READ
Trying to
find English translations of books from every country in the world has
presented a few challenges. For Comoros,
for example, no book was available, but I was able to obtain a file containing
an informal translation of a novel from someone who had met the book’s author.
More often, though, the problem is that there is only one author from a
particular country who has had a book translated into English.
I assumed
that, like everyone else who’s doing a similar project, I would be reading Shadows
of Your Black Memory, by Donato Ndongo, for Equatorial Guinea. No
disrespect to Mr. Ndongo, but I didn’t want to just read the same book everyone
else was reading. Also, I’m making a conscious effort to read more books by
women. You can imagine my delight, then, when I heard last April that Lawrence
Schimel’s translation of Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda
had been published. Not only was it a new option for Equatorial Guinea, but it
featured gay and lesbian characters, which have not been represented in any of
the other books I’ve read for this blog.
La Bastarda is the story of Okomo, a
sixteen-year-old girl living in a small village in Equatorial Guinea. Her
mother died giving birth to her, and she doesn’t know her father, who never
paid the bride price for her mother, which would have legitimized their
relationship. Therefore, Okomo is a bastarda – bastard daughter – completely dependent
on her maternal grandparents. Her grandmother is eager to marry her off,
preferable to a rich man who can help out with the family finances, so she
makes her put makeup on, braid her hair, and wear revealing clothes. Okomo isn’t
comfortable with any of that.
Okomo is
very close to her Uncle Marcelo, and doesn’t understand why her grandparents
and the rest of the villagers hold him in such disdain, calling him a
man-woman. She develops friendships with three teenage girls who her
grandmother considers “indecent and mysterious.” These girls are also very
close to Okomo’s uncle, and during the course of events, Okomo comes to
understand that her uncle is gay and the girls are lesbians. She develops an
intimate relationship with one of the girls, Dina, and resists the efforts of
her grandmother to fix her up with a man.
While being
gay isn’t a crime in Equatorial Guinea, Okomo’s uncle gets blamed for every bad
thing that happens in their village – the local people think he’s a curse. At
one point, he barely escapes with his life when they burn down his house, and
he flees into the forest. Okomo and Dina visit him there one day, and they meet
his lover, Jesusin. The four of them talk about how a gay man may be ridiculed
as being a man-woman, but gay women don’t have a name at all. “If you don’t
have a name, you’re invisible, and if you’re invisible, you can’t claim any
rights,” explains Jesusin.
The book’s
afterword, by history professor Abosede George, delves a little deeper into the
issues confronting members of the LGBTI community in Africa. She says that
conventional wisdom has always held that “…being properly African, and thus in
conformity with community norms, was to be reproductive.” To be gay is often
thought to be Un-African.
Writing La Bastarda
was an act of bravery on the part of the author. Equatorial Guinea responded by
banning the book.
COOK
When Okomo
and Dina go visit Marcelo and Jesusin, they are given something to eat. “They
served us vegetables. They lived in the middle of the forest, surrounded by
animals, but refused to hunt them.” Professor George elaborates on this in her
afterword, suggesting that their vegetarianism is a critique of heterosexual
excess.
“In Marcelo’s home, taking up a
new life in the forest entails becoming vegetarian.
Surrounded by forest creatures,
they refuse to eat meat. In this last commentary on
death, life, sustainability, and
consumption, the story contrasts the cycles of life in
the forest with the cycles of
violence in the village. Marcelo, Okomo, and their free
tribe of the forest will consume
in new ways, finding their nourishment without the
need to kill others.”
When I
searched Google for recipes for this blog post, I found a website called “National
Foods of the World,” which listed the national dish of Equatorial Guinea as
succotash. With Okomo’s words, “they served us vegetables,” still in my mind,
succotash seemed like the perfect dish to make. The recipe at nationalfoods.org
calls for bacon, which I omitted, and butter, for which I substituted Earth
Balance spread. This isn’t quite your grandma’s succotash, since it contains cherry
tomatoes, red wine vinegar, and various herbs, but it will probably taste
familiar.
GIVE
There were
no projects listed for Equatorial Guinea at GlobalGiving.org, so I had to look
elsewhere for a place to send my donation. It wasn’t easy to find a nonprofit
organization offering services in Equatorial Guinea, but I finally found the
Global Campaign for Education, a U.S.-based organization that promotes
education as a basic human right. This is a coalition-member organization, consisting
of more than eighty nonprofit groups. One such organization, Simply Equal
Education, was started by two young women who spent a semester abroad studying
in Equatorial Guinea. During that time, they volunteered in a primary school
and learned a great deal about barriers to education. The Global Campaign for
Education serves countries all over the world, but I designated my donation for
use in Equatorial Guinea. More information about the Global Campaign for
Education is available at http://campaignforeducationusa.org/.
NEXT STOP: ERITREA
