'Deliver us from Evil': Pentecostal Christianity, Queer Sexualities and the Language of Deliverance in Nigerian Literature

Exploring the relationship between religion and queerness in Africa, this chapter discusses three Nigerian queer-themed novels – Elnathan John and Àlàbá Ònájìn’s On Ajayi Crowther Street, Buki Papillon’s An Ordinary Wonder, and Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. Each of these texts offer a literary representation of Pentecostal Christianity, its demonization of queer sexuality, and its culture of deliverance of the queer body. The chapter argues that deliverance is a central, critical and productive theme in contemporary queer Nigerian literature used with a twofold purpose: first, to critique a dominant religious culture that demonizes queer subjects; second, to suggest that Pentecostalism may need deliverance itself from its obsession with demons, in order for queer African bodies to flourish. The chapter distinguishes three different strategies – exposing religious hypocrisy, reclaiming indigenous religion, and reinterpreting Christianity – that offer alternative modalities of African queer religious worldmaking. It argues that such worldmaking can be conceptualized as post-queer in the sense that the novels move beyond, and present alternatives to, a Eurocentric secular frame of understanding sexual and gendered embodiment.