you have made a fool of death with your beauty

Emezi layers years of intimacy and accountability into their lines of dialogue with skill. In fact, Feyi’s center is her friendship with Joy. Feyi’s healing isn’t only in her romantic relationships. Feyi might be messy, or even rash, but she’s intentional as fuck. At the start of the book, Feyi is making decisions - sometimes risky ones - because she’s healing, not because she’s trying to avoid her pain. Instead, she makes art and smokes and feels her way through the grief and pain. Feyi’s time is partially bought by life insurance money, and that’s painful enough to drive a lot of people into a self-sabotaging spiral. It takes time to unclasp your life from its fingers, and time is an expensive privilege. She has been numb since her husband’s death five years before the start of the novel. For Feyi, this way of living comes after years of numbness. Desire fuels action and creation, which is life itself. Because of this, queer romance can also function as the manifestation of collective yearning.įeyi, the novel’s bisexual protagonist, strives to honor her desire. Queer romance is often the home for our impossible selves, where we live and love freer than we can in physical form. So, narratives about us can hurt us, but narrative can also be where we’re made real again. In Texas, where I grew up, Governor Greg Abott recently impositioned Child Protective Services to investigate parents of trans kids - particularly kids receiving gender affirming care - citing “abuse.” In my birth country Nigeria, the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, and other laws that subject queer people to violence, use the term “vagabonds” to further stigmatize queer people.

Erasure.Īs queer people, we witness the ways narrative - stories about who and how we are - feeds the hysteria used to justify legislating our lives to impossibility. Life being possibility and death being absence. Our love can be the difference between life and death. Who and how we love is far too often used as an excuse to subjugate. Oppression affects our relationship to ourselves and each other. Oppression isn’t just impositions on external systems and places it’s internal, too. I think the genre can serve as narrative praxis, because the core of romance is relationship, and fiction allows writers to engage with what has been “fictionalized” in this realm. Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to romance. After all, resistance is an endeavor of love, and life has given me, and the communities I’m a part of, a lot to resist. I have meditated on love - and its perversions, as philosopher Frantz Fanon would say - for much of my life. Multiple considerations on love bubble beneath the surface text of Akwaeke Emezi’s romance novel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.

You have made a fool of death with your beauty