The God Within: Interrogating Queer Practices of Faith in Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread and Akwaeke Emezi’s “Who Is Like God”

Abstract

In many precolonial African societies, gender was a fluid construct that was enacted in social roles rather than exclusively prescribed by biological sex. Heteronormative gender roles and sexualities, as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Maria Lugones argue in The Invention of Women (1997) and “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (2010) respectively, were promoted and inscribed within law through processes of colonization and Christianization. These colonial legacies remain a legal and social presence in many postcolonial nations, including Nigeria, where strong anti-queer sentiments still govern public discourse. Organized religions such as Nigerian Pentecostal churches powerfully shape these debates that led, among others, to the passing of the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act of 2014, which criminalizes same-sex unions and, by extension, non-heteronormative identities. Drawing on a Queer Theology framework that centers the queer body as site of theological engagement, this paper investigates how the works of queer Nigerian (diasporic) authors complicate hegemonic practices of faith through a close reading of Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread (2020) and Akwaeke Emezi’s short story “Who Is Like God” (2017). Both stories center queer protagonists who explore and negotiate their intersecting identities along the axes of gender, sexuality, nationality and race through and against their faith. By metaphorically incorporating a godly presence into the protagonists’ queer bodies, the stories foreground the relationship between the individual and such godly presences and thereby subvert the construction of Christianity as opposed to and thus exclusive of queerness. Challenging the notion of non-heteronormative performances of gender and sexuality as ‘un-African’ or ‘un-Christian’, they simultaneously draw attention to the violent homophobia of Catholicism and the Nigerian Pentecostal Church and the harmful consequences such a rhetoric and the concomitant exclusion from community spaces on those who aim to reconcile their queerness with their faith.