“How to Save the World from Aliens, Yet Keep Their Infrastructure”: Repurposing the “Master’s House” in The Wormwood Trilogy

In this essay, we examine the figure of Oyin Da in Tade Thompson’s The Wormwood Trilogy to demonstrate how Africanfuturism uses colonial infrastructure—or “the master’s house”—in queer ways to resist neocolonialism and produce decolonial contexts of queer and feminist African life. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s often- cited quote, we assert that Oyin Da provides an exemplar of postcolonial realities wherein, sometimes, the master’s house should not be dismantled at all. Instead, Thompson’s trilogy illustrates how Africans can repurpose colonial infrastructure in queer and feminist ways for decolonial ends. We limn the figure of Oyin Da to demonstrate: (1) how the African postcolonial condition itself is a queer one, where there can be no strict separation of colonial structures from indigenous life; (2) how Africanfuturist writers use queer and feminist epistemologies to strategically alter the totality of “the master’s” infrastructure; and (3) how such resistance opens up decolonial possibilities for African queer and feminist liberatory existence.
Author(s): Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante
Date Published: November 2021

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