(Digital) anthologies and genre: Writing sexual pleasure and poetic freedom

Abstract

“Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellion against that repressed form of self-alienation and her striving toward poetic sexual freedom resulted in her commissioning and editing two anthologies, Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. Investment in correcting the silence around sex(ual) pleasure is echoed and amplified in a growing number of anthologies, mostly digital. What is the conceptual repertoire the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom? Are there discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? What kind of freedom is possible in writing and publishing erotic and/or pornographic texts in a digital space? Drawing on the collections’ editorial notes, secondary materials on the founders of the collectives and hubs, Phyllis Taoua’s reflections on freedom, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story “The Oink in Doinker,” I argue that this genre and its current success is all about freedom in its instrumental and substantive guises. Specifically, I show how in combating sexual moralists through the distribution of their literary output via the Internet, these writers engage online platforms as instrumental freedoms. Using those instrumental freedoms, they practice and aspire to substantive freedoms by presenting a radical vision of sexual permissiveness, and thus remedying a stale literary scene through experimentation with content and style, which equally affords their readers a certain degree of substantive freedom. In their practices and aspiration exists the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between the two kinds of freedom.

Keywords:

• erotic
• pornographic
• substantive and instrumental freedom
• Africa
• resistance

A state of sexual happiness can hardly be achieved in a culture in which child rape, extreme forms of gender-based violence and homophobia constantly threaten to transform the body into a site of damage, violation and human bondage… Sex after liberation cannot simply be about the violence of genitality … In times of sexually induced mass death, we have to invent new forms of eroticism.

Achille Mbembe, “Sex after Liberation,” (my emphasis)

For the majority of black women, the connection between power and pleasure is not often recognized, and remains a largely unembraced and undefended heritage. Yet an understanding of this connection is one of the most precious legacies passed on to us by our foremothers. In often obscure or hidden ways, it lies at the heart of female freedom and power; and when it is harnessed and “deployed,” it has the capacity to infuse every woman’s personal experience of living and being with a liberating political force.

Patricia McFadden, “Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice,” (my emphasis)

As a branch of literature, for instance, pornography generally aims at disorientation and dislocation, and it is certainly no coincidence that the production of pornography reached an apogee in France, and in Europe, during the period of the French Revolution.

Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (6)

In 2014, in the editorial note to Sext Me Poems and Stories, Richard Oduor explained, “The idea of the project when we began talking about it was to be anything, but not moderate or be constrained by the social silence around sex… For some (stories) its sex served as adventure, for some its sex served with love, for some, extremes of sex are presented in an open beguiling way” (my emphasis). In this statement emerge two dialectical ideas about sex and literature: freedom of expression and constraints. Oduor, a founding member of Jalada, the collective that published Sext Me, renders the duality with terms such as “anything,” “love,” “adventure,” “extremes,” and “open beguiling way” on the one hand and “moderate,” “constrained,” and “social silence” on the other. In addition to the opposition between freedom of expression, although he does not use the term, and lack thereof, two tacit postulations lurk behind the editor’s view: some forces, unnamed because they are thought to be transparent to all, prevent or curtail the possibility of free, open, adventurous, and limitless sexual stories in the public domain. These hypotheses also fail to consider two sets of limits: access to instrumental freedoms and the complex nature of erotic and pleasurable matters about externality and internality. Concerning access, the question of to whom this freedom is available is a salutary reminder that structures such as class enable or hinder access. Despite the democratizing impulse of the Internet, not all have unfettered access to the digital sphere. Oduor also assumes an indisputable antagonism between external interdictions and the substantive and instrumental freedoms to which the editors, writers, and readers alike aspire and practice. Internal restrictions—lack of awareness and causal control, among other things—even in the absence of interference, demonstrate the co-constitutive nature of agency and structure. Without realizing it, Oduor renders that interrelatedness through the oxymoronic “open beguiling way” because beguilement is framed as devoid of free will, and openness indexes command over one’s life. Equally, the dizzying individual and cultural variability of the experience of what can be named erotic pleasure defies any pure account of the putative divide between absolute mastery and coercive presence.

Through the will of the communal “we” as instrumental freedom, Oduor and his peers exercise the capacity to experiment with content and style in a substantive way to limit the encroachment of prescriptive norms in both the publishing world and their society. Jalada published twenty-two erotic and/or pornographic stories (I discuss the pornography genre later) by enjoying a set of enabling circumstances: the Internet with its twin promises of instrumental freedom and equality of access, the medium of fiction, and the inclusive format of the anthology. The narratives unabashedly offer overt descriptions of sexual intercourse in multiple forms, queer sex, heteronormative sex acts, and even objectofiliac and bestial sex. From the dissemination of the free and subsidized freely available online material, Oduor and his comrades claimed victory over the normative regulations about sexual matters in literature. Yet, that celebratory and mostly liberal tone of instrumental freedom needs to be thought of in tandem with structural constraints that determine the condition of im/possibility.

The sentiments of frustration at social prescriptions and investment in staking a claim for visibility that animated the editors of Jalada, the Nairobi-based pan-African Writers’ Collective and publisher, are echoed and amplified by more and more anthologies and magazines, both digital and in print. These are primarily electronic materials and in English, although some are bilingual in French and English, and others are multilingual in African languages. The exceptions to the trend are the two anthologies edited by the Franco-Cameroonian novelist, Léonora Miano: Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. They are in French, in print and electronic format, but not freely available. Among the six electronic volumes, in reverse chronological order, are Anathi Jongilanga, Moso Sematlane, and Brittle Paper’s Something in the Water: New Fiction from Africa (2022); Bel South and HOLAAfrica!’s Dark Juices and Aphrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries 1 (2019), Sibbyl Whyte and Brittle Paper’s Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology (2018); Q-zine and HOLAAfrica!’s Emergence (2016); Abuja-based romance publisher Ankara Press’s Valentine’s Day Anthology (2015); and Saraba magazine’s The Sex Issue (2012).¹ This remarkable archive of more than one hundred and fifty stories stages blatantly sexual acts in all of their guises: consensual/nonconsensual, within romantic relationships or between random partners, involving age-disparate or age-appropriate partners. They also represent adults and grade-school children; their encounters are normative, non-normative, incestuous, orgiastic, and a slew of other practices too long to list here.

The torrential output of (electronic) anthologies begs questions about the erotic and/or pornographic genre and temporal contingencies that have to do with access and dreams of free will. What is the lexical field do the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom? Are there discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? What kind of freedom is possible in writing and publishing erotic and/or pornographic texts in a digital space? How useful are instrumental freedoms (publishing queer erotica online) to expanding the substantive freedoms (personal liberty to choose one’s sexual partner) of readers and writers of erotica today? These questions reflect how the multiplication of anthologies yields a beguiling number of queries that get to the heart of types and degrees of freedom, coercion, and technological advancements and how national, transnational, and international structures are shaping, with incalculable effects, a global discourse on sexual pleasure. Despite the availability of this treasure trove, no substantive studies of these anthologies in the keys of genre, sexuality, and freedom exist.

Thus this essay takes on that task because the perennial notion of freedom takes on an even more compelling implication in the domain of sexuality, especially in that of non-normative practices. As such, most known societies implement some forms of norms regarding what ought to be done with genitals, when it ought to be done, how it ought to be done, and why it ought to be done. Under the modern regime of governmentality, these prescriptions get codified in legal and sometimes merely conventional restrictions. Stella Nyanzi captures some of these proscriptions in a cogent fashion: “Who can have sex? And who can’t? Who should have sex? And who shouldn’t? Who must have sex? And who must not?” (478). Once implemented, these specifications lead to the differentiation between normal/natural/accepted and abnormal/unnatural sex. Heterosexuality, sex within marriage, monogamous sex, procreative sex, and more fall within the accepted category. Most of the practices and identities that the concerned anthologies and magazine issues stage and promote, however, fall in the transgressive camp—public sex, pornography, sex toys, prostitution, cross-generational sex, S/M, homosexuality, non-procreative sex, promiscuity, bestiality, object sexuality, group sex, self-pleasure, and sadistic violence. This group, in the outer circle à la Gayle Rubin, ought to be banished into the realm of deviance, heavily repressed, and their practitioners denied the prerogatives of bodily fulfillment and even of sexual citizenship.

As will become clear below, editors and writers often marshal the rhetorical language of resistance, visibility, breaking silence, and freedom to practice and aspire to an individualistic and collective, and non-interfering, sense of freedom in the digital sphere and by extension in their own lives. However, in light of Phyllis Taoua’s work on freedom in the African context, another conceptual mapping of freedom (instrumental, substantive, existential, and meaningful) in these texts and contexts becomes not only possible but also productive.² Drawing on the collections’ editorial notes, secondary materials on the founders of the collectives and hubs, Taoua’s reflections, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story “The Oink in Doinker,” I argue that access to the online platforms and constitution of like-minded individuals into groups can be understood as instrumental freedoms because they are tools for these intentional agents to advance sexual liberation and meaningful freedom, although these instruments are not available to all as I mentioned earlier. Also at play is a deeper level of freedom that pertains to self-definition and choice, substantive freedom. Their practices and initiatives such as erotic writing and public self-fashioning involve notions of personal liberty, anti-conformism, and non-normative behavior which are the hallmark of their activism. Specifically, I show how to remedy an outdated and stale literary scene and resist sexual moralists; the editors and writers carve out a space through the Internet to experiment with content and style and to present a radical vision of sexual permissiveness, which equally affords their readers a certain degree of substantive freedom. In their practices and aspiration exist the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between instrumental and substantive freedoms.

I. Breaking silence: Editorial notes

The release of these anthologies is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the publication of the first one a decade ago, the Nigeria-based Saraba magazine’s The Sex Issue, and their titles are unabashedly direct. A certain daringness to be visible, to be free from interdictions of multiple forms, undergirds the titling of these collections. However, the correlation between visibility and freedom is an unsubstantiated one as Michel Foucault demonstrated with the notion of the incitement to discourse. With nineteen short stories and poems, The Sex Issue, as a title, could not be more unswerving. Just as blatant is Sext Me Poems and Stories. This commanding title also implicates the reader, inviting them on a journey in the pleasurable land where the first person receives the largesse, “sext me”—a nexus of technology and sexuality, messaging sexual images and texts. Other titles suggest a stronger desire to provide details despite their directness: Première nuit: une anthologie du désir, Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir, Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, and Dark Juices and Aphrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries—désir, plaisir, erotic, aphrodisiacs, sex, erotic diaries, and more—conjure up ideas of erotic pleasure.

The two titles that depart from the established pattern are those of the latest anthologies, Something in the Water: New Fiction from Africa and the English and French Emergence. Despite the unassuming and neutral title of the collection, the editors of Something in the Water do not shy away from the erotic and sexual nature of their endeavors, as stated in their editorial note. Their organizing concepts, “something” and “water,” indeterminacy or the unknown, and fluidity, evoke questions of queerness and tolerance. The co-editor Moso Sematlane surmises, “perhaps to talk about water is to also talk about freedom. Expansion. Refusing to fit into any specific shape or mold. To us as the editors, this seems to be synonymous with a queer existence. It doesn’t escape our notice that, even today, a queer existence is a policed existence. A criminalised existence” (iv, my emphasis). “Policing,” “criminalization,” “mold,” and “shape” are contrasted with “freedom,” “expansion,” “water,” and “refusing to fit.” The medium of that substantive freedom dream, that undisputable longing to be, exist, and thrive, is that of art, in this case literature, which they argue is boundless like water and queerness. The idea of queerness as limitless, as resisting the symbolic order à la Lacan, and as exceeding all boundaries enjoys a long tradition in queer scholarship. In 1999, Nikki Sullivan reformulated queerness, which she likened to pleasure, as a “pre-discursive, pre-subjective event, an exposure, a becoming-open that is unnamable” (254). The openness, the resistance to being pinned down that is queerness, finds its full expression in literature.

Notions of resistance to enclosure and strivings toward meaningful freedom cum visibility connect all these editorial statements. Tiffany Mugo and Siphumeze Khundayi, curators of HOLAAfrica!, the pan-Africanist digital platform that focuses on sex(uality), justify the title Emergence thus: “We named it Emergence because this is our way of facilitating queer African women and gender non-conforming people coming onto the world stage and saying ‘we are here and we are whole’” (5) [“Nous l’avons appelé Emergence parce que ceci est notre manière à nous de faciliter l’entrée des femmes africaines queer sur la scene mondiale et faire entendre leur témoignage: ‘nous sommes présentes et nous sommes entières’” (6)]. Their being-hereness, their unapologetically defiant presence, is expressed flagrantly as Mugo and Khundayi lay out the range of queer women and non-gender conforming people’s ways of living: “We are loving, making love, working, crying, succeeding, failing, sometimes doing nothing but generally existing” (5) [“Nous aimons, nous faisons l’amour, nous travaillons, nous pleurons, nous réussissons, nous échouons, et parfois, nous ne faisons pas grand-chose, mais dans l’ensemble, nous existons” (6)]. This refusal of moderation and this non-interfering lifestyle as substantive freedoms become more meaningful due to the agents’ gendered position and sexual orientations, because often queer African women are framed, uncritically, as the most oppressed of most sexual categories.

Continuing with prefatory remarks, Emmanuel Iduma and Damilola Ajayi, the editors of Saraba’s The Sex Issue, title their publishing note “Collage of Sexuality,” foregrounding notions of protest, resistance, and refusal of invisibility. They start most directly: “Sometimes sex is a word, sometimes it’s not. Often it’s a question, an exchange, a protest, a dialogue. Often it’s a state of complexness” (70). Although sex encompasses a wide range of questions, the editors’ investment lies with the idea of protest because “our reading of sexuality must necessarily transcend boundaries, whether visible or imagined”(70). The notion of boundaries inevitably evokes walls, borders, frontiers, constraints, control, coercion, curtailment, denial, demarcations, restriction, restraints, limits, limitations, interdiction, im(mobility), and often silence. The silence that undergirds the social-cultural context of Saraba functions through “anonymity,” “name-swap,” and “pursed lips” (Iduma and Ajayi 70). The campaign against those limits leads Iduma and Ajayi to ask themselves and their readers, “How can we begin to talk about sex in defiant terms? How can choice in sexuality be read?” (70). Although the term “freedom” is not used, its synonym “choice” and a related concept “defiance” are used because the editors hope readers will find useful their collection of “pious,” “introspective,” “vulgar,” and “blasphemous” sex-themed writings (Iduma and Ajayi 70). The association of terms including choice, defiance, and freedom is useful in expanding our rhetorical repertoire. Yet each of these words deserves careful deliberation because one person’s choice is another person’s repression. Whereas the dominant structures enjoy the prerogative of determining what counts as proper sex, non-binary individuals experience the dominant’s privileges as unfreedom. Thus, there is danger in evoking freedom and choice as if they were safe and agreed-upon notions. Keguro Macharia, drawing on Audre Lorde, invites his readers to think of difference as subtending and sustaining freedom dreams and practices. Put otherwise, respect for difference, rather than an often oppressive demand for unity, is a practice of freedom.

Fiction is mobilized to wage war against silence around sexuality. Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte echoes that sentiment in her introduction to Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, protesting, “SEX IS EVERYWHERE, and, being energy, it inhabits many forms… Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v). To assume that literature functions as an unquestionable medium for instrumental freedom is to underplay authorial preclusion and the contriving of the publishing industry, which often serves as a repressive relay to larger normalizing arrangements—from the heteronormative culture to the confinement of editors and distributors of mainstream literature to the press. Whyte reminds the reader of those undermining aspects: “Traditionally, in much of what constitutes our African literature, there is a marked absence of sexual intercourse in stories filled with adult characters who, without authorial preclusion, would be getting naked and into each other’s bodies… The 23 works here are proof that sex is not such a taboo subject and can be dwelt upon in writing by Africans” (vii). Whyte’s diagnosis is explainable by the practices of old generations of African writers, whom Mehul Gohil of Jalada, in an interview with Magunga Williams, qualifies as colonized in their minds and unable to rethink literature (qtd in Williams). Gohil considers the new generation as decolonized politically and geographically and eager to adopt “genres and literary landscapes that can accommodate their decolonised minds” (qtd. in Williams).

Contrary to other editors who suggest but do not name factors that participate in silencing sex in the public sphere and literature, Léonora Miano identifies the muzzling effects of racialization. She defines racialization as the process through which the individual loses her status as a subject to become a racial(ized) object, an entity that is primarily a body whose brutalization made possible the destruction of black subjectivity. Miano explains, “C’est en dénigrant ces corps, en les brutalisant, en les réifiant, qu’il fut possible de porter atteinte à la conscience de soi” (Première nuit 7) [It is by denigrating these bodies, by brutalizing them, by reifying them, that it was possible to undermine self-consciousness (my translation)]. The repressive effects of a history of Western racialization of black bodies have contributed to black writers not owning and expressing their sexuality freely. According to Miano, they did so by “une stratégie de contournement du problème, soit en le persécutant eux-mêmes, soit en ne le traitant tout simplement pas” (Première nuit 7) [circumventing the problem through self-persecution or through avoidance (my translation)]. The editor indicts the racialization that estranged blackness from itself and clarifies that its survival necessitated alienation from corporeality qua eroticism. Thus, reimagining pleasurable sexuality in the two anthologies that she edited (Désir and Plaisir) amounted to correcting, for Miano, that brutal and limiting legacy.

Like Miano, who offers the two collections as not only a counternarrative to the violence done to the continent and its peoples, but also invites, encourages, and stages pleasurable experiences, so do Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah and Malaka Grant, who in 2009 founded the popular digital hub Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women to share experiences of sex. In a June 2019 interview with Eliza Anyangwe for CNN, Sekyiamah complained about the one-dimensional account of African sexuality in the international development discourse: “This discourse leaves out so much, specifically, the importance of African women controlling their own bodies. Pleasure is connected to well-being and so comprehensive sex education is essential to a woman’s full development. If you don’t have control over your body, what can you really have control over?” Substantive freedom in the form of digitally telling sex stories to correct erroneous views of black sexuality was the impetus behind the blog that focuses on African women and sex(ualities).³

In the foreword to the collection Dark Juices, Bel South follows the same logic as she is markedly explicit in her goal, elucidating, “Queer African erotica was clearly a gap that was in desperate need of filling. We realised that we don’t often take time for pleasure, for breathing, for touching, for feeling (ourselves or one another), to understand what incites lust and longing. So we invited women to write about their pleasure, what turns them on, what brings them orgasmic joy” (2). Upon managing to collect twenty sexually stimulating stories, South offers them to the reader: “This is a gift: A gift of orgasms. A gift of pleasure. A gift of love. My advice: read it out loud…” (2). With the hallmarks of pornographic fiction or erotica, the stories fulfill their tasks, giving traction to South’s advice to read them out loud. What the ellipsis suggests could be what Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes as books that can only be read “que d’une main” [with only one hand] (1:76, my translation), referring to the self-pleasuring effects of such writings.

In sum, these editors and curators frame their collections in terms of shattering established norms, from the international development discourse on female sexuality to editorial decisions about literary content in print and online, regarding sexuality and gender in the public domain. They are invested in achieving visibility—a rather naïve understanding of visibility as equal to freedom—freedom of expression (instrumental freedom), and freedom to live out non-normative identities and lifestyles beyond the repressive yoke of silence (substantive freedoms).

II. Freeing sexuality

Thus in search of bodily fulfillment and meaningful freedom, the seamless concert of instrumental, substantive, existential freedoms, work the editors, curators, and writers. Such is what Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah highlights in the “Freedom” section of The Sex Lives of African Women, writing,

The women featured in this section show that there are many ways to be free in sexual relationships. It’s no accident that the vast majority of women featured are from the lesbian, bisexual and trans community, and/or practice polyamory. These are women who have resisted societal norms of compulsory heterosexuality and monogamy, and have searched both within and without for other ways of practising love. (115, my emphasis)

“[M]any ways to be free” strengthens my earlier point about the danger of a universally assumed notion of freedom. There are degrees and kinds of freedom, as Taoua suggests. What one person considers to be instrumental freedom may be another’s substantive or meaningful freedom. Prevailing kinds of constraints determine the types and degrees of freedom dreams. For Sekyiamah also, sex and power, sex and freedom, are entangled through and through.

The demand for a relative degree of causal and/or consequential control over one’s sexual and gendered life reflects the fact that repression in sexual matters often causes repressive ripple effects in other domains. Freedom in the realm of sexuality, that most disciplined domain, impacts self-determination elsewhere. This led the World League for Sexual Reform (1921-1932) to become the first international organization to link sexual liberation with social emancipation (Giami).

The extant literature on the reasons certain sexual practices require that much policing need not be rehashed here except to point to two aspects, the fundamental and potentially destabilizing aspect of erotic pleasure and the disruptive nature of non-conventional sexualities. Neurobiologists define pleasure as whatever tickles our limbic system or sets our dopamine surging. Dopamine, the pleasure chemical, is one of the key motivational components of reward-motivated behavior (Berridge and Kringelbach 18). Back in 1922, Sigmund Freud theorized this complex (conscious or unconscious) nature of pleasure (31). The Darwinian schema posits food and sexual pleasure as imperative to survival and procreation (Berridge and Kringelbach 4). Relatedly, pleasure works by serving as relief from distress, satisfaction of desire, and restoring a state of equilibrium (Plato Philebus 35a, Freud). Thus it is often considered a vital force (Nzwegu). Put differently, most forms of life would not be possible without the experience of sensory pleasure. Given the crucial nature of pleasure in the (in)voluntary pursuit of rewards, pleasure is brazenly self-centered and can easily become disruptive, antisocial, or excessive, because it requires perpetual renewal and repetition. Through acknowledging pleasure’s unboundedness, neurobiologists have come to consider addiction as a form of that disruptive nature of pleasure-seeking.

Considering that sex is the most potent site and source of pleasure (Abramson and Pinkerton), it is a perennial target of the hermeneutics of suspicion by moralists, those upholding social norms, and those invested in population management. Often to produce a disciplined populace, modern states, conditioned by often misinterpreted Christian precepts, ferret out sexual and social deviance. Often, repressive practices lead to absences, silences, and closures in certain domains, which the texts under consideration hope to transgress. Back in 1996, Amina Mama identified repressive and homophobic tendencies in contemporary Africa as fueling a new form of silence. In 2003, this relative silence, which feminist sociologist Patricia McFadden referred to as “socio-sexual anxiety,” stemmed from the aftereffects of the three historical (self-injuries) of the trans-Saharan slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonization.⁴

If not silence or silencing, imagined or real, then it is the so-called insignificance of sexuality in African women’s emancipatory ventures, which was articulated during the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. But as early as 1988, Buchi Emecheta declared in “Feminism with the Small f,”

Sex is part of life. It is not THE life. Listen to the Western feminists’ claim about enjoying sex. They make me laugh. African feminism is free of the shackles of Western romantic illusions and tends to be much more pragmatic. We believe we are here for many, many things, not just to cultivate ourselves, to make ourselves pretty for men. (177)

Although more can be said about Emecheta’s point, in the interest of space, I will argue that her downplaying of sex in analyzing women’s beliefs, goals, and purposes became a questionable strategy for celebrating their hypothetical authenticity against Euro-American feminism’s perceived sexualism, the supposed focus on sex for liberatory purposes. Emecheta’s and similar responses, which posit sexualism as a mark of privilege, are more reactionary than proactive. Certainly, these reactions do not reflect practices in local languages and new discourses that meaningfully engage the contextual realities of Africa. The 2000s witnessed a development in the struggle for what can be mildly called sexual liberation through the publication of magazines and anthologies, the implementation of other initiatives, and the push toward writing about sexual pleasure.

III. Calling for sexual pleasure

Until the early years of the new millennium, questions of positive sexuality in internationally circulating fiction were characterized by absences, silences, and closures. Among voices that called for sustained attention to positive sexual practices is Achille Mbembe, who in the closing keynote of the 2003 “Sex and Secrecy” conference in South Africa, highlighted the violent, ugly, and destructive nature of sex in Africa, arguing that “a state of sexual happiness can hardly be achieved in a culture in which child rape, extreme forms of gender-based violence and homophobia constantly threaten to transform the body into a site of damage, violation and bondage” (my emphasis).⁵ Reminding his audience that “Sex after liberation cannot simply be about the violence of genitality,” Mbembe prescribed, “In times of sexually induced mass death, we have to invent new forms of eroticism” (my emphasis). Against the dark conceptual repertoire of “bondage,” “violence,” “violation,” “mass death,” “homophobia,” “damage,” “rape,” and “threat,” Mbembe presents newness as the key to eroticism. Often, invention and newness come with the potentiality of freedom and some form of self-determination.

While Mbembe and others made the call for new modes of eroticism, scholars in several fields and disciplines were already exploring pleasurable sex through institutions, techniques and practices, and philosophies that emphasize the importance of sexual enjoyment. Institutions such as nuptial advisers and women’s rites of passage and techniques, including labia elongation and kunyaza, were already discussed.⁶

In women’s and gender studies circles, the quantitative research methods and epidemiological models in the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS had already taken a toll on notions of positive sexuality. In reaction to the debilitating discourse and the devastating impact of the disease, and reprising Audre Lorde’s 1978 seminal notion of the erotic as power, in 2003 Patricia McFadden made the influential proposition of “Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice,” explaining,

For the majority of black women, the connection between power and pleasure is not often recognised, and remains a largely unembraced and undefended heritage. Yet an understanding of this connection is one of the most precious legacies passed on to us by our foremothers. In often obscure or hidden ways, it lies at the heart of female freedom and power; and when it is harnessed and “deployed,” it has the capacity to infuse every woman’s personal experience of living and being with a liberating political force. (my emphasis)

Similar to Mbembe, McFadden deploys the disabling lexical field of “not recognized,” “unembraced,” “undefended,” “obscure,” and “hidden,” which she counters with that of “freedom,” “power,” “pleasure,” and “liberating political force.” This unqualified notion of freedom makes its practice and enjoyment a daunting task. By delineating the notion of freedom and breaking it into types, individuals are readily equipped with the consciousness and knowledge of measurable outcomes/deliverables and strategies to achieve the kind and degree of freedom they dream of. Two years later, in 2005, Sylvia Tamale advocated moving beyond problematic aspects of sex and instead examining the productive and pleasurable aspects of sexuality in the social and cultural domain. Specifically, she links erotic pleasure to political struggles. The editors and curators discussed above demonstrate with their rhetorical presentation, discursive positions, and editorial statements an affinity with these calls as they oppose silence and silencing to non-interfering erotic practices and lifestyles.

As the decades of the new millennium marched on, other developments such as the explosion of new technologies of communication and information with easy access to the Internet, the international rise in LGBTQ activism, and the proliferation of academic discourse and cultural production on pleasure all combined to pave the way for the anthologies and magazines under study.⁷

IV. (Digitally) anthologizing poetic and sexual freedom

The fact that these anthologies and magazines are electronic and that Miano’s two edited collections are also in print and electronic (but for pay) reflects the enabling effects of media democratization and penetration. The 1990s advent of web2.0—websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, and participatory culture—in the forms of blogs, wikis, and social media, has facilitated in the queer and sex-positive African context the constitution of publishing houses such as Ankara Press, a romance imprint in Nigeria that was launched in 2014; artists collectives like Jalada, based in Nairobi and founded in 2013; sex-positive and queer content hubs and magazines such as Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, HOLAAfrica!, and Q-zine, created in 2009, 2012, and 2011 and based in Ghana, South Africa, and Burkina Faso, respectively; and literary hubs and literary magazines such as Saraba magazine, based in Nigeria and created in 2009, and Brittle Paper, based in the United States and launched in 2010.

Although the enthusiastic celebration of the liberatory promise of the Internet was short-lived, cyberspace has facilitated interaction, communication, collaboration, community building, archiving, and knowledge-sharing. To work toward their aspiration for visibility qua freedom, these writers and curators mined several advantageous aspects of digital publishing: low production cost, quick turnaround in editing and revising, low-cost marketing, streamlined distribution, release of nonphysical products to customers using internet-connected and hand-held devices, speed to market, and editorial autonomy. The Valentine’s Day Anthology took two months from conception to publication (Shercliff). The combination of the low cost and the potentially massive market of digital publishing incentivized many actors (Adenekan, Nesbitt-Ahmed). Finally, we have ease in sidestepping the constraints of the conventional publishing industry, given that the anthologies and magazines are either self-published or published by like-minded entities (Adenekan, Bady). Thus, the editors benefit from a certain kind of autonomy in editorial, production, and marketing decision-making.

In terms of creativity, the Internet and social media sites facilitated easy and fast access to writers and other creative minds. Most collections solicited contributions through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, websites, and magazines. After social media circulated news of the publication of Jalada’s first anthology, Sketch of a Bald Woman in the Semi-Nude and Other Stories, in 2014, the editors were contacted by writers across the continent offering to contribute to the next anthology (Bady). That next anthology would be Sext Me, which was double the size of the inaugural one and had the truly trans-African composition that social media enabled. Moreover, contributors to Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, Ankara Press, Q-zine, and HOLAAfrica! hail from multiple countries, a number too high to list here. Additionally, the facilitating nature of cyberspace concerning meetings, exchange of ideas and plans, and initiation and execution of collaborative projects cannot be underestimated. As regards Jalada, Aaron Bady explains how what started with a roomful of young Nairobians expanded to members from a half-dozen African countries, from Namibia and Nigeria to Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire and from South Africa to Somalia. The editorial team for Q-zine’s tenth issue in January 2015 was made up of members from eleven countries, including Burkina Faso, Senegal, China, France, Botswana, Morocco, and more. Such a diasporic confluence of talents, resources, commitment, and expertise (whether editorial, managerial, or organizational) might otherwise have withered in the face of the challenges of communication, distance, and fundraising efforts. The simplified processes also facilitated collaborative projects and success like the one between HOLAAfrica! and Q-zine that resulted in the 2016 publication of Emergence. For Valentine’s Day Anthology, the editors benefited from the support of publishers from several countries, including, Farafina (Nigeria), Kwani? (Kenya), and E&D Vision Publishing (Tanzania) as readers and translators (Shercliff).

The impetus behind these platforms came from conversations during quotidian activities. Most of them started as blogs by friends who just got the idea of digital storytelling on the beach or over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine; HOLAAfrica!, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, and Q-zine exemplify that process (Sekyiamiah, Interview, Mugo and Antonites). Jalada’s origin story is more structured. It followed the 2013 workshop when Okwiri Oduor set up a Google group named Jalada, which enabled the exchange of writings and feedback, leading to the creation of a “bare-bones website (jalada.org)” (Bady). Similar to other editorial boards and founding members, Jalada’s original team thought through the etiolated and dated nature of African literary productions. Back in 2015, Mehul Gohil, a Jalada core member, was determined in his vision: “We need to move African fiction into areas where there is more freedom of imagination” (qtd. in Williams). The subject matters and genre fiction under consideration are a productive reaction to that supposed infirmity.

The deployment of a compelling social media campaign for greater reach has occasioned the formation of vibrant reading publics, a kind of networked intimacy, toward shared purposes. These collections boast a dizzying transnational dimension. The flexibility of digital publication provided the curators and editors the latitude and instrumental freedom to pursue their dreams even against all odds. For instance, Tiffany Mugo and Siphumeze Khundayi, the curators of HOLAAfrica!, remembered in 2016 when they would beg for contributions and get only one “pity poem” and times when they would be lucky and publish once a week (5).

Certainly, the appeal of the Internet cannot be underestimated. However, another impetus, more determining, drove these adepts of non-normalized sexual practices and identities to turn to social networks. Against dominant homophobic and sexual moralizing sentiments in their lives, perceived or real, young men, women, and non-binary people turn to social networking tools as outlets to process existential threats, manage relationships and friendships, inspire others, build allyship, share stories, celebrate chosen identities, debate social and political issues, and test creativity in photography or storytelling. Those taking to the Internet are necessarily transgressing or resisting repressive norms. In their 2014 analysis of the use of social networking tools, Kagure Mugo and Christel Antonites argued that sex-positive and queer sites and initiatives significantly challenged myths and negative perceptions about the lives of sexual minorities: “We found that online spaces indeed increasingly constitute pockets of resistance” (30). Q-zine constitutes one of those spaces; its founder Mariam Armisen identifies their ambition as contributing to “LGBTI and queer African and allies’ social and political awakening by taking ownership of our own stories and story-telling” (4).

Right after its publication, several reviewers celebrated Sext Me’s defiance of moral boundaries (Awuor, Brittle Paper, Murua). Certainly, the platforms are celebrated for the possibility they have offered as instrumental freedoms. However, the celebratory and mostly liberal tone needs complication for two reasons: state surveillance and ex/inclusivity. The uncritical celebration focuses on the agentive role of individuals to the neglect of structural constraints that determine the condition of im/possibility. In many countries, the state carefully surveils the digital space with impunity (Harrisberg, Manga, Roberts et al.). Additionally, the notion of access should also address who is excluded and how absolute is inclusivity.

In creating these new spaces of advocacy and representation, the collections here have produced a vibrant mix of poetry, prose, and short stories, featuring more than one hundred and fifty writers from more than twenty-five countries.⁸ I call the publication of these texts space-clearing initiatives, a play on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 1991 essay in which he formulated the “post” in postcolonial and postmodern as a space-clearing gesture. The collections cleared the space for an enhanced sense of freedom of expression, with well-known alongside emerging literary voices. Additionally, this remarkable archive of queer literary culture also displaces the myth that sees sexual identity and practices as fixed, natural, exclusively heterosexual, and not to be disturbed.

The flexibility and format of electronic publishing fulfill the publishers’ democratizing impulse (Adenekan). Not only are most of the texts freely available, but they are also comparatively inclusive in their trans-linguality and trans-mediality. Unlike most conventional print anthologies, the digital ones attempt to reach non-English and non-French readers with translations of stories and poems in Yoruba, Hausa, Kiswahili, Kpelle, Igbo, Pidgin, and French. Some collections go so far as to include audio versions of (translated) texts or video versions of English texts. Ankara Press’s Valentine’s Day Anthology, Jalada’s Sext Me, and HOLAAfrica! and Q-zine’s Emergence provide those stellar features. These sonic, written, and translated texts illustrate, contextualize, complement, explicate, and strengthen the message of the original texts. Valentine’s Day Anthology features fourteen voice recordings of their seven stories. For instance, “Candy Girl” is told both in English and Kpelle; “The Idea Is to Be Sealed In” is rendered in Kiswahili and English; “Painted Love” is told in Hausa and English; and “Solitaire” is told in French and English. Emma Shercliff and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf explain their goals thus: “romance in Africa takes place in multiple languages and we wanted to reflect that in this collection … This anthology, therefore, becomes a much truer representation of romance in Africa as we can hear and see what romancing in different languages might sound like and mean” (v). Similarly, the editors of the bilingual (French and English) Q-zine strive for that same sense of diversity. With those features and an eye toward a diverse and not necessarily formally educated readership, the editors and curators truly speak the language of freedom as an unbounded space for a relative diversity of uncensored voices and inclusivity without using the terms.

V. Naming genre: Erotic and pornographic?

These collections’ explicit descriptions of sex acts necessitate an examination of questions of genre and label. Their representations can be found to be liberating, repulsive, entertaining, unsettling, and a combination of all those feelings. Conventionally, these unabashed portrayals would fall into ready-made genres, including erotica/erotic fiction or pornography/pornographic fiction. But the editors and curators shied away from categorizing their productions as pornographic for reasons I will speculate on shortly. Some adopted one term of the supposed dialectic, erotica: Sibbyl Whyte refers to their collection as erotic Africa; Bel South uses the notion of erotic diaries; Efemia Chela subtitles her collection erotic fiction, and Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah names a section of Adventures erotica. Ankara Press inscribes its anthology within the romance genre. Although this essay does not draw hard lines between pornography and erotica, as it will become clear below, it respects the editors’ and curators’ labels.

How does one explain the reluctance, timidity, and/or resistance regarding the pornography category? Why is erotic fiction more appealing than pornography, although the difference between them is markedly unstable and tenuous? Debates around what counts as pornographic and erotic literature continue to animate readers, writers, scholars, concerned citizens, religious leaders, and lawmakers. These definitions also depend on different standpoints: feminist (gender of the author and characters), psychological (reader response—erotica arouses, pornography does not), legal (depends on formal and aesthetic choices), Marxist (commodification of culture), postmodern (identity of the human individual and culture), ethical (sexual norms/pornography is associated with perversion), sociological (social class—erotica is aristocracy and elite, pornography is a lower-class activity),⁹ and more.

Etymologically, pornography stems from the Greek roots porne (whore, prostitute, courtesan) and graphos (writing, describing) to mean the biography of a courtesan or whore. In antiquity, pornography, the writing of, on, about, or even for the life and activities of a courtesan, was not associated with shame and did not raise social and political concerns and policing. From the eighteenth century (in England) onward, however, the term pornography began to be valuated negatively, carrying degrading, pejorative, and violent connotations.¹⁰ Erotica comes from the Greek root eros, the name of Eros, the god of intense love desire, and the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love and beauty. Although Eros is an elusive figure, in Plato’s Symposium he is endowed with the power to offer sexual desire or passionate mutual love and was thus implored by soul-bleeding half-men and -women to unite them with their missing halves.

These etymological connections and their undergirding intellectual and social histories led Gloria Steinem to oppose pornography to erotica, whereby the former functions as a technology of violence, degradation, and financial exploitation of women, and the latter encodes notions of love and mutuality: “The first is erotic: a mutually pleasurable, sexual expression between people who have enough power to be there by positive choice. […] The second is pornographic: its message is violence, dominance, and conquest. It is sex being used to reinforce some inequality, or to create one, or to tell us that pain and humiliation” she declared (37). In the same condemnatory, and reprising in debatable ways The Report of The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Helen Longino defines pornography as “the degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of the human female… as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated sexually” (42).¹¹ In the same judgmental tone, pornography is opposed to erotica: pornography is male, obscene, low-class, subversive, violent, painful, and degrading, whereas erotica is female, romantic, uplifting, imaginative, high-class, pleasurable, and mutual.

Beyond these inescapably subjective definitions exist scientific attempts at operationalizing erotica and pornography. Some scholars uphold aspects such as authorial intent, with the assumption that the writer seeks to stimulate arousal (Thompson) or narrative form, such as realistic descriptions.¹² Peter Wagner rejects the thesis of authorial intention by proposing that pornography be understood as “the written or visual presentation in a realistic form of any genital or sexual behaviour with a deliberate violation of existing and widely accepted moral and social taboos” (7). James Steintrager moves beyond both aspects, arguing that intentionality animated eighteenth-century French and English libertine writers, including the Marquis de Sade, which nevertheless did not preclude the writers from staging scenes beyond human imagination. Uncritically considered benign and compliant, erotica has not often preoccupied legislators and scholars as much as pornography.¹³ Gaëtan Brulotte and John Phillips, in an inclusive spirit, refuse to play into the current negative register of pornography and offer instead the vaguest and perhaps the most unhelpful definition: erotic fictions are “works in which sexuality and/or sexual desire has a dominant presence” (x). Certainly, this definition will very much apply to textual pornography.

Literary genres, and all genres for that matter, fulfill certain functions and follow and/or innovate established norms. Explicit and prominent sexual descriptions, pornographic fiction, are the most legally embattled genre (challenged by both lawmakers and moralists) and the least scholarly discussed genres (Brulotte and Phillips). The rise in academia of gender, sexuality, and queer studies and the ensuing activism for the acceptability of not normalized sexual identities and practices, which have also invigorated the publication of the collections, have brought scholarship on pornography and erotica out of obscurity.

Despite the visibility of the genre elsewhere, the published literature on pornography and erotica in Africa seems to be in its infancy. A Google Scholar search yielded social science studies that discuss child pornography, the constitutionality of pornography, porn literacy, porn and sex education, pornography and censorship, revenge porn, the impact of pornography on males’ sexual behavior, and the like. Bernth Lindfors’s short 1973 essay “The Rise of African Pornography” appears as the most relevant study about the genre. Perhaps my search terms failed me—I would be sad to think that the erotic and pornographic descriptions in oral stories have not attracted serious scholarly attention.

In the absence of sustained scholarship on the genre, these erotic and pornographic texts that overtly depart from current normative registers, as I will demonstrate in the last section, are more likely to undermine than reinforce conventional thinking and accepted norms. Thus the texts’ aims cannot be reduced to sexual arousal alone. In fact, for the editors, sexual arousal seems marginal to their overall logic because the texts are inspired by a multiplicity of objectives, social and political. In the introduction to Something in the Water, Darlington Chibueze Anuonye praises their writers whose goal is beyond just the sexual: “By deploying literature as a force to free marginalized voices and as an agency to propel those voices to their farthest reach, they demonstrate the intentionality of the responsible artist in confronting oppression and erasure” (vi). These intentions resonate with findings about the relation between pornographic fiction and politics since the beginning of the genre in sixteenth- to twentieth-century Europe. In Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America, Peter Wagner argues that the genre changed over centuries, assuming multiple functions, as entertainment and didacticism, and becoming “a vehicle of protest against the authority of Church and State, and finally against middle-class morality” (9). Given its disorienting and dislocating nature, Wagner declares that “it is certainly no coincidence that the production of pornography reached an apogee in France, and in Europe, during the period of the French Revolution” (6). The term pornography and its content carry the capacity to stimulate readers’ sexual imagination to a pitch of feverish lust and/or intentionally disrupt widely held ethical and social taboos. Can a serious investigation into the genre of pornography in Africa result in an understanding of its socially and politically unsettling nature?

The editors’ and curators’ reluctance or refusal to adopt the label of pornography and its highly subversive register, which would have been more consonant with their overall aim, responds to multiple factors that are curtailing their ostensible freedom of expression and the substantive freedom to eventually improve the quality of their lives. First, adopting the term pornography would reduce the already marginalized and self-selecting readership. Second, perhaps the curators and writers consider their stories as representing ordinary human experience like any other and therefore do not see the necessity of labeling them pornographic. Third, the timid scholarship on the genre may have an inhibiting effect on claiming it. Fourth, the Internet will perform its gatekeeping functions; search engines will readily associate the collections with visual and performance pornography sites, which may be off-putting for some readers. Different social media platforms will also flag and block perceived immoral content. Lastly, funding institutions and independent donors may be reluctant to endorse such a named enterprise. Although I found no data to attest that these platforms are receiving funds from philanthropic entities, it is reasonable to speculate that some form of financial and/or material support enables them to keep afloat as they pave their way toward financial stability and independence. Jalada was founded following a workshop in Nairobi organized by the Kwani Trust, Granta, and the British Council. Ankara Press is for profit, and Brittle Paper receives commissions for advertising on its site. The partnerships and business considerations matter. In sum, freedom is always contextual and mutable. Perhaps the editors’ intentional agency rests in navigating effectively conventional thinking and social norms, tastes, and thresholds that are themselves in constant flux.

VI. Narrating and styling poetic (sexual) freedom

As they stage sex acts and behaviors to deliberately violate prevailing moral and social codes and/or stimulate someone’s sexual fantasy, these queer texts, these female-focused narratives, and these sex-positive textual descriptions have to free the activity of imagination itself. How do elements of content and style support or undermine the logic of erotic or pornographic stories? To address this question, I closely read one narrative from more than one hundred and fifty texts. The choice was daunting, if not outright impossible, but using the lottery principle, I landed on the South African Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story, “The Oink in Doinker.”

One of Jalada’s Sext Me’s twenty-two stories, “The Oink in Doinker” is a narrative of doomed expectations involving a half-widow, if that were a social category, and a crawling penis that eventually grows up to become a man, gives the protagonist a three-minute orgasm and then disappears. Although sexual desire and satisfaction are at the center of Gabonewe’s story, his text also stages ideas that would preoccupy any other literary genre: the human need for companionship, women as conventional caregivers, husbands abandoning wives, loss of jobs, and neighborhood gossip. In staging forty-two-year-old Haroldette Tawana, the writer’s inspiration embraces themes and forms that are just beyond the realm of realism. In fact, in his utopian vision to bring his protagonist fulfillment, in his investment to go beyond the limitations of the real world, Gabonewe adopts the genre of magical realism with the entrance into Haroldette’s yard through an opening in the mesh fence “a snakelike critter,” an “anguine specimen.”

What the confused narrator calls “the strange phenomenon,” the encounter between Haroldette and the snakelike critter, unfolds over two nights. Little is known about Haroldette’s neighborhood except that it is ripe with gossip and “Shopkeepers. Scum of the earth. Blockheads. Always on the defensive, and for no fucking reason.” Of her social class, the narrator tells us she is a middle-aged half-widow with no “brats”; her husband left her 988 days ago, which would be two years and seven months. Recently laid off, the protagonist is “horny as an Atlas wild ass,” and has for that reason in the past, three years ago to be specific, played “host to useless doinkers.” In light of all her travails, another kind of genre would have centered around the protagonist’s larger family structure, her prospects of finding work, her preoccupation with her husband’s health and safety, and so on. However, the story focuses on her sexual needs as the narrator remembers with laser focus the number of days, 988, since Haroldette last saw her husband’s penis. After her initial encounter with the “dying penis,” her desperation for sexual satisfaction took animal-like forms and felt like ravaging natural elements and forces:

There was a red-hot volcano seething between her legs, and ten different swarms of fire ants crawling all over her body. She wanted dick so bad she would have sang for it. She went to bed earlier that night, with all kinds of fire whirling and twirling within in her … Turpentine trickles running down her thighs, Haroldette fell asleep clutching the foot of her bed.

This protagonist is caught within the clutches of an explosive sexual desire. The hyperbolic language of “a red-hot seething volcano,” “ten different swarms of fire ants,” and “all kinds of fire whirling and twirling within her” speaks to the imprisoning and consuming nature of needs. The haunting is relentless with the use of the progressive form: “seething,” “crawling,” “whirling and twirling,” “running,” and “clutching.” The combination of alliterative sounds “swarms,” “crawling,” “wanted,” “went,” “with,” and “whirling and twirling within,” and “turpentine trickles … thighs,” with rhythmic sentences give the portrayal of her desire a complex soundscape, melodic and mildly discordant, sonic yet fleshy and touchy. This dislocating and stimulating style frustrates yet demands the reader’s most loyal attention. Haroldette’s almost indomitable focus on pleasure and satisfaction outweighs all other considerations and needs. The irruption in her yard that would have led the most conventional woman to flee the scene, blackout, call for help, or freeze in terror, however, invigorates Haroldette to welcome and host tenderly “the wang.” With the reader’s expectations thwarted, the narrative succeeds in raising and keeping the suspense.

The loyal attention that the style summons is sustained through the use of multiple terms to designate the guest, specifically more than forty-two: “a snakelike critter,” “the anguine specimen,” “that thing,” “a phallus,” “the lost love shaft,” “the choad,” “the drop-in,” “the piece of meat,” “poor thing,” “copperhead,” “a dying penis,” “the moribund member,” “the wang,” “Phineas,” “that billy club,” “the guest,” “Phineas McPhallus,” “the one-eyed ogre,” “pecker,” “doinker,” “useless cock,” “that monstrosity,” “half a man,” “the half-creature,” “that half-man,” “under-construction man,” “her foundling,” “her new babe,” “that half-creature,” “headless half-man,” “a dish,” “the man,” “the visitor,” “the matador,” “that sexy spectre,” “the taciturn man,” “The Three-Minute Man,” “Phineas-the-Cock’s handler,” “you-know-who,” “dickhead,” “pig,” “dicklet,” and “fool.”

The choad’s constantly changing names reflect both his shifting appearance and the narrator’s and protagonist’s emotional development throughout the story. From Haroldette’s perspective, the piece of meat first appeared as a snakelike critter, but it turned out to be a phallus, which overnight transformed into a half-man that grows into a man. The pecker embodies all aspects of a man-phallus-animal: from baby to new babe to sexy spectre, from drop-in to guest and visitor, from wang and useless cock to dickhead, choad, and dicklet, from phallus to dying penis and pecker, from Phineas to Phineas McPhallus and Phineas-the-Cock’s handler, from critter and specimen to copperhead, from one-eyed ogre and monstrosity to half-creature, matador, and pig, from half a man and half-man to under-construction man and headless half-man, from man to taciturn man and Three-Minute Man.

Haroldette’s emotional grammar changes from surprise to excitement and comfort, from pleasure to exhaustion and anger, from rage to madness and shame, and from yearning to disappointment and desperation. Those emotions reflect the terms used to designate the visitor. That a short narrative of 2,928 words packs so many emotions indicates the writer’s fruitful imagination, which keeps the narrative entertaining for the reader. This sustained nature led John Phillips to surmise that “textual pornography is the most reader-centered of genres and it is this reader-orientation which makes the genre not only artistically innovative, but also socially subversive” (2). Certainly, this dizzying multiplicity of terms also provides the reader with a rich vocabulary, from the most informal register (wang, dick, pecker) to the most formal (penis and phallus).

In relation to the genre of “The Oink in Doinker,” the question remains whether that sexual intercourse with a stranger, vividly portrayed and evoking the physical experience of assault, occupation, and orgasm, qualifies as heterosexual, bestial, and/or objectophiliac. The narrator’s description of the man’s facial features and physical appearance remains vague,

Phineas was growing. That’s not to say that the phallus was getting longer, or thicker, because it wasn’t. There was a body growing around it … The penis had become half a man overnight. Two hirsute stumps, a waist bone, a pubic area, a bit of a waist with two clearly visible Dimples of Venus, and the most beautiful derriere she had ever seen.

The penis is black; it transformed into a thirty-ish man who didn’t have “the prettiest face,” and it was “whole as a banana” and was “a dish.” This elusiveness leaves the reader in a state of undecidability and hence freedom. Her substantive freedom to imagine whether that orgasm-inducing intercourse was with a banana—often a symbol of a penis—an animal, a man, or a man-animal-thing also gives the writer the technology to free the activity of his own ingenuity.

The substantive freedom to stage what borders on a heterosexual-bestial-objectofiliac encounter with a stranger certainly violates a social-sexual status quo that is founded on a conservative moral consensus. The threshold that Gabonewe attempts to cross with that hint of bestiality and object sexuality is brittle, as Haroldette makes love to something resembling a man whose origin and point of departure remain unknown and whose destination is obscure to the narrator, the protagonist, and the reader.

In fact, in its elusiveness, the short story affords readers some space of substantive freedom, that is the power to choose as to whether to label the encounter heterosexual, bestial, and objectofiliac. In allowing the reader to make their own decision, “The Oink in Doinker” also thwarts the human urge to label, classify, know, and perhaps dominate. This intricate dynamic opens up the possibility to think through (un)freedom. So, it is not just “their” freedom of expression, but also “our” freedom of playing with multiple readings and speculations that is granted. Deploying a bombastic style, the anthologies are creating for readers the space to indulge as well as to wonder within and outside of what rebellious possibilities are made available both online and on the ground.

Conclusion

Wandering penises and half-widows who welcome them in, bathe them, feed them, house them, offer them presents, and make love to them are not the most conventional sexual activities and acts that would garner consensus. In this pornographic text, in generic terms, Haroldette was concerned that someone in the neighborhood might have caught her hosting what appeared as a missing penis. That this microcosm of a community would look down upon such a relationship to the point of threatening the protagonist’s peace of mind speaks to what some would consider degenerate or morally despicable and thus pornographic. In that sense, pornographic as a label plays both enabling and disabling functions. Thanks to the digital sphere, writers, editors, and readers alike make use of the instrumental and substantive freedoms to write, publish, read, enjoy, and interpret these most eccentric stories. To what extent these freedoms translate to the choice of partners and other choices on the ground remains a challenging proposition.

Access to these instrumental freedoms constitutes meaningful steps toward a non-interfering and individualistic command over lives, that is substantive freedom. Although larger structures, families, neighborhoods, offices, communities, and the state may still oppose these sexual encounters, with the assumption that sexual liberalism is culturally corrosive, fiction and more specifically erotic and/or pornographic fiction is providing the space to express and perhaps live them out. Mapping out the different forms of freedom highlights degrees of freedom in that instrumental freedoms may pave the way but do not necessarily lead to substantive freedom or existential freedom, let alone meaningful freedom. At the heart of Gabonewe’s style and content innovation, at the heart of these erotic/romantic/pornographic anthologies, exists the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between different kinds of freedom.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naminata Diabate

Naminata Diabate is an Associate Professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race, her most recent work on literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays. Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Award and the African Literature Association 2022 First Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, working on two monographs, “Pleasure and Displeasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”

Notes

1 This list is not meant to be exhaustive; for instance, it could have included Exhale: Queer African Erotic Fiction (2020) and Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women (2008). I have not explored them here because, unlike the other electronic anthologies that are free and freely available, Exhale is electronic but not freely available and Open was only in print and is currently out of stock.

2 In African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence, which began as a search for an explanation for postcolonial dispossession in Africa, Taoua explores and moves beyond widely discussed ideas of political self-determination and national sovereignty to highlight other types of freedoms. This exploration led her to build upon Amartya Sen’s seminal idea, of development as freedom, to identify four types of freedom (instrumental, substantive, existential, and meaningful) in contemporary African cultural products. Whereas “(1) instrumental freedoms pertain to tools that serve a purpose; political and civil rights and liberties such as voting, free speech, freedom of the press, the right to organize, and access to resources; (2) substantive freedoms are the ability to make choices, as in a spouse or one’s faith, and the capacity to develop one’s potential through education, work, and social opportunities in order to improve one’s quality of life” (24). As for existential freedoms, they are intangible, relating to “the spiritual realm, to ethical values, and to the psyche as in the absence of alienation” (24). The final category, meaningful freedom, the highest form, is achieved when the other three kinds work in concert, “enabling individuals to live the life they have reason to value” (89).

3 Although Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women did not publish an anthology, it is useful to include it because its origin story shares similarities with those of the platforms that published the anthologies under discussion. Additionally, a category on the hub is named “Erotica.” In 2021, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah published The Sex Lives of African Women: Self-Discovery, Freedom and Healing, a collection of interviews conducted over six years with more than thirty black and Afro-descendant contributors from across the African continent and its global diaspora in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

4 I adopt the notion of self-injury as a way to acknowledge African agency in its own misfortunes. Admission of this agency does not, however, absolve the other agents of their crimes.

5 In the dominant imagination of the West, Africa has often been associated with profligate sexuality. Figures such as Saartjie Baartman, phenomena including “overpopulation,” the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the scapegoating of non-normative sexualities, and practices such as female genital surgeries and corrective rape have contributed to crystallizing that most erroneous view.

6 Nuptial advisors who instruct newlyweds and young women in the art of lovemaking have been studied among the Lawbe of Senegal (Ly), the Nwang Abe in Nigeria (Uchendu), the Magnonmaka of Mali (Diallo), the Ssenga of Uganda (Tamale), and the Olaka in Mozambique (Arnfred). Labia elongation and kunyaza have been studied in Benin, Botswana, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. For more on the subject, see Kashamura, Tamale, Villa and Grassivaro Gallo, Arnfred, Sexuality and Gender Politics in Mozambique, Bagnol and Mariano, and Fusaschi.

7 A vibrant conversation on sexual pleasure is visible on para-intellectual sites, social media platforms, visual arts, performance work, narrative and documentary films, and literary fiction. For more on the proliferation of academic discourse and cultural production on pleasure, see Diabate’s “Nudity and Pleasure” and “On Visuals and Selling the Promise of Sexual Plaisir and Pleasure in Abidjan”.

8 Saraba magazine’s The Sex Issue features twenty writers from nine countries; Sext Me, twenty-two writers; Valentine’s Day Romance, seven authors; Dark Juices and Aphrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries, twenty writers; Emergence, twenty-six authors; Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, twenty-three writers; Something in the Water, fifteen authors; Première nuit: une anthologie du désir, eleven writers; and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir, twelve writers. The electronic anthologies make up about one hundred and twenty-six writers. With the print collections, the number rises to about one hundred and fifty writers.

9 For Angela Carter, “Eroticism [is] the pornography of the elite” (17).

10 For more on this, see Wagner’s Eros Revived.

11 Longino’s use of The Report of The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography to operationalize pornography is debatable because the Commission does not distinguish pornography from erotica. The sentence following the one Longino quotes reads, “One presumed consequence of such portrayals is that erotica transmits an inaccurate and uninformed conception of sexuality.” For more on views against pornography, see Diana Russell’s Against Pornography and Laura Lederer’s Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography.

12 On authorial intent, see also Philip Stewart, “Définir la pornographie?” (86–98).

13 Peter Wagner explains that, in his book, “Erotica … is a comprehensive term for bawdy, obscene, erotic, and pornographic works, including scatological humour and satire, which often employ sexual elements” (5).