Unsheathing the Imagination: A Conversation with Eloghosa Osunde

Fantasy Magazine co-editor-in-chief Shingai Njeri Kagunda speaks with author Eloghosa Osunde.

Hi Eloghosa! Thank you for sharing the magic of your work and your words with the world, and for the purpose of this interview with us. I want to start with a grounding question. As someone who has read your work, I know you think about people as constantly evolving. Who is Eloghosa in this moment? Especially in relationship to their work? What are the terms you use to define yourself?

Eloghosa Osunde: Thank you Shingai. I don’t use terms to define myself because definitions do not energize or grow me, but because I observe myself closely, I can attempt to describe where I am currently. In this moment, Eloghosa is free. I feel borderless and fluid. I’m relentless about my desires and outspoken about my hungers. I’m someone I love and want to continue to treat with respect. I feel peace where some of my anger used to live. Right now, in relationship to my work, I’m sharklike and precise: a champion and devotee of the work I’m building. Eloghosa is an author, artist and force who is coming for everything they desire and deserve.

Shingai: I know your path into writing fiction has been non-traditional. What has preparing yourself to build the kinds of worlds you build in your work looked like?

Eloghosa Osunde: Man, it has looked like reminding myself to keep tuning out the noise around me. It has looked like taking my spiritual life seriously. It has looked like keeping an eye on my capacity so that I’m not burnt out or depleted when it’s time to show up for myself. I try to keep it front of mind that I make these worlds for myself, too. It helps to remember that my calling is not just to flesh out new realities – full of vibrant color, insisted-upon ease, and brave self prioritizing characters – but also to believe myself worthy of inhabiting them daily.

Shingai: You have said in a past interview with Afreada that in the process of making, you’re not just “creating work to fill the container”, you are also “recreating the container itself” and “reshaping the form”. I am curious, how do you alchemize the containers where your different work lives?

Eloghosa Osunde: Oh, I love this question. I alchemize my containers by catering to my tastes first. I live at multiple intersections that are not easy to replicate, and my references are wide-ranging. My path is unconventional for sure, but I have a layered education in the arts because I’m never not studying, I’m never not noticing, and absorbing information. What I make is deeply informed because it comes from inside me, where the trove I’ve kept since I was a child also exists. When I suspend the rules and create from a clear place with myself in mind as the work’s most crucial consumer, what I end up with is a shape in which my marks are clear, a piece of work that sounds like nothing else.

Shingai: Vagabonds was your debut novel and a huge success! How did your life change after its release?

Eloghosa Osunde: Whew. In so many ways. There’s the obvious tangible bit, which is how becoming more visible for the work I do has led to more opportunities that are aligned with what I want. I will never underestimate that. It changes everything. Internally, I became even more courageous and certain. Across industries, I learned how to identify who my actual peers are, which has been useful for many reasons. But I think maybe the coolest thing I have experienced since my debut is how I now live full-time as the person my sixteen-year-old self dreamt of being. There’s nothing better than that feeling.

Shingai: Both Vagabonds and the up-and-coming Necessary Fiction, which I have had the pleasure of reading, have a large cast of characters. Do you know who your characters are immediately they come to you? Or do you figure them out slowly? What is the journey to knowing your characters?

Eloghosa Osunde: Some are clear to me from the start. Like the protagonist of Good Boy. He started everything this time. Usually what happens after the first thing becomes clear is that I then see and meet who my characters love, who they can’t stand, who they dream with, who they do not fuck with, and those people can become part of the novel’s population too. That happened in this new work, and the process was delightful.

Shingai: What did you carry from writing Vagabonds into Writing Necessary Fiction? What did you leave behind?

Eloghosa Osunde: Hm. Another question I love. I carried my doggedness with me. I left (and am still leaving) behind the idea that I’m willing to put myself through absolutely anything for the sake of great art.

Shingai: What were the most joyous moments of writing Necessary Fiction? What were the biggest hurdles?

Eloghosa Osunde: Most joyous: making family with the characters as they popped up. They helped me through some insane things. When I need a friend, I have a friend. When I need a mentor, I have a mentor. Biggest hurdles: I didn’t always have what I needed to be making work of this weight. I needed more safety, flexibility, and mobility. That was not always possible. And it hurt.

Shingai: As a Queer East African writer reading your Queer West African reflections on African Queer modalities feels like a healing spell. Thank you. How does the way you love impact the way you write and vice versa?

Eloghosa Osunde: Thank you too. That means a lot to me. This question is interesting. Um, I know for a fact that I’m impactful in the lives of people who love me — like I’m not someone you love only to forget entirely, not even when I’m being passive — but I don’t think that makes me… uncomplicated to love. I love in ways that are bright and brilliant, imaginative and funny, but I have also loved in ways that are textured and… startling. I think that shows up in my writing. Readers being shocked by what I write actually makes me feel seen, because there are times when I am shocked by my own continued aliveness and my insistence on being myself, my choices, and my own unsheathed imagination even when that is at odds with what we’ve been told is “good” or “gentle” or “right.”

Shingai: How do you incorporate fantastical, metaphysical, and spiritual elements into your work?

Eloghosa Osunde: I wish I had a craft-based answer for you. But honestly, my work comes out like that because my life is that way, and I make my work from inside my life.

Shingai: I love how in most, if not all of your work, there is an intertextual conversation between music, poetry, and prose. How would you describe the relationship between the music you listen to, the poetry you read, and the stories you write?

Eloghosa Osunde: This is a delightful observation to me. I love poetry. I read poems often, to remind myself of why I love language. There’s poetry on my walls in every room in my home. My third book leans heavily into that love. And music? It’s in everything. Music raised me, has been with me daily, is a sure companion. Music shows me what I’m feeling. And I think the attention with which I attend to the music in my life continues to enrich my work.

Shingai: How has writing Necessary Fiction changed you?

Eloghosa Osunde: You make one book, and you think: can I do this again? This answered that for me. I can, as many times as I wish. I don’t doubt it. But more than that, NF showed me that no one creates like me. The process solidified my understanding of the irreplicability of my work. There are many brilliant artists out there, but they are not me, and that is a strength. I made this book as a raft for myself first and foremost, so I find that I’m only interested in having conversations with people who get the text. And beyond that, I just don’t care what else is said. It doesn’t matter. Everybody will be alright at the end of the day.

Thank you for this great conversation Shingai. I felt, in engaging with these questions, very thought of.