Blessings: A Novel

"Blessings is a coming-of-age story—a queer coming-of-age story. It’s about a boy, Obiefuna, and his life in Nigeria. It starts when his father takes on a new apprentice. When this young man comes to the house Obiefuna is just captivated by him. It’s a life changing moment for him. Obiefuna’s father sees there’s something between his son and this young man, so sends his son off to a very strict and quite brutal Christian boarding school. I haven’t been to boarding school, but there’s always this sense of brutality to people’s stories about it. It’s the story of Obiefuna’s journey through boarding school and, afterwards, coming to terms with his sexuality, experimenting, dealing with shame. It’s also about Obiefuna’s mother and his relationship with her. She gets cancer and has her own story. I’m not sure she even knows why her husband has sent their son away, but she senses who he really is. They have a close relationship, the son and the mother. Obiefuna has a tender relationship with his brother too, who is a very different character to him—sporty and popular. Obiefuna is always the one who is bullied by his brother’s friends. But they have this beautiful relationship, which comes out later in the book. Emotionally, we were all blown away by this book. We were so involved with the characters and their relationships were so real. We were frequently moved to tears by it. It transported us to a different place and we felt like we were there. The novel follows Obiefuna right up to and past the time when Nigeria outlaws homosexuality and makes it a criminal offence. At that point, it becomes almost a matter of life and death for him and his friends. People are being imprisoned. It was already an emotionally involving book. When it got to that point, this big context change, it brought home the reality of his situation, which we’d been building up to. You realize he’s writing about a real place he knows well and that it is like that. It’s a beautiful book."

"I’ve been dying to read this, picked it up while I was visiting Lagos and wolfed it down so quickly. I cannot believe Ibeh is 22 years old. It’s incredible. I saw it described as “ Moonlight meets Purple Hibiscus ”—it’s a gay coming-of-age novel set as Nigeria was on the verge of criminalising same-sex relationships with the Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2013. When the protagonist Obiefuna is caught by his father in a tricky situation with another boy, he’s immediately dispatched to seminary school. We witness sexual awakening, abuse, and how he has to navigate this new boarding school’s hierarchy and unpredictable violence. It’s a tender, beautiful text. From someone so young, Chukwuebuka Ibeh is a supremely skilled writer and I can’t wait to see what he produces next. There’s a slight messy dual narrative, where we hear from his mother. But I think it’s necessary in this book, because in Nigeria’s traditional, patriarchal society, there’s an intelligent arc about a mother coming to terms with who her son is, and the strains that knowledge has on her marriage and relationship. All the while, there’s a time-crunch because she has a health crisis that is speeding this whole thing up. It’s a very elegant story that asks how one can live free in a country that forbids one’s true self. I was really blown away by the novel. And it makes me really happy that they are telling these kinds of stories there, because it’s the kind of thing I imagine will do better outside of Nigeria. But he’s breaking boundaries by telling this kind of story, by bucking expectations of the types of stories that ‘African authors’ are allowed to tell. I don’t know if it has altered it. There will, for me, always be this question of authenticity. I cannot detach from Nigeria. It’s in my name, it’s in my Chi, it’s in my everything. I’m Nigerian, even if I have explored the globe and lived elsewhere—it trickles into everything. So, I don’t know if it has changed my relationship with the country, but there is always this lingering question of authenticity, particularly when I’m not writing from my own perspective, but from the perspective of a 19-year-old growing up in an informal settlement. It’s a question I think any author would ask of themselves, approaching any work outside of their own experience. That was my challenge with Water Baby . And I hope that any Nigerian, residing in Nigeria, reading my book will find it convincing."