Mark Gevisser recommends Queer literature from around the world

Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet- Mark Gevisser recommends Queer Lit from all over the world

As I sat down with South African writer Mark Gevisser during the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet earlier this year, we began talking about queerness and how it exists with several different kinds of intersections all around the world. Eventually we delved into literary representation and that’s how we came to the topic of queer stories from non-West parts of the world and how it remains unexplored for many readers. Here are some recommendations about the same from Mark, the author of The Pink Line: Journeys Across The World’s Queer Frontiers; .

As You Like It: The Gerald Kraak Prize Anthology Volume II (2018) is an anthology of fiction, nonfiction, essays, and photography published by the Johannesburg-based publisher Jacana Media. Comprising the pieces shortlisted for Jacana Media’s 2018 Gerald Kraak Prize honoring African works on the topics of gender, human rights, and sexuality, the anthology features 17 pieces, including the eventual winner, Pwaangulongii Dauod’s essay, “Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men.”

A groundbreaking book, accessible but scholarly, by African activists. It uses research, life stories, and artistic expression including essays, case studies, poetry, news clips, songs, fiction, memoirs, letters, interviews, short film scripts, and photographs to examine dominant and deviant sexualities and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities, and femininities. It also opens a space, particularly for young people, to think about African sexualities in different ways. This multidisciplinary text, from a distinctly African perspective, is built around themed sections each introduced by a framing essay. The authors borrow from a wide political spectrum to examine dominant and deviant sexualities, analyse the body as a site of political, cultural and social contestation. The book adopts a feminist approach that analyses sexuality within patriarchal structures of oppression while also highlighting its emancipatory potential.

In nine exhilarating stories of queer love in contemporary Nigeria, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things announces the arrival of a daring new voice in fiction.

A man revisits the university campus where he lost his first love, aware now of what he couldn’t understand then. A young musician rises to fame at the price of pieces of himself, and the man who loves him. Arinze Ifeakandu explores with tenderness and grace the fundamental question of the heart: can deep love and hope be sustained in spite of the dominant expectations of society, and great adversity?

Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he’s out of breath. He’s running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He’s running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who’s out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco.

Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa’s identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.