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 colonisation and Christianisation. These colonial legacies remain a legal and social presence in many postcolonial nations, including Nigeria, where strong anti-queer sentiments still govern public discourse. Organised 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 criminalises same-sex unions and, by extension, non-heteronormative identities. Drawing on a queer theology framework that centres 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 centre queer protagonists who 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 divine presences and thereby subvert the construction of Christianity as opposed to and thus exclusive of queerness. In doing so, they challenge the notion of non-heteronormative performances of gender and sexuality as ‘un-African’ or ‘un-Christian.’