What makes these tropes newly urgent, though, is their context in Nigeria. Ibeh sets his story in the years leading up to the country’s 2014 anti-gay law, and, intriguingly, connects the dots of queer persecution and the everyday tragedies that are woven into the fabric of Nigerian life. The same structures that encourage homophobia, in Ibeh’s view, make for harshly patriarchal households, abusive school environments, corrupt opportunism, torment and repression.
“Blessings” is a novel of juxtapositions. In addition to Obiefuna’s story, we also get the perspective of his mother, Uzoamaka. She suspects that her son is queer and loves him nevertheless. She had no say in Obiefuna’s banishment and desperately wants him back home. As the novel jumps between their points of view, we see love and cruelty set close together; acts of compassion are quickly followed by violence, and vice versa. Ibeh, though, is less confident writing about Uzoamaka. She exists less as a character and more as a force, which is to say her chapters are less of a plot than a device.
Along the way, there are glimpses of transcendence. Obiefuna is hit with a feeling of “how brilliant and bright and beautiful everything was”; he is “filled with a sense of wonder at the world’s perfection” as he hears “the sonorous singing of birds.” These lines are moving, proof that Obiefuna’s life isn’t all suffering, but bluntly trite, they also betray a writer with room to grow.
More successful is Ibeh’s language of perception, the specificity with which he observes characters deny themselves a bit of happiness. When Obiefuna is alone with a mercurial upperclassman who is ultimately, and mysteriously, caring, for example, Ibeh writes: “Senior Papilo traced his eyes for a long moment. For once, for a split second, Obiefuna thought he could interpret what that dewy-eyed glassiness in Senior Papilo’s eyes meant. And then Senior Papilo looked away and looked at him again, and, just like that, it was gone.”
The best of “Blessings” is made of sentences like these: revelatory yet unresolved, simple yet polyphonic, hopeful yet full of heartbreak.
