"Nigeria is a very homophobic country"

Award-winning Nigerian-American author Chinelo Okparanta speaks on same sex relationship in Nigeria.

Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Okparanta who lives in New York says with or without the bill criminalising same sex marriage, Nigeria is a very homophobic country.

In an interview with Jennifer Malec of Books Live South Africa, Okparanta revealed that her debut novel Under the Udala Trees, a bookabout homosexual love in Nigeria was completed before the same sex bill was passed.

"The novel is ultimately just a story about people struggling to live out their lives the best way possible, even in the face of societal pressures, discrimination and in some cases, outright abuse. I completed the novel a month or two before Goodluck Jonathan signed the bill criminalising same-sex relations.

With or without the bill, I would have (and had indeed) already written the novel. But I thought it was important to add the author’s note regarding the signing of the bill in order to help readers – especially those who are not familiar with Nigeria – to contextualise the story.

Ultimately, though, the novel is a story of individuals living in Nigeria, under a particular system of things. It is only about the bill insofar as the bill affects the day-to-day lives of the nation’s citizens."

And when she was asked if she would have written the book Under the Udala Trees while in Nigeria.

She answered: "Would I have written the same book? I don’t know. The “correct” response would be to say, “Probably not.” But who knows. My mother says I’m stubborn, and perhaps given my stubbornness, it’s likely that I would have been stubborn in the issues I chose to write about, regardless of the sociocultural context. Or maybe I’d be married with five kids and no time to write, if I had stayed. It’s hard to know."

She also spoke on how the Biafran war affected her family:

"My mother her father in the war, so my siblings and I grew up always knowing that story. It was a devastating time for her family, and of course, there are always lingering effects to having lived out a war."

Okparanta is the author of two books: a collection of short stories called Happiness, Like Water, and a novel, Under the Udala Trees, released last year.

Okparanta was shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing, and her collection of short stories Happiness, Like Water was shortlisted for the the 2014 Etisalat Prize for Literature and won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award.

Under the Udala Trees is her first novel.

Read the full interview on Books Live.

READ: A Review of 'Under the Udala Trees' by Chinelo Okparanta