Udara Juice by Ada Nnadi
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
Tag: Tradition
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
EXHIBIT A: The Fruit
I am no stranger to sexually suggestive fruits. Pomegranates, peaches, eggplants, watermelon, bananas, cucumbers; I could go on—delighted by all the ways sex and sexuality can be encoded into food, the act and figure of consumption, and desire. Perhaps I settled on udara because I wanted a representative sexually suggestive fruit—a paragon of (feminine) sensuality and sexuality that was Nigerian, Igbo.
And, perhaps, I also wanted to subvert, or elevate, udara’s role as a symbol of abundance and female fertility in Igbo cosmology, remedying lack, desire, want. A kind of inevitable dichotomy. Particularly if you think about how it’s eaten. For there’s no fruit, I feel, that quite exemplifies and impels ravenousness; no way to eat that small fruit that’s not mimetic of some great hunger. I wanted to record this great hunger.
I wanted to record it as queer, sapphic, Black, Nigerian, Igbo. I wanted to record all of that with a fruit that I, and everyone around me, knows. So that what I saw, what Justina and Felicity feel, could become ubiquitous, inescapable—undeniable.
EXHIBIT B: The Book
I first read Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees at sixteen. Before then, I’d been adrift, searching for and collecting like precious stones media that reflected the Nigerian queer experience, especially the Nigerian queer woman experience. I needed help understanding myself. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone. I don’t know if the me of this present reality, writer and self, would exist without it.
Published in 2015—a year after the Nigerian government passed the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA), criminalising same-sex marriage, relationships and gatherings, as well as public advocacy and support for queer people—Under the Udala Trees carries with it a tenderness and quiet defiance. The latter, specifically, is markedly present in its epilogue, which also contains my favourite passage in the book.
I keep this tenderness and quiet defiance in mind in my work, especially with marginalised characters living under oppressive conditions. Where you can tell that despite the difficulties they face, they are nonetheless held by the narrative. My homage to the book was just a matter of time, and as of the time of writing this, the SSMPA remains in place.
EXHIBIT C: The Essays
EXHIBIT D. Addendum
I wanted to. I wanted to—an insurmountable list…
ADA NNADI is a queer Nigerian-Igbo writer and editor living in Nigeria. Their work has appeared in Tor’s African Risen, GigaNotoSaurus, Anathema, and Omenana. Their story “Tiny Bravery” co-won the 2020 Nommo Awards in the short fiction category and appeared on the 2019 Locus Recommended Reading List. They are currently working on an upmarket lesbian novel that’s a blend of fantasy, romance, horror, Igbo and Christian mythology. Ada hopes that after their two master’s and a PhD, the Nigerian Psychological Association will NIPOST them the ability to read minds, like all psychologists before them. Ada will one day be the mother of many cats, two birds (because that’s the closest they’ll ever have to getting a pet dinosaur), a ball python—and maybe a big dog. Find her on Instagram @horneddaughter.