Vagabonds!
There is a way a story caresses and fills you, and like a kind ex-lover, you're never able to get over it even when you have moved on. This is my story of Vagabonds!
Vagabonds! is healing…
I have read this book carefully and intentionally, as a lover would treat their partner. I have read it with a closeness that comes from a desperate need to fill up spaces. This book has held me closely and warmly this year in a way I could not imagine. It has given me an understanding of life from the perspective of a people trying.
Adura’s letters have been the balm that has soothed my anxiety, my depression, and my pain. The story of Hellen and B has calmed me, and Johnny and Thomas have cracked me up. I have visited and revisited the pages of this book to the point of familiarity. We have come to know each other by our first names and the sound of our breaths. I feel a closeness to the stories, a belonging. It’s as if I was the proverbial square peg attempting to fit into a world that didn’t fit into me, and one day I came across this other world that just had space for my shape, and everything started to make sense. My loss had meaning, my emptiness made sense, and my pain was valid. It wasn’t even because any of the stories here reflected my own, but it was just the way the characters approached loss, life, love, and living… they were teaching me something, and I was learning.
The opening pages tell us what to expect- a book ready to break boundaries. Definitions belong to defines, not the defined ones, so rules of writing and genre belong to those who set them, not writers because Vagabonds! is a book in its own league.
Vagabonds! is a brilliant masterpiece. It’s daring, and I absolutely love daring books. It has no structure, or perhaps it has a structure we are not privy to. It starts really slow with the opening pages, but patience is a virtue you must have when it comes to Vagabonds! The beauty of the book unfolds as you progress.
It is a book you don’t read once, as every time you go back to a chapter, you learn something new. The language is plain, raw, intimate, soft, kind, and painful. I was transported to a chaotic place where I felt seen and understood my pain- Adura’s letters kept my head afloat.
There was no fear in the way Vagabonds! was written. They did not hold back anything. Skins were pealed, whispers were written, the impossible was documented, the hate, the trauma, the messy living, the sacrifices, the losses were written in a way that always makes me want to sit in that world and never leave, in a way that will live forever.
l laughed in some of the stories; in others, I cried. Writing about the bill unapologetically is one of the things I admire about Eloghosa. I also loved how she serenaded money- it was satisfying to read.
I did not know that the first story was setting the tone for the book when we were told that the world is not what it seems, and throughout this book, we find out that this world is not what it seems.
There are women that wear the bodies of men so they can achieve their dreams, there are people who have been told that their love is contraband, there are others into sales of human parts, there are also pastors who pay people to fake miracles, there are politicians who would openly criticize queer people but will happily bend over boys and toys in secret, and there are parents like Gold’s mother who would accept vagabonds as children. And then there is us…
Eloghosa gave visibility to sexual minorities in a way they took up space. Like the world, it belonged to them, too, as it should be.
I am absolutely in love with this book. I love it in the way I love Under the Udala Trees; I cannot explain it. I know my heart races fast and constricts when it comes to Vagabonds! This book is activism in literary form.
