Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda, translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel, takes place in the author’s native Equatorial Guinea, a relatively small country on the west coast of Africa that celebrates fifty years of independence from Spain this year. La Bastarda, the first novel by a female author from Equatorial Guinea translated to English, is a deceivingly simple story of a young girl, Okomo, who grows up in the country and defines her identity in the absence of a living mother and with a father who does not claim her. Told from the perspective of Okomo, the reader begins to understand the disjointed and complicated definition of family. She is raised by her grandmother, who is the first wife of Okomo’s polygamous grandfather, is told that her mother died in childbirth due to witchcraft, and that the father she has never met is a “scoundrel.” The novel depicts Okomo’s struggle with and escape from the confines of social convention in a story that teaches the often seemingly simple, yet difficult path to individual freedom. In addition, the work can be read as an allegory for the young nation separating from its colonial “parent” Spain, and Equatorial Guinea’s existential place as an orphan—culturally and geographically separated from Spain, Latin America, and Africa, and often ignored by an array of academic fields and global politics. In La Bastarda, we read Okomo’s coming-of-age story while also acquiring a great deal of understanding about the particularities of Spanish-speaking Africa.
Explicitly about overcoming traditional roles concerning gender and sexuality, La Bastarda makes a significant contribution to queer literary culture. The novel opens as Okomo’s grandfather, Osá, scolds her for persistently wishing to seek out her father and orders her to cut his toenails, a task that, according to her, “had hardened into my personal burden” (2). Through the metaphor of her grandfather’s toenails, Okomo reveals to the reader the gender hierarchy in her family, which belongs to the largest ethnic group in mainland Equatorial Guinea, the Fang people. These gendered roles continue as her grandfather explains that in Fang tradition your mother’s brother should take over the role as father in the absence of the biological one. However, Okomo’s uncle, Marcelo, is dubbed a “man-woman” because he will not impregnate another woman and is rumored to have intimate relations with other men. While Okomo is the story’s protagonist and narrator, Marcelo is also the target of homophobia, revealing how the traditional gender roles as well as normative expectations regarding sexuality in the novel affect both men and women. Okomo’s grandmother, complicit in the perpetuation of patriarchal tradition and female subjugation, constantly berates her for not already having found a male suitor because, according to tradition, a young girl’s most important goal is to catch a husband and start a family. Her grandmother always warns, “I don’t want you to make the same mistake as your mother. She never learned a woman’s place in Fang tradition. She lived much too freely” (4). In these first few pages, Okomo summons the reader into a suffocating patriarchal and heteronormative Fang community.
La Bastarda is a literary work explicitly about gender and sexuality. It is undoubtedly an important addition to the endeavors of Feminist Press, a publishing house dedicated to featuring feminist literary projects. The text is a demonstration of Okomo’s frustrations with patriarchy and normative female expectations. She pointedly hates the stories of the valiant male ancestors that her grandfather adores recounting to her. She is constantly annoyed by the long braids that her grandmother wove into her hair. She wearily desires to shave her head, but “my grandmother forbade it, since a woman should always be beautiful. And never ask questions” (9). In Okomo’s world, women are only valued on the grounds of their ability to bear children—Okomo explains that she became an adult on the day she got her first period. While Okomo is consistently frustrated by her family’s wishes, she is still the product of her community because she continuously searches for a father to support her and to ultimately complete the role of caretaker, as men are traditionally expected to do. “If only I had a father,” Okomo reflects, “Surely he would build a bed for his daughter and I could go away with him, I said to myself every night” (22). This perspective ultimately changes the moment she finally finds her biological father and is disappointed when he rejects her. It is then that she finally exhibits agency vis-à-vis her place as an outsider in society by refusing to conform to its outdated and stifling conventions.
Schimel’s English translation brilliantly captures the childlike tone and pace with which Okomo communicates her journey. The innocence of her narration both reinforces how some gender and sexual norms are engrained in societies from a young age and functions to emphasize the absurdity of many of these expectations. For example, Okomo questions the concept of manhood with respect to her “man-woman” uncle, Marcelo, when she argues, “If in the past I thought it was enough to have genitals hanging between one’s legs, I wasn’t so sure. Because Uncle Marcelo’s were like that, but nobody in the village considered him a man” (21). In another moment she loses hope with the entire social structure, upon which she comments, “My elders. It was always the same. When would I become an adult? Never. I had forgotten that in Fang tradition no one ever became an adult because at any moment they might be hit or yelled at by people who were even older” (55). It is through these observations that appear throughout the book that Okomo unravels traditional Fang society through the perspective of the queer and female subject.
As Okomo begins to rebel against her grandmother’s wishes that she conform to traditional femininity, she begins to explore her own sexuality. She meets a group of girls in the woods who also hate braids and make-up and partake in same-sex physical intimacy and in return is haunted by the voices in her head that warn her about tradition and hanging around with “those girls.” But she ultimately gives in to her desires and joins their lovemaking in the forest. From then on, Okomo spends more time with her friends in what they call the “indecency club” and falls in love with the oldest member, Dina. Okomo’s visits to the forest and time spent with her female lover allow her to see a world beyond her own community. After a series of mishaps and punishments upon the discovery that she is a lesbian, she ultimately decides to live peacefully with this gang of sexual deviants who help her realize that she is content without a father.
By maintaining the Spanish title of the novel that is gendered as feminine, the new translation of this work remains both a feminine artifact and a testimony of a uniquely female experience. In the text, Okomo recognizes her femaleness, her abandonment, and her sexuality as characteristics of an outcast and assumes this marginalized identity in order to resist the tradition and violence of her community. The decision to preserve the original Spanish title is wise as it ties together her various marginalized identities and allows the work to stand as a celebration of difference, of the feminine and queerness as outsider and transgressive traits.
While the novel highlights issues regarding gender and sexuality, it also contains rich aspects of history and culture unique to Equatorial Guinea. The country was a Spanish colony until 1968, and references in the novel to Spain enter the story at strategic moments. There are direct references to the Spanish imperial legacy. For example, while Okomo’s grandfather praises the family’s patriarchs for defeating the Spanish, there are constant indications to the so-called “House of the Word,” the “Western God,” and Easter celebrations that all gesture towards the lasting legacies of colonial rule. At the same time, however, the novel does play with her country’s relationship with the West. Marcelo returns from having his father cremated and Okomo’s grandmother, seemingly unaware of the practice of cremation, tells Okomo that he probably burned his father alive and kept the ashes. Okomo herself reflects upon this practice: “Do they really burn people alive in Spain? What a barbaric country!” (22). This moment, among others, is interesting from a decolonial perspective because it complicates the line between the so-called civilized and the primitive. Through Okomo’s eyes, the notion regarding a “civilized West” is problematized because here the reader is given the perspective of the so-called “primitive other” considering the colonizer as a barbaric other.
At the same time, the narrator makes sure to emphasize that she belongs to a Fang community. The English translation cleverly preserves numerous Fang words for the flora, fauna and food Okomo often lists for the reader: one character smokes banga, Okomo wears a popó dress, characters drink glasses of malamba, a dish is mentioned containing chocolate, sardines and malanga. In other moments, words are explicitly “taught” to the reader: “The elders would call him a múan or molo, which is the same as saying ‘disobedient child’” (24). Likewise, the first time Uncle Marcelo is mentioned, the narrator reveals that “he was a ‘man-woman,’ or fam e mina” (10). The preservation of these indigenous words plays an important pedagogical role especially given the fact that this is a work in translation. In addition, through Okomo we are able to travel to other parts of this small African country and witness the traces of European imperialism. She is sent away by her grandmother to towns along the border with Cameroon and Gabon and explains that “In my village, and in the entire region of Akonibe, we all spoke Fang, but the people here, despite also being Fang, spoke in French, even the children . . . On the streets I heard words like bonjour, monsieur, bon voyage instead of Spanish” (61). Not only does this moment reveal the diverse linguistic and ethnic character of Equatorial Guinea, but also how language and nationality across the African continent do not always correspond to ethnicity precisely because European empires divided and imposed their own languages in these communities.
In its brief eighty-eight pages, La Bastarda invites us into a world seldom explored by literature or the Anglophone world. The narrator mentions towns that are so small that they do not appear on Google maps. Through Okomo, the reader is told a story about a poor, lesbian, African girl overwhelmed by fear and expectation who escapes the confines of her society by rejecting tradition and assuming the status of outcast, of a bastarda: “I’m a bastarda, a Fang woman; I’m a bastarda, daughter of an unmarried Fang woman; I’m a bastarda, a lesbian” (88). Obono has beautifully woven together a story that highlights the trials of one’s queerness in an oppressively heteronormative and patriarchal place—an issue that is universal just as much as it is African—while simultaneously teaching the reader about the history, geography, and linguistic and cultural diversity of Equatorial Guinea. The story is critical of seemingly “bygone” social expectations without naively positioning these traditions against the binary of primitive and civilized, but rather shows how the only escape from these expectations is to reject the confines of community and make refuge in liminal spaces—whether physical or social. La Bastarda is a powerful exploration of culture and tradition and is a testament to the transformational power of freely expressing and living as one’s true self no matter who or where you may be.
Parker Brookie is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
*****
Read More Reviews: