Warm Mulled Rum of a Home | Review of Necessary Fiction By Eloghosa Osunde

EVERYONE: If anyone deserves to live, it is us.

EVERYONE: It is us, after all this dying we have done.

 

When you read a book that feels like your skin, your bones. That feels like your life. The way you have spread out in your home until it feels like yours. To read a book that feels like the inner workings of your blood and bone. Your mind spread. When you have faced your mind. Faced the terrors that have moved (through) your mind and body. The home that is your body, and look into a book and see them facing you. To know its insides are yours. To see yourself in front of you and know that you are not unworthy, unloved, or dismissed. Someone has seen what you are and said yes, I see you, your bones, your blood. You are worthy, let me speak your insides to the world. You are still safe. You are still hidden. But your faces are not ugly. Your faces are beautiful. I am with you. Look at these pages, there are kin waiting to love you who will know you based on their prayers and wildest dreams. Here, let me show you your kin, see you are not alone. Let me show you your dreams, see, they are possible. Let me show you your grief. See, they will not kill you. Let me show you dying things, see, they will continue to live. Let me show you dying, dying, dying like you have. It is possible to be dying and running and have that as the genesis of a safe life.

 

“death is a nightmare many

times, and once you have survived a nightmare you would never have

guessed you could, you’re free in a new way,

to dream new dreams.”

 

When I left my first family, there was not a lot of literature on grieving people who are still alive, or grieving people that have died but who have hurt you and are unwilling to forgive or absolve due to their not having a body-skin anymore. There are not a lot of places that are able to look at a dead body and not immediately bow to it. Bow to its guilt-ridden demand for absolution for its hosts’ sins. What this book does very well, what Eloghosa does very well, is reveal. Reveal the complexity of grief. Reveal the possibilities of love, family and friendship. Reveal the realities of parent-child relations in Africa. Reveal those who live at the borders. Reveal the consequences of living in terror countries that bleed you with intention. Terror-homes that kill you and kill you and kill you and open their wide maws with indignant denial. Terror-homes that are knives that part skin, then muscle and dig into bone. Trying to slap bandages and apathy into and onto the bleeding, rotting wounds. Reveal the ways African children are being killed by their kin: their fathers, their mothers, their aunts. Show the true face of the horrors hidden behind jewels and expensive fabrics. Churches and ‘strong’ men and ‘goodwives’. Showing this in and of itself is an embrace, prayers answered. Honest and raw. revolutionary in its honesty and revelation. To show this can be a betrayal and a rebellion. But it is also life-saving, life-giving. A breath of fresh air, or really the creation of space, the destruction of rope for you to breathe deep into your body. It is kind and loving to those who can see themselves in these stories and know that someone believes them. Someone sees their pain and says it is enough. I will not look away. I will not create a story that contorts your pains and horrors into paper cuts.

There is the portrayal of home and family as things that you can create and sustain. That can be filled with the things and people you love; peace in your sternum and a clear sky of a mind. That you can leave broken, bruised homes and families and create better ones. Find better. There is still grief. There are still wounds. Some muscles are still exposed from the hurts, but there is your home and there are your loves. Possibility this book whispers. Not without ground teeth and bloodied tears, but a possibility nonetheless. Having a life that can be a lifeline, an escape, soft ground full of green plants and pastel flowers.

 

“I’m consoled by

the fact that I am my first faithfulness.”

 

I think what this book does with immense grace and beauty is show that you can be African and queer. Complex in your makeup and breakdown. Complex in the intricacies of the relationships you sustain and bury. You do not have to leave any part of yourself behind to be seen and loved and answered by God, yourself or your loves. The rich, beautiful depiction of the mundane; Nigerian food and snacks, pidgin, dark brown skin, with the simultaneous expression of the complex, believing and praying to God, while being able to speak and see dead spirits. Dream walking. Understanding and knowing art as sentient. Art as part of or its own spiritual practice. This rich complexity of African life and existence. This revelation of what it can look like to be African and queer and know God and all the ways existence can manifest. You do not have to leave yourself behind to be with god. God can be with you, be a part of your life with intention, and you can still be yourself. A girl with many faces. A body with several hosts. A body/ a boy as a conduit. To see all this and know that it is true. It is real. There does not need to be any abandonment of your arm or your leg. You can stand with all your faces and all your legs that have transformed into roots, and it can be true and real and possible. And in that truth, loved and held and believed. I think this book is decolonial in nature because what colonialism did is tell us you are not possible and even if you are, you are not good. This is the basis of contemporary African society. Telling a child that they are not possible while they are right in front of you. Real and themselves. The veils and lies and manufacturing of a lie-reality causes a madness and grief and hatred that blooms and stretches in their bones.

I would recommend this book to all the mad queer things that have become despite or want to become despite on the continent. That has bloomed from blood and broken bone/ mind. This book is a lethargic pain. A revelation. A doorway. Permission. ‘I love you. Let you see you. See how magnificent. Let me show you your kin. See them. See how they are still alive. See how they are not only alive but loved and safe and home. Come. Let me hold you a while. Let me hold your mind, your body. Came see rest. Come see joy. Come see family- gardens. Come see me. Come see you. Come see. Come see. Come see. You can create a life, loves and joys from these book-roots.

‘I’m a blooming organism with fruitful homes in you.

I get to make a full life next to you mighty people in this choice-garden, this love a healing soil.’

 

---

About the Writer: Angel Lovely is a queer artist and writer who centers black and indigenous queer narratives to document forgotten, erased and disappeared people, stories and histories. Their work witnesses. Archives and holds lives, homes, community, history, loves, and beauty. To witness the tenderness and intimacy.

instagram handle: @lilart.angel