Penguin Random House / Eloghosa Osunde
“I would always tell myself that I’d write a book eventually,” says the Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde, “but I just thought I was too young to have anything to say.” That long-held belief quickly changed years ago when Osunde applied for a fiction writing workshop located in Nigeria and was accepted. “Being around other Nigerian writers and trading stories, talking about dreams, and seeing that some of them were going on to be published authors showed me that it was possible.”
Since then, Osunde has had her writing published in several publications such as The Paris Review, Catapult, and Berlin Quarterly. This year, she won the ASME Award for Fiction for her short story “After God, Fear Women,” which appears in the latter half of her debut novel Vagabonds! Out on March 15, the book takes its title from the Nigerian constitution which refers to anyone who is queer or who defies cultural and societal norms as a “vagabond.” “I found that out in 2019,” she says. “I didn’t know that, but I remember seeing that word and thinking to myself, ‘Oh no, they don’t get to decide that.’” Thus, the title was born. The novel, set in Nigeria, tenderly brings those on the margins of society to the center, while highlighting their passions, their frustrations, and even their complex relationships with God. “It’s such a thing in Nigeria,” she says. “You can’t really escape the religion conversation. I was thinking to myself that if I’m making a world that is like another Lagos, then there is no way to ignore the fact that part of being in Lagos is having to face the question of God.”
Below, Osunde spoke to ELLE.com about Toni Morrison’s impact on her work, the necessity of music in her writing process, and how this book changed her from the inside out.
I love that you introduce Vagabonds! with, not one, but two Toni Morrison quotes. The second being: “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” How has she influenced you as an artist?
Toni Morrison is important to me, not just because of her writing, but because of the way she occupied space. That’s such an important thing because I think that, in making work, sometimes people think that they can tell you what to make. And I like that she never even allowed that to be a conversation. I love the way she sat in herself and I love the way she thought of her stories as crucial. I think a lot of the time we’re expected to pretend we don’t know that the work is shifting something in the world. We’re supposed to act like it’s something that happened accidentally. I love that she made it clear that she knew exactly what she was doing. She intended to write with that impact in the first place. When I saw that quote, I remember thinking to myself, “This is exactly what I’m trying to say with this book.”
Are there any other writers who influenced this book as she did?
The main text that was instrumental in the book is actually the Bible. I feel like it’s one of the highest expressions of what language can do to a spirit or what language can do to spirits over time. One of the things that I told myself while writing this book was that I want to write it from a place that was spiritually true. I’m not a Christian anymore, but I do respect that book and I think the imagery is sick. Have you heard the way that the Bible describes angels? I feel like so much of my inspiration came from that.
You write about love in a really beautiful way throughout the book. My favorite chapter is “The Only Way Out Is Through” which is told in the form of letters to a lost love. One line sticks out the most: “Next to you, I loved my whole self. I forgot my favorite fake faces. I remembered my whole skin.” When you were conceptualizing the book, was romance always going to be an essential element?
It was always going to be in my work. I think that love is what saves our lives, isn’t it? The world is brutal a lot of the time, but I think that we can make little worlds in which we are safe. Love is one great way to do that. It was also really important to me to represent different kinds of relationships because the fact that those two in that story don’t physically end up together doesn’t mean it’s not a true love story. It’s always been on my mind to show how people take care of each other. There’s a quote that I’m thinking of [by Jenny Holzer] that goes, “It is in your own self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” I love that. In writing about love, that’s what I’m showing.
“I think that love is what saves our lives, isn’t it?”
I also want to talk about music because you mention a lot of songs throughout the book and I actually wrote down a few. My new favorite is “Big Booty Problem” by Full Crate.
Oh, I love that. That’s such an amazing song. The first time I heard it was when I watched the Savage X Fenty show. I paused it because I was like, “Wait, did I just hear that?” Then when I was writing the book, it just came up in one of the scenes and I was like, “You know what? I’ll go with it. This song isn’t going to leave me.”
Do you listen to music while you write?
I listen to music every day. It’s transportation. I love being able to go from an Afrobeat song to James Blake. It’s also linked to memory; if you think about most of your memories that come back to you easily, there was probably music playing somewhere in the background. So it’s also a way that I strengthen my memory. I listen to music when I write, when I go to sleep, and when I drive. One of the best and most effective questions to ask a character is what music they listen to because once you know that, you can tell a lot about them. Also, another thing about my relationship with music is that I’m currently learning how to DJ. I’m enjoying that process of curating music. I think that DJs are doing some holy work, to be honest. And I think when people get past just trying to play the top hits, they actually get to ask themselves more interesting questions, like, “What kind of set would I play if I were trying to give everyone in the room something?” I know that I wouldn’t stick to any genre because I believe everything is connected. So, I guess the way that I think about and experience music also bleeds into my writing. Music influences my writing more than actual writing does, more than literature does.
Which chapter or character was the most challenging to write and which was the most rewarding?
The most challenging to write was “The Only Way Out Is Through.” There’s such strong grief in that series of letters that I literally couldn’t write it from my brain, I had to write it from my chest. There were times when it physically hurt. So that would be the most challenging. And the most rewarding would either be “Hide Us in God” or the ending. Oh my God. I am so proud of how I closed the book.
It’s so good. So many twists and turns. Did you always envision that as the ending or did it come to you as you were writing?
It came to me as I was writing. The last sentence came to me the day before I finished the manuscript. Once I heard it in my head, I was like, “The book is done.”
Since Vagabonds! is so deep and introspective, I’m wondering if you felt like a different person after you wrote it.
Yes, this book almost drove me mad. [Laughs] There’s that. Vagabonds! required so much stillness from me. I grew up in a home where it wasn’t a scary thing for something to reveal itself to me spiritually before it became real. Once I knew the shape and the destiny of my book, it introduced itself to me. My book knew where it was going. It knows what it wants from the world. I think it changed me in the sense that when it came to me, I realized I was not actually brave enough to write it yet. To write that book in Nigeria is actually unhinged. [Laughs] I had to decide that my work is more important than the law and more important than what the people who love me will think. My work is more powerful than my shame. It’s more powerful than the world itself. That changes you. It changes how you walk. I walk differently because I wrote this book. I feel more spacious on the inside. More audacious. I feel taller. I feel braver.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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