From Plight to Freedom: Exploring a Lesbian’s Odyssey in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the personal journey of a lesbian woman pursuing independence from the path of panic, pain, and perplexity as depicted in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. According to Nigerian folktales and people, the Udala fruit traditionally symbolises female fertility. The select book is an immediate outcry against the Nigerian government’s initiation of laws with regard to queerness and queer humans. Okparanta’s portrayal realistically echoes the fact that most gays and lesbians, irrespective of their true sexuality, are forced to adopt marriage as their only choice to meet their survival. In sum, this story recounts the experience of a woman with same-sex orientation struggling between her mother, society, and marriage in the Nigerian context. This article will inform readers on how these three overpowering factors, impact the heroine mentally, dissolve her true self, and disrupt the process of self-realisation as a homosexual. In large, the protagonist is subjected to the domestic spheres, circumstances, and persons rather than public settings. She completely accepts herself as a lesbian, and her coming out was successful only during her motherhood, as in the interim she was repressed by her mother until marriage and by her husband after the wedding. Nigeria is not native to queer people; nonetheless, the novelist ends the story with a non-diasporic essence, as how her queer protagonist reached liberation and was able to dwell within her native walls is the novel’s emotional touchstone.