When Obiefuna, a teen living in Nigeria, is caught fooling around with his family's male apprentice, his father sends him to a strict, Christian, all-male boarding school. There he encounters homophobia but also finds friends and even lovers. Then, as he's graduating, Nigeria passes a law that criminalizes same-sex relationships. As a queer teen, Obiefuna knows he faces a challenging, even dangerous, future in his homeland.
This is the premise of Blessings, the debut novel from Chukwuebuka Ibeh, 23, a master's of fine arts student at Washington University and native of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The idea grew out of his own life — he attended boarding school in Nigeria and was shocked when the country criminalized same-sex marriages in 2014.
"I knew that Nigeria was obviously a toxic place to grow up as a queer person," he says. "Nigeria presents itself as a conservative country, and the law was overwhelmingly applauded. I think a really high percentage of people welcomed the law."
Ibeh, however, was not one of those people. "It made me think of how difficult it would be to navigate the world as a queer person. This curiosity stayed in my mind and, coupled with my experience at boarding school, inspired me to write the story."
The Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) law banned same-sex marriages in Nigeria, as well as public displays of "same-sex amorous relationship." Anyone who "registers, operates or participates in gay clubs, societies and organization" or "supports" such organizations could go to prison for 10 years. Human Rights Watch said the law "effectively criminalizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons based on sexual orientation and gender identity."
Despite the autobiographical elements, Ibeh says the story is not about him. "Aspects of my life are similar to the protagonist," he says. "But I don't know that it crosses the territory of auto-biography."
Ibeh has always been a storyteller who draws on his observations to weave his tales. "Chukwuebuka Ibeh's writing has a certain delicacy to it, so wonderfully observant, and so beautiful," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists told Brittle Paper. The popular author led a writing workshop that Ibeh took.
"An editor read the story and loved it and reached out to me ... wanting to know if I had written a longer work," Ibeh says. From there he acquired an agent.
The story that got him discovered is about a widower professor who has lost contact with his children. He calls them regularly, but they never answer. One day, he misdials a number and speaks briefly with someone. Hungry for conversations, he continues dialing wrong numbers in search of, but also afraid of, the connection that each wrong number offers.
Ibeh's delicate style is certainly evident in this short story, where his sentences have a complex, almost lacy structure held together with semicolons and commas that carefully and beautifully evoke feelings of longing and loneliness.
Take this excerpt from the story's beginning:
"It was easy, at first, to try; to make calls that went unanswered and never returned, and then formulate excuses later for the silence, to go to bed with the resolute belief that all was well, to remind himself each day to check another professional gadget repair store. ... But with time, with the new method of forwarding or diverting his calls, so that the steady mechanical voice over the line left him disconcerted, he had come to accept reality. They no longer wanted anything to do with him. And so on those days, when he sat by the desk in his airless study to dial their numbers from the worn-out slip of paper that had the numbers carefully outlined in their order of seniority, he sometimes missed a number or two and ended up calling a wrong person, a stranger."
Ibeh says that he was unconsciously inspired by two authors he was reading at the time, Raymond Carver and Jhumpa Lahiri. "I kept chasing ... ways to connect both of them," Ibeh says. And the idea for the story came when he was on the bus and two girls behind him were talking about making prank calls. One of the girls claimed she became friends with one of the people she called, who also happened to be a Nigerian celebrity.
"I don't know if that was true or not, but I was interested in the fact that you could make a hobby out of making prank phone calls and the possibility of connecting with [that] person," he says.
For his novel, due out in 2024, Ibeh explores themes similar to his short story. "I'm interested in love in all its definitions, themes of longing — longing for things that seem to be within reach, but you can't quite have them — of loneliness, of queer identity, obviously, of friendships," Ibeh says.
The book has already generated some buzz and the Artists Partnership, a talent agency, is representing Ibeh and helping him sell the rights to his book for film and TV. In the meantime, Ibeh is overseeing the final steps of getting his book printed, including seeing his cover for the first time. He was delighted by Kelajaye Tosin's cover illustration.
"As a book-cover junkie, I'd been curious and nervous about mine. I personally brainstormed a couple contenders, but nothing could've possibly matched this final gorgeous product," Ibeh says. "I love ... the stunning artwork that is, quite eerily, an exact rendition of my protagonist Obiefuna, as I imagined him."
But while he's excited about his book, Ibeh is also focused on finishing up his final project for his MFA.
"I am just so happy to be at Wash U," he says. "I also kind of thrive on space and a certain distance from things. Back in Nigeria, I might get calls that need my attention from family and friends. Obviously I love them, and I want to be there for them whenever I can, but having that distance and space to create is very important."
This may be because, like most writers, Ibeh finds the first step of writing the hardest: "It's often more fun to think about writing than to actually do the writing," he says. "That's what I find most challenging, actually just sitting myself down to write."
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