these letters end in tears.

reading africa book #8 (review!)

30th newsletter!!! delivered from spring with love! photo creds: pinterest.

i’ve been sick the past couple of weeks, i managed to have one evening celebrating the end of uni with my classmates but since then my chest wheezes when i breathe in, and i can only breathe through one nostril (on a good day, i’ve become very familiar with my oilbas oil nasal stick) so the week i’ve been back in london, minus an audition in croydon, i’ve let my days pass me on that pink sofa i told you about once.

my seventh book in the reading africa challenge has taken me to cameroon. i read these letters end in tears by musih tedji xaviere. i’m not really sure what made me pick this book- perhaps my desperation to read about queer africans from other countries overpowered my one promise to myself: no longer reading queer books that destroy me, to seek out stories that end with love and kisses because it’s what i deserved, i have to hope for something.

and what a privilege that hope is. what a thing to turn my back on queer stories that are painted in violence, smothered in religious trauma and are honest in their brutality. see, these letters will end in tears and you don’t have to read me but it’s the truth. my truth and if you do pick me up and flick through my pages, if you do decide to lift a pen to my page know that these words were once written in my blood. before fingers hit the keyboard i had to bleed. because that’s what being queer in africa demands from you, blood.

despite finding the writing style leaving little to the imagination and slightly clunky in parts, the story itself is powerful. though you could argue that the book is purposely written to sound like someones voice. bessem, the main character, is not a writer so she would have no need to flourish her words with grandeur- and i can see the merit in that.

i know very little about cameroon except for her lush green hills but i learnt the places that bessem loves, bemenda the city where she’s created another life for herself ever since her wife disappeared one day. this life where she must pretend to think gay people are devils and swear that she could never be one of those lesbian types she doesnt know if she loves her life or hates it. i know about the fish farm in binju her father owned and how he became a divisionary delegate of secondary education of nkambe. and while bessem may be fictional, her parents and the people she loves may be fictional the world musih has created is real. this is cameroon from the eyes of someone who has lived to see and love it.

i cant talk about the lesbian aspect of the book without recognising how incredibly lucky i am. i have written poetry about my time with women sexual or not and posted it without a care in the world. i’m more concerned with people liking it than its content. i have walked through london with my hand firmly in the curves and dips of another woman’s. sometimes they would pull me into corners and we let our mouths touch. or i would ask “shall we see how long we can kiss for” in a nearly empty train and their eyes will light up and lean forward to touch me. hold me. once, when i was younger and newer to this i was afraid not for my safety but whether i was doing “this” right. i was nervous, i had dreamt about women for so long and was sure i was going to mess up and embarrass myself. the times where i did get on my knees and beg for forgiveness was not because this body could be persecuted, beaten, made a pariah, defeated but because i needed to know why he chose to make me in this way and if he could take it away.

i no longer clasp my hands in prayer unless its in the tangling of hers.

age and the freedom to explore my sexuality have left these fears nothing more than wisps in the air. occasionally i would think about my catholic roots. once, nearly three years ago now, i woke up with my ex girlfriends hands around my naked body and thought i could see jesus in the cracks of sunlight spilling in. and now, i’m twenty two confident and assured in both my displeasure with catholicism and anti gay religious rhetoric. jesus is not so much the imposing middle man i feared as a child anymore.

but bessem and fatimatou don’t have that freedom. bessem the anglophone christian brought up in the southwestern province of bamenda who was exorcised by a priest the same day she was bailed out of jail for being discovered in a gay nightclub. fatimatou a poverty stricken muslim girl who didn’t want to wear hijabs, who didn’t want to wear girls clothes, who wanted to love islam but also wanted it- needed it to love her first, whose brother thought that love meant violence, that control was all a man was good for. her brother who took the discovery of a queer nightclub into his own hands. her brother who changed her life completely one sweaty evening. neither of them could detach themselves from their religious identity so easily as i despite the way they tried.

as i write this i think about that morning with my ex girlfriend who at the time i was desperate for her to love me- and honestly… even like me. how i was sick after because i had done something i spent so long wanting and yet and yet and yet there he was. in the room, dancing with the dust in the light morning air and there was nothing i could do about it except repeat the lord’s prayer as i cleaned the toilet. have i even detached myself from my religious identity? i understood fatima, understood needing the thing that influenced my life so heavily to love me first and prove it. it was the least, the very least it could do.

there is a rawness in african queer literature (from the continent) that reminds me of post segregation black american lit. a vulnerability that comes with carving the words out of ones flesh and threading the sentences together using bloody ogans as punctuation, because if you don’t no one else will and the lies will continue to swell. they say queerness is a western thing, well here we are. they say africans can not be gay, well here we are. they say that you cannot be gay and christian, well here we fucking are. what a burden to be the author of the book that dares to imagine nigeria outside of its homophobia, or cameroon or even equitorial guinea but i can’t express enough how grateful i am for the shoulders the task fell upon.

i think its okay that there might be a lot of books with queer african characters (written in and by africans) that end in tears, i think thats the price for clawing your way through a system that shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place (there are obivously exceptions to this) i think its also okay to not want to put yourself through that, triggers are real and valid. but just incase you are like me and you search for your people even in the salt flakes of tears long shed- i think you’ll like this.