A Novel of Transformation: Transcultural and Transgender Crossroads in Olumide Popoola's When We Speak of Nothing

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of Olumide Popoola's When We Speak of Nothing (2017) as a novel of transformation. In slanting Mark Stein's reading of the black British bildungsroman as a 'novel of transformation,' this essay argues that Popoola's young adult novel interweaves formative processes of transgender and transcultural identity formation, establishing a dynamic, intersectional transidentity in its young British-Nigerian protagonist, Karl. The multiple literary and political forms that meet in the novel subvert understandings of the traditional bildungsroman's coming of age (and in this case coming out) as linear and teleological. Instead, the novel explores forms such as the gap and the crossroads, and proposes indeterminacy, circularity, and disruption as formative of transidentity formation and constitutive of alternative spatio-temporalities. Popoola's novel of transformation gives voice to a young transcultural transgender community and symbolically claims space for their experiences to be acted and lived out both in Britain and Nigeria. As the novel draws on these different forms and frames of reference, it inscribes itself into multiple, overlapping (both British and Nigerian) textual lineages at once: folklore, estate fiction, and queer/trans writing.