Asylum: A Memoir & Manifesto. By E. Okporo

‘For immigrants, the opportunity to live in America come with its own price tag: the community you left back home has expectations for you to advocate and make their struggles known’ (p. 139) writes Edafe Okporo in an effort to capture his post-migration experience in the US. This memoir takes us on a long and often painful journey from Nigeria to the US—walking the reader through themes including family dynamics, threats and violence, detention centres, human rights advocacy, mental health deterioration, and freedom to live. This is a poignant memoir depicting LGBTQ+ human rights alongside a refugee identity—ultimately the right to live, love, and exist.

In his short memoir, Edafe Okporo reflects on his experiences of being raised in Nigeria and ‘coming out’ as a gay man in a country with no protection for people who belong to the LGBTQ+ community. In Nigeria, being gay is illegal under the Criminal Code Act and the Same Sex Marriage Act 2013 (Human Dignity Trust 2023) and people can even face the death penalty. As a result, many LGBTQ+ people have sought refuge in countries that can provide a safe environment and the freedom to be themselves (Alessi et al. 2020). The author highlights the danger of being gay in a cultural context where sexuality is considered normative and binary; and in a cultural and geopolitical context where your life is in danger. For some readers this may be difficult to imagine and conceptualize—and the author’s lived experience of violence, abuse, torture, and extreme fear raises awareness on the importance of providing asylum and protecting people who are in such vulnerable positions. Edafe’s experiences are relevant to the context of the current political climate in the UK and other countries of the Global North undermining fundamental human rights as part of a domestic political agenda. Around the world, we can observe the rise of right wing and conservative narratives around forced migration. It’s not long ago that the current UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, said that ‘fearing discrimination for being gay or a woman should not be enough to qualify for international refugee protection’ (BBC Politics 2023). Looking at this statement through the lenses of this memoir shows its absurdity. The memoir highlights how LGBTQ+ people are often tortured in places all over the world because of their identity and the people they love; thus, they deserve and need protection and a sense of safety. Golembe et al. (2021) explored the experiences and mental health difficulties of LGBTQ+ refugees in Germany through the framework of minority stress theory (Meyer 2003). The minority stress theory informing their findings suggests that people in the LGBTQ+ community experience increased distress in society associated with their sexual orientation or gender identity. Their mental health difficulties can be attributed to the expectations of operating and performing in a heteronormative environment, the need to conceal their identity and the daily encounters with discrimination, rejection, and violence. In their study, Golembe et al. found that LGBTQ+ refugees felt discriminated against due to their intersectional identities and reported a poor mental wellbeing. Whilst overall the evidence on LGBTQ+ refugees’ mental health is scarce, studies like these provide some ground for this particular population of refugees to be acknowledged and cared for in migration policies and integration to the host country. As explored in this book, LGBTQ+ people from certain countries where same-sex relationships are criminalized not only flee from danger, violence, and persecution but also once they seek refuge elsewhere, continue to face dangers in host societies.