Poured Over: Eloghosa Osunde on Vagabonds!

Miwa Messer

“Each time I wrote a story that belonged in this book … It held some pain. It held some love. It held some hope, some longing…”

Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel Vagabonds! is an inventive, mythic whirlwind through the city of Lagos, Nigeria. Told through interconnected short stories, this raw, painful, and ultimately hopeful work sheds light on an often-unseen world and its diverse inhabitants. Osunde talks with us about the significance and spark of inspiration behind the title, writing a novel in an uncommon format, the feelings she wants to leave her readers with and more with Poured Over guest host, Jenna Seery. Listen after the episode for a TBR Topoff from Marc and Jaime.

Featured Books (Episode)
Vagabonds! By Eloghosa Osunde
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery, I’m a bookseller and the associate producer of Poured Over and I’m here today with Eloghosa Osunde, the author of The Incredible novel Vagabonds!, which came out in spring of 2022, but will soon be hitting the shelves in paperback. She’s written short stories for literary publications like The Paris Review, but Vagabonds!, which is dark, raw, gut wrenching and hopeful, and named one of the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker, is her incredible break into the world of novels. Thank you for being here today.

Eloghosa Osunde
Thank you so much, Jenna, this is this is an exciting opportunity. And I’m really glad to be here and to get into this conversation.

So I think the listeners are going to find it very obvious very quickly that I love this novel and could talk about it all day. But to save them that and to avoid spoilers. Would you tell us a little bit about this book?

Yes. Okay. So Vagabonds! is a novel and stories about Lagos and its inhabitants. And the title is actually got some from the Nigerian constitution. So I’m going to say that without like, expanding too much into that, in the Nigerian constitution, Vagabond is defined as anyone who crosses gender lines, anyone who like cross dressers, basically, anyone who’s queer and outwardly presenting a search, I found that very interesting when I found this out a few years ago. And so I decided just to create a bunch of stories that speak directly against that. So as you will see, when you get into the book, Vagabonds! is actually a book that centers queer and trans characters in Lagos, where those kinds of expressions are still very heavily surveilled at the moment.

And it is, I would say, an undertaking, a sprawling undertaking of a story, there are so many characters, so many pieces of this grand puzzle that we find as we move through the story. There are so many intertwining plots, and the plot itself has so much depth, profundity, and specificity to a culture that not everyone who’s going to pick up this book is familiar with. So just want to ask how this story came to you. How did you know this was the story that you wanted to tell on your first novel?

So, I was working on another novel, actually. And I think that that novel was more quiet. In general, I think that there was this a more quiet novel. And then one day I was I was reading through the same sex marriage revision act. And I found the word “vagabond” in there. And I just found that like, deeply fascinating, and I had these short stories I had been writing for years that I knew had a very thick thread. But I wasn’t sure what it was, until I came across that word. And it just seemed to tie everything together. And this was in 2019. I think as soon as I found that, I wanted to speak to it. And so it became clear to me that this book was like a more urgent book than the one I was working on at the time. That’s how Vagabonds! came up.

And when I say sprawling, I really mean sprawling, there are so many characters, both within our world and the worlds alongside ours. How did you come to that place? Did the characters come to you first? Or did you set up sort of the world you wanted them to inhabit?

I worked on it story by story, which is kind of like the way I build a book. And so, I work scene by scene, story by story. And it kind of just builds on top of each other in the end. So, these stories like one talks to the other talks to another. The first story that I worked on was a story called Night Wind. And I’m not going to describe that too much so it doesn’t become a spoiler. That was the first one I worked on; it was in 2018. And then after that, I think that more and more stories kept on coming around with similar themes. That’s what made the book.

Do you have a favorite story or a favorite character that you really felt like you connected the most to? I know for me, There is Love at Home, that Daisy and Divine story is truly one of my favorites. But I also love Adura, The Only Way is Through and her other appearances. But do you have someone that really stuck to you?

I don’t know that I haven’t seen her catch up. I think the ones you just named, were the most delightful to write. So if I had to name like a top five, those four will be in there for sure.

I know when I was reading, again, I want everyone to read this but when I was reading the end of Daisy and Divine story, “There is Love at Home”. I think I’ve read that last page about 50 times because it’s one of the most stunning things and that’s what I’m going to tell readers out there. Also, you said that you’ve been working on this for a long time, these characters have come to you in these stories. Do you often find that you prefer to work in short story? I think the structure of this is so interesting that it is this intertwined, short story collection, but it is truly a novel. I don’t think you could separate pieces out into their individuals and not miss something from reading the whole thing. Do you find working in short story important?

Yes, I really love that question. And I think that short stories are definitely my favorite way to work. Because they go very well with my brain, it feels like it matches the structure of a short story. And the way that my brain works, the way that my thinking works, they’re very complementary. So, I find that when I’m working with short stories, I feel the most comfortable when I was trying to write like a more conventional novel that goes from chapter one to chapter two, chapter three, I struggled very much because that my brain doesn’t work in chronological order, it actually works in themes. So, I think that short stories give me more space than a conventional novel structure would, in general.

I think you can definitely see that when you read that this— theme is so important, it moves through the sort of sweeping, some more painful, some more hopeful to sort of arrive at different conclusions. But I know, something for me is that we only get so much of certain characters, you know, you always hope there’s like, Oh, I hope they come back. And sometimes they do. And, and sometimes they don’t. And you have to sort of reconcile with the fact in a novel like this, that it’s not just about the characters on the page, it’s this really the city of Lagos itself, that is such an important character and important piece.

How do you feel about short stories, when you’re reading just in general?

I think that something like this a collection that moves from one to another, and has this thread, like you said, that goes back and forth, it really provides such a different reading experience, my brain sort of found each part a little bit differently, because going from just a chronological chapter one to you know, that’s such a common structure that we anticipate in a novel. But this really gives us something different. In a lot of ways, it’s a very western format, a chronological novel. But there’s so much in this that moves beyond that. And I think that lends very well to the story you’re telling.

I’m so glad to hear that.

And one of my favorite things, because this novel is outside of a lot of my own experience, is the way you personified the city of Lagos the way that you teach us about this city from a way that feels real and not glamorized, not glorified, but wholly different to something that many readers will have experienced. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you came to that piece of the story?

Yes. Okay. So, in writing the book, a lot of the stories were set in Lagos. And that was my intention with writing, I found that the book wasn’t going to feel complete until I created a structure around how the city interacts with people. So, it’s actually like a book that takes the city, and then also takes its relationship with people and then blows that up. And so, in creating that, I asked myself what Lagos feels like to me. And to me, Lagos doesn’t just feel like a place, it feels like a spirit, and it feels like a god. And so, in creating that, and just looking at all the minions that it uses to, like, do its bidding, I started to go deeper into like, what those power dynamics are like, and what it means to grow, or live in or come into a city that has its own motives for each person inside it. So, in creating that, I think that was the core question for me. What is Lagos and I realized that Lagos is actually spirit and a God before it’s the city. So in writing this, I was trying to stay as true as possible to that answer.

I think that for many American readers, or non-Nigerian readers, this will give something completely different than a Nigerian reader, do you feel like there’s two different versions of this book for those who already know and those who are just coming to know for the first time.

So, I think that the reception of the book has been very interesting to me, because I’ve met about 100 different versions of vagabonds since it was released. And that includes, like Nigerian readers and non-Nigerian readers. So sometimes I hear someone describe the book, and they describe it as a spirit novel. And I hear someone else describe the book, and they describe it as a novel about Lagos. And then I hear someone else describe it as a queer book. So, it’s been very interesting to see which threads readers are pulling out of it. I feel like all of them are true, depending on where you’re looking at it from and depending on what your interests and your investments in stories are. I think that each reader takes a different book from the book.

I agree. I think there’s a lot of readers that will find many different things. I’m looking forward to reading it again to, I’m sure find different things. Back a little bit to sort of the structure of this. You have a very interesting framing device, that you use to sort of break up these stories with almost a narrator to this novel. How important for you was setting up things in that way? Did you feel like it was necessary to have sort of something breaking up those stories to sort of direct your reader in a specific way?

Yeah, I feel like in a world that feels as vast as this, having a tour guide of some sort was very instrumental. Because if I hadn’t used that device, I think this would be a different book, I think it would just be a book of stories, on stories on stories on stories. But what readers tend to find as they go through Vagabonds!, is that really, they are going through different sections of the city. And they’re being shown before they get into the stories, what they’re about to see. So yeah, I think that’s why I decided to use that. But also, the narrator is a very compelling voice. And so when he first came to me, it became very clear that he was going to steer the book. And it was very interesting to create the relationship, or to relay the relationship between, Eko the city. And this minion, specifically, this right-hand angel that is closest to it.

I think that it adds so much to this idea of magical realism that happens in this book, I was talking with it with some friends of mine, and trying to describe that it’s not fantasy, it doesn’t go into those genres themselves. But it has so much mysticism and magical realism that you really feel a genre outside of just literary fiction as well, these cultural pieces, this magical realism, these gods, these city spirits, how did it feel to get to include those things into this novel, and to sort of bring that to your reader as well,

It felt very freeing. I love that with this book, I didn’t have to worry about how realistic things felt. But instead, I could think about how true they are growing up in Nigeria, its demarcations that were never made between what is human spirit, for instance, or what happens when you’re standing right side up and what happens when you’re looking between your legs. Those are two different things. Those things were part of my upbringing, all of those things are part of my life. And so, in a way, I think of what is here and what is spirit as different states, but they’re not contradictory. So being able to find a way to write the book that encompassed all the things that I know to be true. For instance, every time there’s a human being, or every time there’s a human gathering, there’s probably like a related spirit somewhere close. Yeah, that’s how I felt, I think it felt free. Most of all, how did you find the reading experience when you encountered some of these elements? Did it feel jarring?

I think it felt immersive. I think it allowed me to put myself into this novel even more fully, because there were things I didn’t understand. At first, or, I needed to do more thinking— there were definitely times in between stories where I had to close the book, and do a little processing before I could go back in, but only in good ways. Because sometimes I want to just read things fast plow through, but this book I had to sit with and think with, and those pieces enhance that, for me understanding a culture that’s not my own in a way that was very all encompassing while I was reading this book, and I think that many, many of our readers or listeners are always looking for that next thing. They’re looking for that new voice and I think that they’re going to find something like that here very easily.

That’s really exciting to me. Thank you so much for saying that.

One of my favorite things about this book that I think readers will enjoy is the tone, it’s so interesting. It pendulum swings back and forth between darkness and beauty, and areas of light and love and desperation and hope. And you never know what the next story is going to bring. How did you find those balances in writing these sometimes difficult but also ultimately beautiful stories?

I don’t know that I thought about it that way. I know that in writing the stories, it didn’t feel true to write a brutal novel or just a gentle novel. The closer I got to the heart of the book, the more I realized that it was a book that would contain many things, many tones, many feelings, many people, many states of being many emotions. And so, I think each time I wrote a story that belonged in this book, it held a little bit of each. It held some pain. It held some love. It held some hope, some longing. And I think that’s what makes this book this book.

I agree. You had talked earlier about how you write in short stories and how your brain thinks in short stories when you were writing them, did you have them in an order already? Did you move them around to sort of rearrange the story? Do you think linearly, like are in an outline? Or is it more combining things as you’re moving through? How does the editing process on that make it come together?

So, my editing processes very cumulative. So, I write all the stories first. And then as I get deeper into the links, between stories, I’m able to see what comes first. For instance, with the story “Rain”, that’s one of the stories I’ve seen, readers went on the order of, because when people read Rain, I don’t think they expected “The Only Way Out is Through” as a story that talks to it. So, I think what happens is, I write the stories first and the more I write, the more I discover about the timeline. Some stories I wrote before, but they’re very late in the book and some stories I wrote quite late in the process and they come up very early in the book, the stories tell me what the sequence is.

I think it’s just so interesting. We don’t see so many of these novels, sort of written in this short story format. So many people have asked me, Is it a short story collection or a novel? And I have to say, well, both but a novel.

I have a question. How did you find the book or had the book find you?

So, at the time this published, I was a bookseller working in a Barnes and Noble store and I saw the cover and was stunned. Truly, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. I think I probably have a picture on my phone of when it published, I took a picture of it sitting on the shelf and said, You have to come back to this. And I did. So when this pubbed, I think was March 2022. You had done the hard part, you put the book out in the world, you’ve done all the work, the writing the pouring your soul out, how have you found the reception? Did it go the way you felt it would? Did you expect everything to happen the way it did? How does it feel now that it’s been out for a year? Easy questions, easy questions.

This is so easy. Wow, what a breeze. How have I felt about the reception, I have actually felt stunned because I expected the book to be well received, because I believe very much in this book. So, I’m not going to say that I felt completely shaky. I felt quite eager, because I knew that the book was going to go into the world and do its work. So that part I kind of expected. And what I didn’t expect, I think was the reading community that has formed around it. I have literally seen people latch onto this book, people like make makeshift book clubs with their friends, people get vagabonds tattoos in Bantu, like people create threads and communities on social media, people creating like, bookmarks. I didn’t expect it to form a community of people that it’s actually genuine. I expected there to be individual readers who loved the book, but I didn’t really expect them to then become friends with each other because they read this. So that’s been very surprising. And I think that has blown my mind and blown my expectations out of the water. Yeah, genuinely speaking what I feel is a lot of glee, a lot of thankfulness, and a lot of hope for the rest of this walk.

What an exciting feeling. How do you want people to feel when they’ve read the book, what should they come away with? I know I felt a lot of things. But I always wonder what authors want their readers to feel when they close that cover for the last time.

Hmm. So, this question for me has a very specific answer. And the answer is, I want readers to feel whatever feels true for them. So, some readers come away from the book and feel angry, some readers come away from the book and feel like they want to get more free. Some readers come away from the book and want to call that ex-girlfriend who they never actually made it work with. All of that makes me happy because it’s true. So, I think for me with this book, whatever the reader wants, or whatever the reader feels, at the end of the book is what I want.

I think that is very profound. I think that that answers a lot of my questions for authors. Now that the book is going to be out in paperback, and we’ve got a whole new set of readers who are going to snag this for the first time, who is the reader that you hope picks up this book? Who do you feel like needs to pick up this book?

I love this question. So, the first is, whoever has been thinking, it’s not fair that I don’t get to live like myself, I hope they pick up this book. Another person who I hope picks up this book is someone young, and queer who thinks it’s not okay to be that. Another reader who I’d like to find this book is a Nigerian who has thought that Nigeria only belongs to them because they’re straight. I think a fourth reader would like to find this, anyone who’s looking to be free. Yeah, I think it fits reader would be someone who’s lost someone close to them, either relative or friend to death, I would like for them to pick up this book, because this book thinks of spirits as active, this book doesn’t think that death is the end, I would like for that reader to pick this up as well. Those are the five.

I love that. I can see how all of that ties together and more. I think so many readers are going to find things in this book. And like you said, you want to have someone find something that’s true. And there is so much truth here. And for many people, they’ll find what they’re looking for here. But you mentioned so many authors in this book and other books that the characters have read and love. So, I’m dying to know who are your literary influences who has helped to get you to the point where you were able to create this world?

I love this question as well. I love all your questions. So, the biggest influence on this book is actually the Bible. I used to be a Christian. And I read the Bible quite thoroughly. And I find it very interesting as the literary type. The Bible inspired more than a few things in this book. So, I think that’s my first literary influence that I would reference. Also, another writer, or a writer who really changed my mind on the story is, is our Arundhati Roy with The God of Small Things— that blew my mind. So that’s definitely up there. And Oyeyemi with her novel Icarus Girl, which is her first novel, I really enjoyed that book. And I enjoy how expansive its view of the mind is, I think that that book gives color to the mind, it gives shade to the mind, gives texture to the mind as a place, but I think that we don’t get to see enough of that in fiction. So, Helen Oyeyemi’s Icarus Girl is up there as well. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is one of my favorite books ever. Because Wow, just wow. So that’s definitely up there. And then Bryan Washington’s writing really excites me. I liked the way silence exists in the work that he makes. I like that there’s so much space in Bryan Washington’s work for things to not be said. And I really, really respect that. So those are the few that come to my mind.

Amazing. I can definitely see some of that influence in there. And also, I know from looking at some other interviews you’ve done and some other things that music is very important to you. And I know that there’s a Vagabonds! playlist out there. Would you like to talk about any sort of music recommendations for people along with this? Do you listen to music when you write? Is that a part of your process as well?

Yes. So I’m always listening to music. And when I’m writing the music, I listen to changes. Usually when I’m writing, I listen to jazz because there’s room in jazz, I think, for you to think and for you to expand your thinking without being influenced by lyrics. I definitely recommend jazz for anyone who’s just trying to incorporate music into their practice. Right now. I am loving a lot of Afrobeats music. So I’m really loving music by Ayra Starr. I’m really loving music by Fireboy. I’m really loving music by Wizkid. I really enjoy music by Miranda. She’s one of my favorite musicians working at the moment. I love music by Esperanza Spalding. Through this I feel the artists I’m listening to right now. And Kamasi Washington. I want to talk about Kamasi Washington all the time. So yes, yes.

Yes. Perfect. So now our listeners can also build their own playlists for when they are reading along. And of course, the question that everyone asks when someone has a novel coming out is what are you working on next? What should we expect to see soon—hopefully?

I actually just finished my second novel. So you can be expecting that.

For sure. That is very exciting. Anything you’d like to say about it? Or do we have to be very tight lipped about what it is?

I can’t really talk about it right now. But of course, I do want to say that if you have enjoyed any of the stories I’ve published since Vagabonds!, you’re really going to enjoy that novel.

Well, that is very exciting. And I think I could probably sit and talk about this all day. But that’s about the time that we have. Thank you so much for talking with me about this book. I’ve had a great time. I think that our listeners should absolutely be heading out to pick up Vagabonds!, when it’s out in paperback now. So thank you so much for being with me today.

Thank you so much, Jenna. This has been a delight. I’m very grateful for your thoughtful questions, and I look forward to speaking sometime soon in the future.

Poured Over