^{Odala Yuma}

The first time I was introduced to romantic longing in books was at the age of 13. The protagonist was a white girl who was odd enough not to fit in but beautiful enough to be considered conventionally attractive, for the plot to be framed around her. It was on Wattpad, and although it was poorly written, which honestly didn’t matter to me,  (this is because the male protagonist called our main character ‘sexy’ within the first chapter, and my adolescent mind was in a frenzy) it made me feel a rush I didn’t know I could find in books especially from the books I read in primary school. I deemed it the most beautiful book I have ever seen. Why? I had associated lust with yearning. Here is a strange, awkward, and introverted girl being pursued. I saw it as representation; it wasn’t until I read more books that I realized that the two were fundamentally different and evoked different feelings within the reader. I wanted to read more books that featured characters yearning for each other, with plots that matched, and this is where my quest began.

At 16, I was going through an identity crisis. I had a deep desire to read about characters who looked like me. I asked myself questions about who I was as a writer because my stories reflected an experience that, yes, I related to, but wasn’t completely true to my cultural context. I felt like I was doing my culture a disservice by not using my eloquence to speak on behalf of those who think the same as me but don’t have the words to express it. Fiction exists in diverse genres or sub-genres; that’s the beauty of writing, I believe. You can find a genre with a story about anything. The issue with this, however, was the lack of genre that accurately represented my experience as a person who grew up in a very different cultural context than the white authors I was reading at the time. So, we reached a crossroads. I had the desire, yes, to read more books written by people who looked like me, but I didn’t know where to find them or if I would be able to find them. I was in secondary school, and we didn’t have access to many ‘cool’ novels, but we had literature books, and I read each story greedily, trying to take it all in. They opened my mind to African literature and storytelling, its struggles, beauty, eloquence, and the history of being African. I read Chinua Achebe and whatever I could get my hands on from a collection of stories called ‘African Short Stories’ and ‘Short Stories from Africa’, Familiar Stranger, Kwalimba Uta, and many more. And even though I loved them, there was that itch I couldn’t get. The one partially satisfied by the books that had characters who had the same feelings, yes, and our experiences were somewhat similar, but not quite the same culturally. I loved classic literature, but I also wanted to read a book with characters that looked like me or that were like me culturally with similar experiences, being yearned for, I mean, surely it was possible, wasn’t it? It’s fiction!  

My quest came to another halt when I realised the books that had that the yearning I was looking for didn’t have characters that looked like me, and I began to mentally dissociate the two, as though yearning wasn’t something we could apply to works of fiction in this context. A friend of mine told me that during a conversation with her mother, she was told that black men don’t know how to love, and the media we consume seemed to say the same, so she believed it because the representation of black love wasn’t the best. Still, I didn’t back down; that event propelled my quest for yearning in African media further. I had stumbled upon another book, and the characters were black. I was ecstatic. This is a world I hadn’t been to, fiction-wise, and I wanted to see how the black girl existed in romantic fiction, and not as a disposable side character to fill a check box for diversity or be comedic relief, but being the one yearned after. It started well, childhood sweethearts that jazz, but I noticed the way our male main character described our female main character. It was all physical; he never once mentioned anything palatable, no description of her mind, her humour, her ambition, her character from an objective standpoint, only in the context of what she did for him. No sign that he saw her, or yearned for the essence of her, which was so strange, I remember thinking the female character was funny and bold(at least I thought so). He was attracted to her, I’ll give him that. We had a whole 2 pages of him describing what she looked like with graphic descriptions of what he would like to do to her (I don’t think we needed 2 pages of that).

However, there was no yearning, no desire for her as a character, but the author had blurred the two together as though they were inherently the same, meaning in her mind they are, but is that it?  The white girls were longed for because of their character and their intellect. And it made me root for the characters because I could see how much they wanted this. They yearned for each other as others yearn for breath. Grant Faulkner explained this phenomenon so well in his essay ‘Literature of longing’, how longing drives characters and plots, and this drive is what was missing in a lot of the books I was reading; the happily ever after came yes, an ideal ending that would leave any reader satisfied but the stories didn’t feel complete they felt hollow.

The more books I read, I realised that longing was an entirely different specimen and its appeal to me was rooted in something deeper, the desire to be seen and wanted without auditioning to be worthy of it and without being objectified as though the only thing that could make a female character desirable is something physical like the width of her hips or the size of her butt, yearning in books transcends that. It’s a sort of intimacy that’s bigger than the physical. I thought back to my friends from secondary school who hungrily read and tore spicy pages from Mills and Boon novellas. We were young teenage girls with various insecurities, and hungry minds reading that sex was intimacy, not the gentle caress of two hands or a conversation that spans hours.  And I had mistaken physical lust for intimacy, for some strange reason we have instilled that sex is the same thing as being seen well, at least I did. Longing made books, films, and songs more intimate. Like I knew how much the characters of either form of media wanted the other, it revealed to me a type of vulnerability that made these stories worth reading, watching, and listening to. And dare I say it made them more relatable; every human being has had a deep-rooted desire that can only be described as longing or something more.

Which brings us to now, I am 22 and I still search for yearning in every media I consume, from music, film, etc, and I have found it, but not in places where I expected, and this time I am kinder to myself about it because that’s the beauty of art, it connects people of different races and cultures. Despite this, I still look for longing in African fiction, and there have been great strides. Still, I yearn for stories that could also join the yearner hall of fame together with The Great Gatsby and others because African folktales and music speak of a yearning that is beautiful and that deserves to be a part of our literature as well, we are resilient and strong but we also have the capacity to yearn and love, and be yearned for and loved. I think younger me and the other young girls in my secondary school class would have been empowered by this message. I know I am now.

Odala Yuma is a Malawian writer and poet, currently studying Media and Communications at the University of Malawi. She enjoys reading, art, and discussions on everything culture. In her free time, Odala loves to travel, sew, and create content. Connect with her on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@ithinkhernameoly?_r=1&_t=ZS-92gQL0BIbGq or email yumaodala@gmail.com