The Intersection of Freedom: A Walk Through Two Photographers
I left home in the midst of chaos. In 2018, I fled to Ghana after being beaten, threatened, and harassed. Exile, that familiar word to millions of people wandering the world, seeking space in foreign countries, had become a part of me. Although exile was a familiar word, the loneliness of exile was unfamiliar. As the days passed, I descended into the chaos of untangling myself from the silence of my hostel room. This process of finding my way was my cross to carry, yet it was strangely the only faith that kept me tethered to a city where the lingo was different from any language I’d heard in my life. I was shut out from the sounds of the streets, out of the familiarity of places people run into. Perhaps loneliness is the way strangers knock on a city’s walls, the first step to knowing a city. Perhaps it is also a safe space to begin the question of existence in a city that is not home. I was in this state for weeks, sometimes I haunted the clubs at Osu, beach bars at Labadi, roadside restaurants. I turned my camera on these places, trying through my amateur photography skills to map the city that had become my refuge. I was lost in this world of loneliness and discovery; every day was scary. This was my state when Troy Onyango, the Kenyan writer, and I were chatting on Instagram. The details of that conversation are now lost to me, but his words, you have to meet Eric, stayed.
I did meet Eric Gyamfi. It was at an event held at East Legon by Drama Queens, a group that sought to use theater as a means of restoring gender equity. The event was for queer people. We gathered in an open courtyard, discussing issues that were dear to us. I had never known the freedom of open association. I didn’t know it was possible to be out under the evening sky talking about homosexuality, but there I was among beautiful people, in a capital city in West Africa, talking, having conversations without looking over my shoulder. When I saw Eric, I knew he was the one. His hair was on its way to mirror that of Basquiat, he had a nose ring and walked in a way that said, I could walk through your soul. I was attracted to his freedom, his careless laughter. It didn’t surprise me that when I googled his photographs, the first picture I saw was of two men laughing, two gay men laughing.
The photograph I saw was part of Just Like Us, a series he shot in 2016. After minutes of staring at it I became afraid, frightened by such an open display of joy. It seemed that Eric had turned his camera at the men at the exact moment when joy distills into recklessness. One of the men was falling from a recliner, his left hand was on the ground, an attempt to break his fall. The other man held a cushion, I couldn’t see his legs, I assumed his knees were touching the ground. Both of them were laughing. It was an ordinary scene, one that has been reenacted by lovers from the beginning of time, so why was this different?
The first time I saw pictures of gay men was in an Awake Magazine that was published and distributed by Jehovah Witnesses. The gay men were portrayed as men cursed to suffer from every illness in the world, their faces were sullen, their countenance seemed to shout, I am a sinner waiting for death. Over time the images of gay men I encounter didn’t get any better, Nigerian media still portrays gay men as caricatures. It seems that the only place where we could be ourselves was in danger. There are pictures of homosexuals in different stages of lynching across blogs, on Instagram, on Facebook, in newspapers, and online forums. I had no idea when I began to associate these images of violence as the root of my queerness. Perhaps I had internalized these pictures, held onto them until they became part of my identity. But there I was, assaulted by a picture of two gay men in the chaos of joy. I looked at them, at the ordinariness of the setting, at their clothes. I knew that room. I had worn those shirts. I had worn that safari shorts. I had broken down into joy in intimate spaces, but it was private, the way society had taught me, the way we were taught to survive but here was Eric, here was Eric saying joy was normal, its display was normal, it was us. I broke down in my hostel room at Kotobabi, alone at night, laughing and crying, wondering about the power of a picture to return us back to reality.
I wondered why Eric chose to take these pictures. What does it mean to put the spotlight on joy, to say this is me, just like you? What does it reveal? Eric, in an interview with Culture Trip, said, “it was important for me to understand the various contexts, as a way to not ball up the queer sphere under just one umbrella. People are queer but they are also something else. There are so many other intersections for humans. That even keeps evolving.” These words have stayed with me. The evolution of joy in Nigerian queer spaces is still unfolding, woven through the socio-economic class, tribe, and religion of Nigerians. For queer people from the lower-class, desire, affect, and being comes with risks that require daily navigation; parties are not safe, health care requires a certain language of coding, and to have sex is to run into desire alongside the risk of being discovered. When Eric took those pictures, he brought the private expression of joy into public spaces, the possibility that the unthinkable might be achieved in our lifetime. In this public space of joy, there is no fear, no doubt, no shame. With the art of his photography, Eric has intersected my queerness with joy. He has captured spaces that are familiar to me, spaces that reminded me of home, of hiding. Yet, these pictures are public, in them queer joy is in the open, normal, not fighting, not tired. I could see myself in them, I couldn’t hold myself back. I searched for more.
I was grateful to find a picture of two men brushing their teeth, one of them is holding a child, behind them is a glass window, there is no curtain. There is a clothesline above the head of the man without a baby. They are the same men from the first picture. The scene has changed, from the window there is the threat of discovery, yet they are so close to each other. It is this closeness that attracts me, the simplicity of it that cloaks the feeling of desire and a possibility of love between both men, yet in their closeness, there is a familiarity that is not hidden, they are claiming each other in this space that is open, they are willing to be seen, they do not fight it, we know, the camera knows.
I stared at this photograph. I was obsessed with the question: if this is Eric’s way of speaking back, who is he speaking to? In a video interview with Adelaide Damoah after his exhibition, See me, See you, Eric said, “violence is not the only way to tell this story, people don’t listen, so I had to tell the story of the mundane lives of queer people.” I wondered if the mundane is removed from the violence of queer lives. I have seen pictures of Olubunmi on Facebook, a gay man who was “caught” having sex and then lynched to death in Ondo, a town in Western Nigeria. There is violence in the mundane, but it is not the only story, there are many. I have been to queer parties, I have attended dinners with other queer people — why are these pictures not shown? Why did it take me this long to find the photography of Eric Gyamfi?
Queer lives are often seen through the lens of violence. Yes, it is dehumanizing, but for queers it is also a warning that we have to perform better, we have to code our language of desire into Nigerian queer speak, we have to perform for our survival. And because our survival depends on performance, it takes over our lives until the only thing we remember at night is that darkness is a curtain descending on the play of our lives. Yet that is not all we are. We work, we drink, we party, we fuck, we love, we struggle. We are more than props to interrogate the violence of homophobia. Eric’s vision is one that attempts to give us freedom, it blurs the line between the margin and the center, and in this blurred line there is a slippage into dreams of queer utopia. I see this dream in the room holding the men and the baby, the space is public, the men are free to perform the simple act of tooth brushing. In this enactment of freedom, Eric is saying we belong to our cities, our homes, our lives, we belong to love. I always come back to the picture of these two men and a baby. I stare in awe at the men, appreciating the vastness of our shared humanity. What glory. What joy to be seen in the midst of tenderness. I have come into the gratitude of my existence; I have been seen.
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A few weeks after I had discovered Eric’s photographs, we hung out at Labadi beach. Troy and Socrates were visiting Accra from the Ebedi Writers’ Residency in Nigeria, and we (Eric, Moshood, Yaw, and I) took them to visit the sea. I watched these men walk on the beach. There was a naturalness to their embrace of water. I watched the way they ran into waves, the way they smoked hookah, the way their half naked bodies strutted through sand. I took pictures of them. It was one of those instances where my lens became the means of interrogating land and bodies. On that beach of half-rotten boats, horses with their riders waiting for beach goers, roasted meat, masks, marijuana, armature tattooists, we didn’t need to claim our origin, to declare that we belong to the land. The land, the water, were claiming us.
I watched the sea come into land, washing over us, calling us her children. In that moment, I thought about origins, about pastors, writers, singers, people who say we are foreign, that our desires came with the ships, with airplanes, with migration. How many times have I heard that, read that, stayed in silence because to argue about the origin of my desire is to put my body at risk. Yet I have, in the silence of my room, thought of the sea, rivers, streams, as our beginning. My earliest memory of worship is of my mother, my grandma, and other women standing before a river, offering gifts and praises to Olokun. I watched water swallow their feet. I watched Olokun enter their bodies, leading them into dance, taking hold until they became vessels, blurring the line between the physical and the spiritual, existing in the realm of worship that could be said to be queer. This ritual I have come to think of as romance between orisa and devotees. In this ritual water knows flesh; it is the requirement it needs to dance, water washing over legs, the beginning of a relationship, the first requirement between the physical and spiritual.
The more I sought to link queerness to worship, the more I realized I was infusing myself into the myth of creation, into a place where I needed an ancient performance before I could exist. I knew that to belong in the beginning I had to open up the past, to attach myself to the land I was cut out from. I knew this because we are shut out from the origin of black bodies, because we are told we do not belong to the land, because we spend our lives searching for a way to belong, because most times we find that belonging in performance, the flick of a hand, the gentle twist of a neck, bright colors. We may or may not know that our performance is a reach for an origin story, for belonging. Sometimes it is a reach for an origin story that is reinterpreted in our bodies until we own it and pass it down as queer behavior, just as it was passed down to us, until it blurs and the origin becomes new, Nigerian, ours.
In 2019, months after beginning my exile in America, after spending weeks in McLean Hospital (a fancy name for a psychiatric clinic) I returned to my apartment in Cambridge to stare at the picture I took of Eric Gyamfi. In the picture he is walking on beach sands, his hands are in the air as if he is dancing. The sea and a man riding a horse are behind him. There is a place where the sky and water meet, where I now imagine I have crossed, never to come back the same.
We always wish for a past, for a knowing that’s deeper than the beginning of songs. We want to know the beginning of rituals. I have walked away from that. I have walked into the middle of exile, where blackness wrestles with the ocean for a way home, I have made that spot of chaos home. I live there. I write there. Yet there is a loss of home, of spirituality, a loss that I seek to build from. By placing Eric by the sea, the origin of my spirituality, I have woven his quest for queer utopia to my lineage. But the ocean also speaks of a departure, the beginning of a diasporic world that flows into its own.
Where do I begin to reclaim the past? How do I weld myself to the memory of worship? I knew that in my earliest memory of worship my voice was silent, I watched but didn’t join the women. I was eleven, I already knew that survival begins with silence, that silence can be the beginning of rebellion. Years later, when I had found my confidence to claim this spirituality, I was still confused, still afraid. I placed my queerness outside of worship. When I whispered my prayers, I did it with shame.
That shame stayed with me. It said to me: how dare you whisper of belonging. It was not a question. All my life I have always wanted to belong to a place, I had wanted an acceptance that’s not tolerance. All my life I had denied myself that, even before the world denied me. This was my state before I saw the photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode.
The first photograph I saw of his was in a book in Lagos about black photographers. It was on display among other used books under an overhead bridge in Surulere. I bought it on a whim, perhaps as part of my desire to be a photographer. In it were the photographs of Lorna Simpson, Gordon Parks, Jamel Shabazz, and others, and somewhere at the end of the book were the photographs of Rotimi. I paused when I saw his pictures. The first one was of a man with a protruding stomach sitting on some semblance of a chair; everything was dark apart from the man. His body was covered with white and black dots and lines made by chalk and what I assumed to be ash. In his hand were three burning candles held together by twine; there was no face in the picture. I was fascinated: here was a queer body so spiritual I could see him being a Babalawo. It gave me the audacity to dream of belonging to a spirituality that is a part of me, the audacity to stand in my place among the praise names of my father’s lineage. Because there was no face in the picture, it gave me the power of imagination. I could become that face, a dutiful son walking into the origin of my people.
Over time I returned again and again to the photographs of Rotimi. They have recently taken on a new meaning. Perhaps it is because I now live in the Midwest of America. Alienated from home, my body has refused to find a place here. Spirituality offers me the only refuge of belonging, yet what does it mean to cross an ocean, to leave behind places of worship?
In one of Rotimi’s photographs a man in aso oke stands in the dark, his hair painted in black and white, his hands clasped together in the Christian way of prayer. On the ground a naked man kneels, his head covered with the hem of the praying man’s cloth. His face is not seen, it is hidden in the dark warmth of the man at prayers. I have never seen a picture that depicts the tension of my body more than that photograph. In the photograph, the queer man is kneeling, he is begging, he is praying for survival. Contending for his body are the past and the present, the West and home.
I exist in the middle of battles, but what if in this tension there is a drum beating, what if we could hear it, could long for it? The drums are spiritual, the drums are happy, the drums are violent, a signal to war, a signal to find home elsewhere after a defeat, a readiness for survival. What if in that instance of rhythm, the old and the new become one, and in this meeting place the queer body is set on a journey? We may choose to look at our future as black queer bodies trapped in exile through a diasporic lens; maybe I am looking for ways to truly be home, maybe home is holding onto every diasporic black tradition, culture, carnival that speaks of freedom to the queer body. Maybe home is grafting the joys of the sea, of black bodies singing, of rituals to myself, maybe this is the beginning of joining a spirituality that’s native to the homeland and the diaspora, maybe I am simply negotiating the terms of my survival, the beginning of my freedom.
But what does it mean to survive? I hold in my hands my grudge and freedom. When I walk into coffee shops in America I do not hide my queerness, but what about those back home whose daily lives are littered with tests they must pass, whose existence is tied to NGOs playing savior? Days before beginning this essay, a gay man was lured from his city to another state in Nigeria by a man posing as queer. This gay man, who on the way must have imagined the pleasure of a man’s hand discovering his body, was robbed and killed by his host. As social media erupted and queer people protested, I was silent. Shame and guilt plagued me. What is freedom if people still walk with the fear of being seen? What is freedom if desire can be death haunting queer people?
In June 2019 I attended my first Pride March in Boston. I walked alone, reveling in the outburst of colors in the train station, on the road. It was a warm day. As I stood among the crowd, I felt alive, there was an energy that flowed through us. We had survived what the world threw at us. I watched a group of trans women walk past us, dressed for a party, faces on fleek. They held pictures above their heads, they were pictures of murdered trans women in the US. We were quiet as they walked by. We knew what it meant to hold a dead body against the sky, to say these souls belonged to us, to say this crime is known to us. As these women walked by, our silence erupted into claps, whistles, cheers, an acknowledgement of pain, a reckoning of endings, a celebration of life wrapped in a performance of protest.
As I walked home, I thought of queer survival as both personal and at the same time collective. We hold in our dreams all those who fell to the hate against us, even in our quest for freedom the dead sing. We hear the songs; we say this will never happen again, we hope, we wish. In our escape the dead are present. In exile where I walk down streets, wearing a shirt that says Queer, the gay man in Nigeria who holds against his fear his desire for love, for sex, lives in my shadow. There is no queer freedom when people are still hiding between desire and survival. I am free to exist. I do not have the freedom to depart from queer pain, from fear, from memory. I am trapped. A desire for queer utopia is my prison. It is one that I do not see ending.
Rotimi and Eric have given me a way to stand in a foreign city and think of home. It is a beginning. I hold it dear. But as I think about freedom, I also think about the people in these pictures. I think of their queer bodies as songs, as elegies of survival, which are elegies of queer bodies, which are homages to disappearance, which are assurances that queer artists are spirit mediums who would always lift our dead toward light.
We must imagine our freedom. I chose to place mine here, at the intersection of spirituality and the mundane. If I cannot see more than these intersections, then it is a failing of where I chose to stand. In every pain I seek a window into joy, into life. Queer utopia is an unending quest for freedom for those at home and in exile. We try, we breathe, we walk. Survival does not end, struggle does not end, and there lies the beginning of our salvation. We all must keep walking.
Romeo Oriogun was born in Lagos, Nigeria. He is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Museum of Silence (Arrowsmith Press) and The Origin of Butterflies (APBF). He currently is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the John Logan Prize for Poetry.