Genealogies of Desire, Extravagance, and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote Pas Trop

Francophone sub-Saharan Africa lags behind in taking up the difficult, yet generative, question of same-sex sexualities unlike the anglophone context with its exponentially growing aesthetic archive. Frieda Ekotto’s 2001 novel, Chuchote pas trop [Whisper Not Much], radically departs from the earlier tradition of oblique narrative strategies by engaging with questions of disability, abjection, rurality, age-disparate, interfilial, and interracial nonconforming sexualities in a relational and extravagant fashion, thereby becoming queer. By uncovering intertextual connections with other African texts and Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays, this essay establishes parallels between north Atlantic queer theory and African diasporic feminisms.