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language: Spanish
country: Equatorial Guinea
year: 2016
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 5.8.19-6.8.19, 6.3.25-7.3.25
(cw: sexual assault/rape, incest, homophobia/transphobia)
I read the Equatoguinean writer Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La bastarda for the first time in 2019. I’ve been itching to reread it over the past few months, and I finally decided on a whim to pick it up again yesterday. it’s a quick, engaging read, about a teenage girl discovering her sexuality and finding herself increasingly in conflict with her very Tradition-focused rural Fang community in Equatorial Guinea.
Okomo is — legally speaking — a bastard: her mother died shortly after she was born, at which point her father had not yet paid her dowry. per customary law, she grows up as, notionally, the daughter of every man in her village, and so of no man in particular. left in the “care” of her demanding, abusive grandparents: her grandfather is obsessed with tradition and answers all of her questions with rambling stories about the great heroes of the Fang (all men); her grandmother is obsessed with getting her grandfather to return to her bed instead of his second wife’s, and with finding Okomo a husband, whether Okomo wants one or not.
as it turns out, she doesn’t: a chance encounter with three “indecent” girls she has been warned away from leads her to the discovery that she’s a lesbian. ultimately, after a visit to Gabon and then a tumultuous period where she and her lover are caught and all of the “indecent” girls punished by the community, she refuses the demands of tradition and escapes to live in the forest with the girls, her gay(? more on this in a second) uncle, and his lover.
it’s interesting to read this in proximity to The Bird King, because while this is ultimately also a novel about escape, it’s a novel that leaves the escape route open: physically, the forest is not an enclosed space; metaphorically, the way Okomo finds her way into it is on the invitation of one of the “indecent” girls, who she meets by coincidence after a disappointing meeting with her biological father in the town she’s been sent off to in disgrace. perhaps others will find their way to this little queer community — or be found by its members, who remain in contact with the outside world. (I’m also thinking about the construction of the forest here in relation to the Gaelic expression fon a’ choille, literally “under the forest” but figuratively “outlawed”.)
(I say that her uncle is “gay” because he has a long-term male(?) lover and the narration refers to him with masculine pronouns and gendered agreement, and he doesn’t particularly seem to identify as anything else, but the word the narration uses (calqued from Fang fam e mina) is “hombre-mujer” (i.e., “man-woman”); it might be most accurate, following the Sizhen System, to say he occupies the position of “faggot-subaltern” — clearly there’s some transfeminization going on in the gendered category he’s been assigned to, or rather in the way he’s been excluded from the category of “man”, but it’s not clear that he identifies as anything other than a man. his lover is also characterized as an hombre-mujer, but he’s only in one brief scene.)
my two critiques of the book are, first, that it’s a bit rushed: Okomo meets the three other girls, they immediately have a foursome, and the next day she tells Dina that she’s in love with her. I know how teenagers can be, but I still think this could have been given a bit more time to develop. second, and more pressingly, Obono is a journalist, and unfortunately you can definitely tell from the writing. I would describe the novel’s general tone as ethnographic. it’s clearly aimed at a non-Equatoguinean/non-Fang audience — and so, presumably, a white Spanish audience that has probably never thought about Equatorial Guinea. see, for example, this passage when Okomo has been sent to a city near the border with Gabon by her grandmother to collect 50,000 francs so she can pay a local curandera:
Tres días después, todo estaba preparado para que yo empezara a trabajar. A principios de la década del año 2000 la población ecuatoguineana que residía cerca de Gabón sobrevivía gracias al comercio, sobre todo el distrito de Akurenam. Las extensas plantaciones de caña de azúcar, yuca, maíz, malanga y todo lo comestible se vendía en el país francófono. Había que ganar dinero, ¡y vaya si lo gané después de sufrir tanto!
this is very obviously just Obono herself, perhaps at the request of her editor, providing some Historical Context for readers unfamiliar with the region — there’s no other implication beyond the first person, past tense narration that Okomo is writing from some future time looking back on a specific historical period. I suspect a lot of the “ethnographic” element of the book is a product of the publishing process: the novel is apparently banned in Equatorial Guinea, and there isn’t exactly a huge market for hispanophone African literature, so I would guess finding a publisher even in Spain was challenging.
all of which is to say that, while I think it’s quite a good book, it’s also very much a book for outsiders — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would say, I think correctly, that it centers Europe/a European gaze. nonetheless, it’s a landmark in Equatoguinean literature as the first book about lgbtq characters and directly addressing homophobia/transphobia, and in spite of the at times didactic ethnographic elements its journalistic prose keeps a strong forward momentum — it’s genuinely a page-turner. its critique of Fang tradition and particularly of patriarchal violence in Fang communities — sexual violence, incest, physical abuse, homophobia/transphobia — isn’t necessarily new in the context of African feminist literature, but the specifics of the way Obono lays out her critique make it stand out to me. worth checking out if any of this sounds interesting to you!
moods: dark, hopeful, informative (kind of derogatory), polemic