Intimacies between men: modernism, African homosexualities and masculinist anxieties in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters

Abstract

Through a detailed analysis of a pivotal scene in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreter ([1965] 1970), this article explores the functioning of the homosexual figure in African high modernism’s aesthetic and ethical strategies and in African nation states’ discourses on tradition and nationalism. Studies of pre-colonial forms of same-sex relationships suggest that despite the regulation of gender and sexual roles, social spaces were created for the expression of non-heteronormative sexuality, that Christian missions attempted to destroy these traditional spaces by the demonization of homosexual practices and that colonial policy completed this process by criminalizing them. Soyinka’s complex portrayal of Joe Golder, a gay character who is both strangely marginal and central to the narrative, destabilizes the masculinist (and heteronormative) assumptions of the central “interpreters” of the novel, which they share, in part, with the contemporary nationalistic rhetoric of African leaders who cast the homosexual figure as the absolute Other of the African nation state. The homosexual, therefore, becomes the social and textual site of the paradoxes intrinsic to the use of pre-colonial tradition by nationalist discourses. While these discourses seek to use misogyny, homophobia and heterosexism to secure a hyper-masculine nationalism, the in-between figure of Joe Golder, like Soyinka’s in-between text, threatens to disrupt and destabilize the boundaries of self, identity, nation and text.