Foregrounded Margin in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees

This work infers that Chinelo Okparanta, in her book, Under the Udala Trees, uses the Biafran War, which qualifies as an instance of centre discourse considering its immanence in Nigerian literature, as a background not only to brace up marginalised homosexual love but also to historicize it. War novels are often accompanied by all kinds of sexuality, as a result of the atrocities, mayhem, and bloodbath that come with war. War narratives in African literature, particularly those written by Nigerian writers, navigate around the struggle for survival of heterosexual love in times of war, and that is Okparanta’s point of departure as she makes a case for the lesbian love that exists between two girls, Ijeoma and Amina, from different ethnic groups during the Biafran War era. This study implies that, as much as heterosexuality, as the norm, has been prominently occupying the privileged position of the centre, queer sexuality, which has been occupying the periphery for a while, keeps edging towards it through conscious efforts by some writers like Okparanta to give it focus. We intend to recontextualise ideas from American critic hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, in our analysis of the selected text.