Be devoured

Vagabonds! ★★★★
Eloghosa Osunde
4th Estate

Multidisciplinary artist. Fat Bastard chardonnay enthusiast. Music lover. Storyteller. Vagabond. 

Many adjectives can precede Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde's name with the latter coinciding with the title of their debut novel, Vagabonds!

Osunde regards their book as a “queer novel depicting Lagos in its truest form”; offering a number of definitions of “vagabond” before the opening chapter. The author most relates with its first entry:

1. Vagabond (n)

Definition: A person who wanders from place to place without a home. 

Synonyms: itinerant, wanderer, nomad, wayfarer, traveller, gypsy, rover ...

In other words: an outsider, an unbelonger, many.

“I do consider myself to be a vagabond. According to Nigerian law, I want the outside of things,” they explain, expressing surprise that their book — condemning corruption, capitalism, oppression and a patriarchal society, and advocating societal justice and the agency of LGBTQIA+ bodies — didn't face censorship or banning in their politically conservative home country. 

With a plot driven by peripheral figures defying societal norms, Vagabonds! delves into a gritty, lustful, covert, pulsating and authentic contemporary Lagos; narrated and provoked by spiritual entities,

Osunde's dramatis personae of Nigeria's largest metropole integrates — and interconnects — characters including a gay chauffeur, a lesbian couple involved in covert sex work, apparitions, fairygodgirls — “all-the-way-gone girls, already-dead girls, and so, untouchable girls”, abused wives reclaiming their power, an AI rent boy, “everyone on the outside of the mainstream”, à la the scribe.

“I think there are many reasons why people end up on the outside. Sometimes it's because they don't fit into a standard society has created. Sometimes it's because of their sexuality,” Osunde elucidates. 

Yet their audience surpasses those who relate to the term “outsider”, with Osunde relaying how their book was met with neither hostility nor judgment by Nigeria's reading community: “One of the beauties of releasing this book and interacting with readers is realising who identifies with the book and why,” they say of this unexpected feat.

“People have identified with it because of its fairness. I've had people say, 'I'm really glad that you wrote a book in which people are allowed to be depressed'. Queer people are reading it, straight people are reading it, religious people are reading it. Someone's grandma said “I love this book because of its spirituality',” they smile.

Osunde's Lagos houses spirits, personified by narrators/agitators of change who assemble the city's vagabonds: one Èkó — “he's the spiritual avatar of Lagos, he uses Lagos as a place he's in charge of” and Tatafo — “he is Èkó's right-hand angel”, the author explains of the omnipresent apparitions. 

“I've always been interested in the idea of having a favourite out of a celestial host. I love that in the Bible it's quite clear God favoured Lucifer; that dynamic makes me think about what happens to all the other angels,” Osunde muses. "'How do they feel about that?' It also explains so much about why The Fall is such a significant part of the Bible's construction.

“These two characters look at the city from different angles. One of them from a very supreme place and the other from a cast-out place,” they add of Èkó (the Yoruba word for 'Lagos') and Tatafo (his name derived from the Nigerian pidgin term “to gossip”). 

Merging reality with the phantasmagorical, Osunde remains “OK with whatever the reader thinks it is”, regarding the book's oft-misinterpreted genre. “It has what people would refer to as magical realism, even though I don't agree. It has elements of fantasy. It even has some science fiction.

“There's no right answer about what the genre of the book is and that's one of my favourite things about the book.”

On the topic of favourites: Osunde “really enjoyed” writing the characters of Daisy and Divine (the lesbian couple engaging in covert sex work) as the duo allowed them to destigmatise their profession: “There's a weird divide between love and sex. In Nigeria, and in any other part of the world, sex work is supposed to be very hush-hush. I wanted to write a story in which sex work is the same as any other kind of work; I wanted to write characters who are safe outside of that world.

“If we're in a society that uses that as a currency or uses that as a means of exchange, then what happens to people who do that work when they go home,” they question. 

Osunde considers Vagabonds! a homage to a Lagos not solely preserved to spaces where their characters feel safe or welcome, but the city in its entirety owing to their interest in power: “Lagos is a place that doesn't shy away from its relationship to power,” they explain. “It's very open-faced about the fact that it will favour the most powerful and there are many ways to be powerful, and you will be rewarded for it. There's spiritual power, there's material power, there is aesthetic power, there is monetary power,” they list. “You don't see many places that are honest about the fact that that's how they operate.”

The act of consuming — be it conspicuous consumption, the literal act of consuming food or incorporeal figures devouring humans — is a recurring motif throughout the book. Why the employment of this metaphor?

“I love that question!” Osunde grins. “That's one of the truest ways I would describe Lagos as a place. It's very easy to get lost in, it's very easy to lose yourself in. And it's a very hungry place. My experience of Lagos has a consuming force, it's a space with an appetite. So that came up in food, in absorption. That's something that continues to be repeated across the book in various ways. There's spiritual consumption, there's physical consumption, there's deviant consumption.”

Sans spoilers, the conclusion of Vagabonds! encompasses consumption of a different nature, depicting an “examination/imagination of what a just world would look like”, says Osunde of the novel's denouement. “I know we can't change pain and we can't change injustice. But I do believe that if there are spiritual forces greater than us, then justice has to be one of the conversations we have.”

Outsiders. Outliers. Egalitarianists: Vagabonds! invites the reader into the maws of a ravenously ravishing Lagos. Satiate your appetite before digging in, for it might just devour you.

Yum.