Fiction Review: You Sing of a Longing by Otosirieze Obi-Young
One remarkable quality I'll ascribe to Otosirieze's short fiction, You Sing of a Longing, is audacity.
Writing about homosexuality at a time when it didn't enjoy the current level of tolerance, or better put, indifference—that's some guts. (Recall the recurrent threats and physical attacks against gay right activists, Chibuihe Obi and Romeo Oriogun sometime in 2017.)
Against this backdrop of almost non-existent Nigerian literature on gay sexuality, it is easy to see how it might have been tedious trying to pull off an untold story depicting a most unusual love dynamic: one between a young man and another old enough to be his father; an authority he looked up to, at that.
Perhaps this laboriousness was what contributed to the slow pulse of the story that made it fail at sustaining my interest for long. I had to talk myself into finishing it (after abandoning it for three days). I waited to cry just like I read other fans of the story say they did but, for me, that intense moment never came.
That said, I found some lyrical thoughts, like this paragraph that I read out loud more than three times:
"To be in love is to feel a lightness of being, in being. It is to feel in your belly a little god of little things, a granter of miracles in the most meaningless of moments...To be in love is to imagine defiantly, to believe defiantly, that the object of your hunger will always lie in your sight. To love is to have the luxury of options, and to choose to be unshackled."
And this one, too:
"The only thing wrong with love is the lovers: who they love, how they love."
Those words. Profound. Sublime. I look forward to reading more of them from Otosirieze Obi-Young in subsequent literary pieces.
Read “You Sing of a Longing” here:
