The Truth Circle is not where the story begins, but it is where every necessary fiction tumbles and unfurls out of the characters’ mouths in Eloghosa Osunde’s second novel. Necessary Fiction follows three years after Osunde’s debut Vagabonds!, and continues a surreal, magical exploration of queer Nigerian life inside and outside the closet, the home, the city of Lagos, the country of Nigeria, and Africa as a whole continent. This novel weaves into being magical characters who feel alive in every sense of the word. The pages are suffused with language that imbues emotional resonance through echoes of musicality and poetry.
Necessary Fiction invites the reader to travel between friends, lovers, partners, parents, and dead loved ones, in countries of time both familiar and otherworldly. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is told exactly what they are in for with the epigraph that references the quote from which Osunde presumably found their title.
“This is kind of how we get through our lives:
we tell ourselves stories so that what’s happening
becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.”
–Lidia Yuknavitch
This is a story about “the stories we tell ourselves to survive.” Who is the we? I am inclined to push back against a desire to universalize African, Queer, Black, and every other story written in, with, and from the margins. This is not because they are not, or cannot inherently be universal, but because it becomes easy to flatten, to project, and to refuse to engage with what is challenging or different about the specificities of what is written by and for the other, or to borrow Osunde’s term by and for the Vagabond.
I read the we in Necessary Fiction as navigating a very specific context in Lagos, Abuja, and other parts of Nigeria. I read the we insisting on defining freedom, family, and power as a vagabond belonging to a country that does not recognize the we’s existence. I read the we as intergenerational loss, silences, longing, and small moments of unencumbered bliss. The we is in the particularities of this Nigerian friend group, and the we is also in the attempt to break away from societal rules that erase essential parts of one’s being. The we then carries over into a transnational and transcultural resonance. This story sees the experience of marginality and reminds the reader that to center the margins is to live in all of its contradictions and nuances.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s words alongside quotes from the poet Ocean Vuong, the musician Mereba, and the author Natalie Wee introduce us to the first of five parts in this novel, FAMILY ALBUM. Osunde’s protagonists are many enough that we get a cast of characters before the story begins. Each one, except for the first, is introduced in relation to another. First, we have Ziz, then we have Karabo (partner to Ziz) then we have Maro (best friend of Ziz). Later down the cast line we have Tega (father to Maro), then Hassan (lover to Tega). So on and so forth. None of them stand alone, and all of them are necessary to the stories they tell themselves so they can live with the lives they have been given.
Ziz, a character brought back to extended life from the short story, “Good Boy”, first published in The Paris Review, brings the reader into his very alive living as a Queer Nigerian who has learned how to survive the colonial legacy of a homophobic nation-state through hustling.
“I’m not inspiring,” Ziz says. “When I first moved to Lagos, I didn’t come here with good mind. I came here with one mission and one mission only: to get a lot of money, so as to prove my popsy wrong. That’s all. For me, blood family doesn’t mean shit….”
Eloghosa Osunde pulls the reader into a tug-of-war between blood family and found family throughout the novel’s arc. Ziz is just one of the large cast for whom blood family wounds run deep. As much as one tries to escape these wounds by choosing and defining their own family, they are consistently confronted by what is still unhealed inside of themselves.
In the last chapter of the first part of the novel, we (the readers) are invited into the Truth Circle, a communal gathering where the chosen family of Vagabonds delight in telling the truths of themselves. Similar to a coven or AA meeting, there are rituals involved: rituals of silence, of listening, of laughter, of not pushing for anything other than the truth, and if the truth itself is too much, it is also okay. The Truth Circle ends with a chant that animates the rest of the novel.
Everyone “If anyone deserves to live, it is us.”
Everyone “It is us after all this dying we have done.”
The Second part of the five-part novel, HERE, NOW begins with epigraphs that work towards defining freedom. The way this epigraph page is formatted, it is as if Mary Oliver asks,
“Now that I am free to be myself, who am I?”
As if Ann Carson responds,
“If you are not the free person you want to be
you must find a place to tell the truth about that.”
The next few chapters explore grief, specifically Maro’s. Maro, who is the best friend of Ziz for twelve years, raised by a single father. Maro, whose father has a best friend, Uncle Hassan, who has been teased about being his father’s wife. Maro encounters a loss so cutting, it takes the breath and sanity from his lungs and head. Maro has to somehow learn how to live again; through relationships, through sex, through love. As a member of the Truth Circle, if anyone deserves to live, it is him; after all the dying he has done.
Akin, who hosted the Truth Circle, becomes a refuge for Maro, and a portal. Akin was born to be a gateway to other realms.
“Since he was little, Akin had a clear sense that he had been here—in the world—many times before.”
So Akin can take messages for Maro to the realm of the dead, to find the one Maro has lost, and bring back a message from them. This is only one part of Akin as a whole person that is revealed to the readers; an example of how Eloghosa deftly crafts multifaceted, unexpected characters. Akin is also his music: the work he is on this earth to make.
“The album prowled out of the intangible, found Akin to be a worthy tunnel, and moved through him like a beast with nothing to lose… The project made its way to him, jumping over lakes of time, skies of space—eyes yellowed by intent, muscles slinking under midnight-flesh.”
Akin finds the necessary fiction of his living by understanding his artmaking to be the spirit portal work it is meant to be. Akin is not the only character Osunde uses to invite the reader into self-defining freedom through art making.
In the third section of the book, titled SHE/HER-THEY/THEM, Anne Carson is invoked again for another epigraph.
“Is it a god inside you, girl?”
and Lucille Clifton is there on the page, also saying,
“See the sensational/ two-headed woman /
one face turned outward / one face /
swiveling slowly in.”
This introduces us to the inner life of Awele, a friend of Akin, Ziz, and Maro. She is also a member of the Truth Circle. Awele is a lesbian who has found her living in the blog she runs called “Village Square”. As we (the readers) travel through the years of her life, we see that Awele began writing as a child to process the contradictions of an abusive mother who claimed to love her.
Awele, when she is still young, begins a friendship with Yemisi, the quiet girl at school who becomes her partner during swimming lessons. They exchange stories, writing, and eventually illicit kisses as the friendship blossoms into something sweeter–something that tastes too close to freedom. Their friendship is interrupted by the shame that is projected onto them by a God-fearing school and community. This results in a silence growing distance that separates them. After years of being out of touch, the girls find each other again at a party in Lagos where Awele is an attendant and Yemisi is the photographer.
They talk about each other’s artmaking as they process the many griefs that have occurred in the space and time between them. Yemisi has read Village Square and says to Awele, “It is a powerful thing you’re doing, you know? We don’t have enough blogs like that, and people need that kind of honest writing. You do it.”
The blog references the religion Earthseed, calling back to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as a spiritual practice that Awele, the character, has taken up. When it is Yemisi’s turn to be interrogated about artmaking, she says about photography, “That gives me life. That gives me something to work with.”
The epigraph that sticks to my spine from the fourth part of the novel, WE MEAN BUSINESS, is an excerpt from Morgan Parker’s poem, “Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s”, where she says,
“Since I thought I’d be
dead by now everything
I do is fucking perfect.”
Is this not the truth-telling heart of the matter? Necessary Fiction loudly and viscerally proclaims life over these characters who see dead people, who have dream lovers, who name for themselves who they are outside of the labels they have been prescribed. Through the Spirit work of their artmaking, their grieving, their loving, and the stories they tell themselves about themselves, Ziz, Maro, Awele, Yemisi, May, Psalm, and the myriad of other deftly written characters become evidence of the multiplicities in the stitched together African Queer life that is worth celebrating. These characters, as with many of us on the margins, were not meant to live in the world that we live in; a world that narrates “survival for the fittest”, as survival only for those who abuse and exploit power. Yet in the breadth and largeness of who they are, these characters live, and we also—both the transnational and the specific we— live.
LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING is the permission-giving title of the last section of this novel. An ode to telling about the living in all of its marginalized nuances, contradictions, and complexities. I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s 1978 poem here, “A Litany for Survival.” In the last stanza Lorde says,
“So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”
Necessary Fiction animates the call to speak, to write, to make music, to dance, to love and be loved loudly and ungovernably, remembering we were never meant to survive. I foresee myself returning to this novel over and over again in the course of my lifetime.