Otosirieze Obi-Young

Obi-Young was in conversation with Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo at the 2019 Lagos International Poetry Festival and discussed Evaristo's career and influence in African and British poetry.

Writing about Obi-Young’s short story, “A Tenderer Blessing,” in Los Angeles Review of Books, Erik Gleibermann notes:

“Chukwudi’s language circles around his feelings as he observes Nnaemeka on campus. The two enter an intimate friendship. Yet much still remains unspoken. Obi-Young relies on body language cues and the spaces between words to shape the intimacy. Finally, Chukwudi internally names his own feelings, though even then with a heterosexual framing. ‘For an unguarded moment, a slender second of resurgent craving, I wondered if he’d ever imagine that were he a girl, I would chase him endlessly.’ As readers, we feel almost as though we’ve been holding our breath the whole story, waiting for him to finally say it. We feel almost as though we have ourselves come out. This makes Chukwudi’s subsequent unrequited confession all the more devastating.”

In 2018, he was named a judge for the Gerald Kraak Prize, an initiative for writing and visual art about on gender, social justice and sexuality. In 2019, he was announced as a judge for the Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship. He is an editor at 14, Nigeria’s first queer art collective. He is the founder of the Art Naija Series anthologies which include Enter Naija: The Book of Places and Work Naija: The Book of Vocations.

Obi-Young has argued against having a category of LGBT literature. “I am heavily skeptical of the term ‘queer literature,’ or ‘LGBTQ literature,’ because it has no counter-reference,” he says. “Unlike ‘African literatures’—Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and in indigenous languages—which fits into a geopolitics that acknowledges an equal term, ‘European literatures’—English, French, Italian, Spanish—the lack of an equal for ‘queer literature’—an equal which would have been called ‘heterosexual literature,’ writing that examines what it means to be heterosexual—begs the question: Why should literature exploring same-sex desire be categorized based on who its characters find themselves loving or on who its writers themselves love, especially as such categorization is withheld from literature exploring desire for the opposite sex? While the categorization does function as a marketing tool, a way of drawing attention to literature traditionally overlooked, lives deliberately unseen, it is one that is rooted in Othering, and so proves insufficient in humanizing queerness, particularly with the way it takes focus away from the skill of its writers and pushes it to their subject, a denial not bestowed on writers of ‘heterosexual literature.’”

In 2018, Obi-Young used the term “the confessional generation” to describe his generation of African writers. “The contributors to Selves: An Afro Anthology of Creative Nonfiction belong to this generation,” he wrote. “Aside from their skills having been honed on the continent rather than in the West, these writers stand out for their boldness in expressing themselves, for their lack of fear in going where it hurts. Powerful miners of personal stories, theirs is a confessional generation. In general, you will find them on social media emoting boundlessly, sharing the spoken and unspoken, their lives an invitation for participation. In particular, you will find that they write fiction well, have breathed life back into the poetry scene, but that it is in nonfiction that they are unshackled, unspooling confessions in a hitherto unconventional manner. Through emotional honesty as raw as it is brave, they are taking the genre to places their predecessors shied away from, leading important conversations about trauma, about sex and sexuality, about depression and vulnerability and private shame.”

Obi-Young is considered a leading advocate for LGBTQ writing in Africa. In a 2017 letter titled “Queer Literature in Africa Is Not a Trend,” he addressed critical views of queer writing in African literature. “To write literature humanizing queerness is a political act: because writing itself is political, because to humanize queerness is a decision in much the same way that to demonize it is, but a decision to be honest and empathetic and truthful, because to tell the truth is a decision,” he wrote. “But I must point out also that to write literature humanizing queerness is only as political as it is not, because it is grounded in lived experience, grounded in the vagaries of everyday breathing that has no recourse to grand political intentions; because, in your country Nigeria, there is Akinnifesi Olumide who died from a mob beating in Ondo State in February 2016; there are the forty-two men arrested in Lagos this year for attending a ‘gay party’; there is the online hate faced by Bobrisky for straddling masculinity and femininity so loudly; and there are the man and the boy harassed on video in Edo State this year. How can one un-robbed of empathy say that to show these lives in literature is a ‘political concession’?”

In a 2016 interview with Africa in Dialogue, Obi-Young is quoted as saying: “Cultural production in Africa is no longer dominated by heterosexual men, not as it used to be. Literature, for example, is now run by women, and they are using it so well to fight back, to write their sex and gender back into history. The next generation of writers, the ones who began to blossom last year and would peak in five years’ time, is dominated by people who are either queer or female and who have already begun to revolt against the normalized absence of their kind in literature.”

Otosirieze Obi-Young (born April 3, 1994) is a Nigerian writer, editor, and literary journalist. He is the former Deputy Editor of Brittle Paper. In 2019, he won the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. His short stories and literary commentary have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Transition, and Dazed Digital. His work in LGBTQ advocacy in literature has been profiled in Literary Hub. His essays focus on sexuality and literary culture. He has been described as among the "top curators and editors from Africa".