Heteronormative Versus Non-Normartive: A Reading of Chinelo Okpalanta’s Under The Udala Trees and Jude Dibia’s Walking With Shadows

Abstract

Colonialism had transforming impact on African ideologies of gender and sexuality. Administrators and religious leaders in unison with the African tradition enforced heterosexuality as the central axis of sexual definition which has become the ideal template for social order. In Africa, marriage, especially customarily constricted is a heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman or women. Same sex relationship as a thematic concern in contemporary African literature has been treated with silence and abstinence from African writers in the past but it has gone beyond that stereotype in Nigeria since the West boldly identified with homosexuality to the extent of challenging the hetero-normative African social order. Therefore, this paper seeks to examine Chinelo Okparanta’s Under The Udala Trees and Jude Dibia‘s Walking with Shadows As non-normative challenging the hetero-normative orientation of marriage. This stems from the value the Nigerian society and Africa at large place on natural procreation and the stringent adherence to Christian and Islamic religions. Until recently, African writings depict same sex relationships in a negative light and unsympathetically so, due to the monothematic representations of this subject in African literary texts, again, Africans perceive homosexuality as innately alien to African cultures. This paper exposes Okparanta and Dibia’s sympathetic representation of homosexuality which challenges the Nigerian/African cultural orientation. However, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical Criticism is adopted as the theoretical framework since the texts deal with socially-based identities, gender and sexual identities which do not conform to the norm.