Reimagining Transracial Intimacy: The Cartography of DecolonialLove in Leila Aboulela’s ‘Something Old, Something New’ & TomiAdeaga’s ‘Marriage and Other Impediments’

Summary

Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why Iendeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.

(Frantz Fanon 2008, 28)

Writings on love in African literary studies have often sufferedcritical neglect. Most times, such writings are excluded from theeconomy of ‘serious’ art, especially when they are short story formsproduced by women. In the introduction to ALT31, ‘Writing African in the Short Story’, ErnestEmenyonu decries the marginalization of the short story form inAfrican literary criticism considering that African writers ‘haveused the short story to comment on various aspects of life in modernAfrican societies’. Despite the critical neglect, African writerscontinue to use the short story to signal ‘a new sense of direction,moral regeneration, social integration, racial tolerance, andequality of all humans under the law’ (6). For African womenpractising such a significant form that has suffered criticalmarginalization, contending with the problem of doublemarginalization is inevitable. Nonetheless, I seek to criticallyexamine how African women writers reimagine love as a decolonialtechnology for remapping the cartography of the self and the otherin the short story form. I examine how they contest theethno-normative frame of love to offer other possibilities beyondthe colonial regulation of social intimacy. I ask: How do Africanwomen writers’ engagement with the aesthetic act of reworking loveforeground other ethical inter-relational orientations that clearlydepart from colonial inter-racial intimacy?

To engage this question, I carry out a critical analysis of two shortstories in Ama Ata Aidoo's edited African LoveStories: An Anthology – Leila Aboulela's ‘SomethingOld, Something New’ and Tomi Adeaga's ‘Marriage and OtherImpediments’ (‘Something’ and ‘Marriage’ hereafter). I choose thesenarratives because of their central trope of transracial intimacy.Theoretically positioning these short stories at the intersection offeminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thoughts on love, I considerthe decolonial thesis, themes, and conflicts in the stories byanalysing how these African women writers imaginatively reworktransracial intimacy as a liberating force for transforming the selfand the other. Through the trope of transracial intimacy, theSudanese writer, Aboulela, and the Nigerian writer, Adeaga,radically critique the colonial boundary, the self and theother.