If you’ve spent any time on X, formerly Twitter, lately, you might have seen a very unexpected term trending on the social media platform: North African lesbian poetry.
If you thought: “Hey, that’s a nice, refreshing change from all of the right-wing hate that has permeated the platform since it was taken over by controversial Trump-supporting CEO Elon Musk,” you’d be wrong, sadly.
The blue tick, anti-woke, right-wing MAGA activists on X are actually invoking the phrase as a “joke” to, in their terminology, “own the libs,” by repeatedly suggesting that all of us pronoun-using, DEI-loving lefties have degrees in, yes, you guessed it, North African lesbian poetry.
What does a University charge for a degree in North African Lesbian Poetry?#maga #lgbtq #cnn #msnbc #studentloanforgiveness #StudentDebt #Uconn #collegestudents pic.twitter.com/CSAPyiitlE
— James McGovern (@mcgoverntheory) March 1, 2023
The much-repeated phrase first popped up a couple of years ago, and it’s been trotted out repeatedly online in recent months, usually by the kind of people who celebrated when the Department of Defense’s website deleted a photo of famed World War II bomber Enola Gay, an otherwise entirely heterosexual plane that just happened to have the word “gay” in its name.
“North African lesbian poetry,” like “blue hair and pronouns”, is a right-wing dogwhistle: a caricature of a “woke liberal”. It’s a form of crude shorthand summing up everything they hate, in much the same way as gender-critical activists invent offensive stereotypes of “hulking, dress-wearing males” to demean trans women.
It’s also racist to suggest that poetry written by African LGBTQ+ women is somehow not worth studying: meaning that a degree in that poetry would be worthless. In fact, multiple high-profile universities, such as Harvard, offer degrees that include courses about queer African writers and poets, and graduates of those courses often go on to earn significantly more than, for example, Hank Bunchofnumbers ConfederateFlag on X.
“North African lesbian poetry” reading list
If this article has made you want to learn more about queer African and African‑diasporic authors, poets and writers, here are some recommendations to start you off.
Unoma Azuah
Unoma Azuah is a Nigerian writer and activist born in Biafra in 1969. She focuses on issues relating to queer Nigerians in her writing and activism. Azuah has published works such as Blessed Body: Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerians and is well known for her LGBTQ+ rights advocacy in Nigeria.
Chinelo Okparanta
Nigerian-American novelist Cinelo Okparanta published her first novel, Under the Udala Trees, in 2015, which the New York Times describe as “a gripping novel about a young gay woman’s coming of age in Nigeria during the Nigerian civil war.”
Trifonia Melibea Obono
Trifonia Melibea Obono Ntutumu Obono is an Equatorial Guinean novelist and LGBTQ+ activist. Her acclaimed novel La Bastarda was the first-ever novel by a female Equatorial Guinean writer to be translated into English.
Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian fiction writer and visual artist, arguably best-known for their 2018 novel Freshwater and the New York Times bestseller The Death of Vivek Oji.
You can find a much longer list of queer African reads here.
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