Nigeria’s Literature of Love

By RENA SILVERMAN Beyond the headlines of bloody conflict and kidnapped schoolgirls in northern Nigeria, Glenna Gordon found love. She had been working in Lagos documenting local weddings for her “ Nigeria Ever After” series, when she learned about a “mass wedding” in the north. Intrigued, she read up on the area, including “Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home,” by the Nigerian author Balaraba Ramat Yakubu. It was not a guidebook or political treatise, but a romance novel. That book was in the genre littattafan soyayya, a Hausa term that roughly translates into “love literature.” Some of the authors, devout Muslims, speak out against child marriage and human trafficking, while others advise how to please husbands or offer escapist tales where the impoverished heroine finds love, wealth and a husband. So when she went to photograph the 2013 wedding, Ms. Gordon also sought out many authors of these novels in order to make portraits of them. That was the beginning of “Diagram of the Heart,” which is being shown as part of the Open Society Foundation’s “ Moving Walls 23: Journeys” group exhibition from Oct. 22, 2015, to May 13, 2016. The other projects being shown include Dionysis Kouris’s “In Transit: Columbia Records, Athens,” which focuses on a once-thriving, now- abandoned music studio now occupied by migrant squatters; Jeanine Michna-Bales’s “Through Darkness to Light: Seeking Freedom on the Underground Railroad,” which envisions an imagined slave escape route from Louisiana to Canada; Liam Maloney’s “Texting Syria,” an installation that looks at Syrian refugees in the digital age; and Shahria Sharmin’s “ Call Me Heena,” a series of portraits of Bangladeshi hijras — who identify as “third gender” or transgender women. Each of these projects has a common thread: what people do in search of opportunity. “With Glenna’s work, we were interested in how these women were using writing as a way to not only make their voices heard as women, as authors, but also to reflect the various pathways that young women navigate in terms of coming-of-age, finding love and romance,” said Yukiko Yamagata, associate director for the Open Society Foundations Documentary Photography Project, who was a curator of the “Moving Walls 23: Journeys” exhibition along with Susan Meiselas and Stuart Alexander. “Also, self-determination. For example, their efforts to pursue higher education and professional success. And I’m particularly interested in Glenna’s perspective, because she’s photographing a region where there are certain narratives that are being told.” Ms. Gordon first gained attention last year for a striking series of simple images of the clothes, notebooks and other items belonging to the schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram. Yet that abstract approach — as opposed to documentary images of street protests or portraits of heartbroken parents — was actually informed by her work with the popular romance writers. The authors she met over the course of two years, mostly in Kano, were devout Muslims, who had to register with the morality police as well as other officials for their work. Their husbands were mostly supportive of their writing, as “they didn’t have to leave the house,” and earned a decent living with their writing. “I would say for the most part, they are middle-class or upper middle-class,” Ms. Gordon said. “I mean you have to be educated, your family has to have had enough money to send you to school.” She started by taking mostly portraits. But when she showed her images to photographers back in New York, they suggested a more “abstract” approach. When she returned, she thought of her wedding photographs and how dowries related to the Nigerian novels. “Their books would be about dowry negotiations,” she said. “So I started photographing a lot of dowry.” When the kidnapping crisis erupted in Chibok in April 2014, Ms. Gordon quickly covered some of the protests, but she wasn’t quite satisfied with her results. Instead, she decided to apply her abstract approach and represent the girls the way she had the novelists, by photographing objects — in this case, the possessions of the missing girls to symbolize their absence. “I don’t want to come off as flip about the Chibok work, but especially more than a year later it feels like that work fit into a media consumption cycle that shared and disseminated the images widely and rapidly and forgot about the issues just as quickly,” she said. “My hope for the ‘Diagram of the Heart’ project is that it both requests more of the viewer and offers more in return.” Although it’s hard to eradicate the narrative of Boko Haram, it’s also important to document the strength that exists. “I was excited to work in a place where everything I thought I knew was wrong,” Ms. Gordon said. The mass wedding, which she thought would involve thousands of brides and grooms in a room, turned out to be gender-segregated. And the Muslim romance novelists shattered her notions of what’s possible for women in conservative Islamic society. “I loved learning that our world is so much richer and more nuanced than I could have ever imagined before I went to see it.”