Volume 3, No. 22: Making Space for Queer Grief

Greetings, book people!

I’ve been thinking a lot about Pride, and the conversations we tend to have during Pride Month, and how I kind of hate all of them. We shouldn’t celebrate, or we don’t feel like celebrating, because of all the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the U.S. right now. We need to celebrate precisely because of what’s happening. This is how you should feel about Pride, and this is how you shouldn’t, and this is what straight people should be doing, and this is what they shouldn’t be doing, and if you’re not loud about queer liberation then you’re a terrible person, and if you are loud about it, make sure you’re loud in the right way. The first Pride was a riot, and Pride is political, and corporations that profit off queer lives in June while donating to politicians trying to legislate us out of existence are trash, yes, and. Yes and.

The thing is, I don’t care what straight people do during Pride or how they act or what they say. If you are invested in queer liberation, you are invested in queer liberation, which is a yearlong project, and not reflected in what you do or do not post on social media during the month of June. Honestly, I don’t care what queer people do during Pride, either. Some queers hate it and some love it and some are indifferent to it, and if we as queer people are invested in our own liberation and the liberation of our communities (which means trans people, disabled people, queer immigrants, BIPOC queer folks), then we are invested in that liberation. What we say and do in June is a tiny piece of the whole.

Which is to say: this is not an essay about Pride. I read a book, And Then He Sang a Lullaby by Ani Kayode, the first book in Roxane Gay’s new publishing imprint, and I have a lot of feelings about it. Feelings about queer grief and queer liberation and how we talk about queer stories. It’s a gorgeous book. I hope this piece encourages you to read it. It does contain “spoilers”, though not the kind that will ruin the book for you—I would have loved it even more if I had known going in what happens in the end.

By the way, if you do want to do something concrete to celebrate Pride, my June Books for Trans Rights Fundraiser is still going and there are tons of amazing books available!

CW: homophobic violence, suicide

And Then We Sang a Lullaby is a beautiful, devastating book about two gay men in Nigeria who meet and fall in love at university. August comes from a big family of many sisters. He carries with him the weight of familial expectation, as well deep grief and a sense of responsibility for the death of his mother in childbirth. He’s running away from his queerness, leaking shame and internalized homophobia everywhere he goes. Segun arrives at uni with a very different series of hurts, including trauma from his first abusive relationship with a man. Unlike August, he’s openly gay, despite the incredibly real danger of not hiding his sexually in a country that criminalizes it.

The first half of the novel traces both their childhoods and teen years, so that when they finally meet and fall in love, we, as readers, know their histories intimately. It’s so poignant to watch them slowly open up to each other, given what they’ve both already been through. It’s beautifully tender. It’s also being marketed as a love story, and it is—partly. But much more than that, it’s a coming-into-self story, a survival story, and (almost) a grief story.

After a new anti-gay law is passed, Segun survives a brutal homophobic attack. For August, this event is terrifying but catalyzing. It vaults him out of complacency. For Segun, who’s always been fiercely political, who’s involved in the student socialist group, who’s been fighting for queer liberation since he arrived at university, it’s the opposite. He survives it, but he doesn’t survive it. He dies by suicide. This is where the book ends: a few days after Segun’s death, with August looking into a future remade by grief.

I hated this novel for the first 24 hours after finishing it. This is partly because of how I react to queer death—if I’m surprised by it I shut down and go numb. I repress every scrap of emotion inside me in order to get through it. This is why I hate it when deaths are hidden behind “spoiler” tags (but that’s another essay). I usually do my own research, but I read this book far enough ahead of publication that I couldn’t find any reviews that went into enough detail. I wish I could go back and read it again for the first time, knowing what happened, because then I would have been able to stay with the characters in their grief and pain. As it is, I cannot love it wholeheartedly. I can only love it in the abstract. I can love pieces of it. I can love how I think it might have pierced me if my protective walls hadn’t gone up. And—here is the unexpected gift—I can share some of what this book (and my experience reading it) has taught me about queer grief and how we write about it.

***

Here’s the thing: I love what Kayode is doing in this novel. It’s a book about how queer people survive after tragedy. It’s about how we go on living in the wake of each other. It’s about the sometimes painful and catastrophic ways that lineages of love, resistance, and liberation are passed from one queer to another, often through death. The last scene is unbelievably powerful in the way that it marks this—August physically walks into the space that Segun has left behind, grieving but alive, grieving but still here, grieving but ready to fight for the person he loved—and therefore himself.

I especially love the middle of the novel, which is hard to read, but feels vital and immediate and true. In the wake of horrific violence, Segun loses himself and August finds himself. They never really make their way back to each other. It’s such a powerful exploration of how violence destroys lives and relationships, and also of how something unutterable can wake someone up and break someone else. I love that no straight people are involved in any of it, and the way it flips the “queer person dies so straight person can become less homophobic” trope. I don’t think Kayode was writing any of this with straight people in mind. It’s a story about how queer people do and do not survive homophobia, and about what that feels like inside queer relationships.

I realized all of this after a few days, when I’d had time to calm down and let some of those protective walls crumble. I started thinking about why my initial reaction was so visceral and sudden. Reading about a young queer man dying by suicide is devastating. It is also devastating to read a book that culminates in death.

I wanted space to grieve.

I’ve been thinking about Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis, one of my favorite novels of all time. It has a lot of similarities to And Then He Sang a Lullaby. Both are about queer people who don’t survive. Both are about characters who experience violent homophobia and die by suicide. But while Lullaby ends in the moment, with August still in the early impossible days of grief, Cantoras ends year later, with the chosen family of the character who dies now in the worn and familiar later years of grief. These women have lived their lives missing and loving and honoring their friend. I wept and wept at the end of the novel, but those tears felt healing as well as despairing. De Robertis makes space for queer grief. She wrote 30+ pages of catharsis into the end of the novel.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is another deeply sad queer novel I had a visceral reaction to. It doesn’t end in death. In fact, it ends in a moment of incredible hope. It’s a bleak book, with few moments of relief, and while the ending isn’t happy, it does offer a glimmer of happinesses. Stuart charts an escape route, a portal for his characters to step into. And yet I couldn’t stand the book for days after I finished it. It took me weeks to come around, to see its beauty and its truth.

Like Lullaby, Young Mungo ends in a moment of decision. Neither Kayode nor Stuart offer their characters—and therefore, their readers—time to grieve. All of the grieving takes place in the silence beyond the last sentence. This is why I struggled so much with both books. It’s probably why it took me weeks to find my way toward a kind of love for them—I had to make space for my grief, space not offered to me in the texts.

***

I am so tired of this conversation about queer suffering and yet I can’t seem to stop having it. It actually feels like an impossible conversation. I keep thinking I’ve figured out what I think, what kinds of hard queer books I love and which ones I need to stay away from, which ones I think are actually trash and which ones are just not for me—and then I read something that explodes it all.

I’m becoming more and more suspicious of my own intellectual reactions to books like And Then We Sang a Lullaby. Does it work? Does it not work? The things that happen to August and Segun are not coherent, and they are things that happen all the time in the real world we live in. I want queer people to write devastating stories about their realities. Sometimes I think these stories fall into old, exhausting formulas, and I crave new formulas, different shapes.

I want to read books that make elaborate space for queer grief. But everybody grieves differently.

I don’t know how to end this essay, except to say that maybe it is an impossible conversation. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s the point. In all things, I crave queer complexity. That’s why I’m still here thinking and writing and wrangling. I want us all to have space to grieve, and space for joy, in books and in life. I want all the impossible conversations.