Paper short abstract:

Using Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, this paper examines the transgression of deformed bodies into sexually-charged spaces reserved by norm for perfect bodies and how this border crossing (re)defines and (re)constructs identity and personhood.

Paper long abstract:

From the perfect gentleman in oral folktales to Amos Tutuola's "a full-bodied gentleman reduced to head" (in The Palm-Wine Drinkard) to Calixthe Beyala's Lame-Leg (in Your Name Shall Be Tanga), African writers have been obsessed with and have sustained the narrative of the able/perfect body as norm for the sexual. The idea that bodies that are different/deformed could not be sexual has been so dominant in African fiction over time that in the instances where it happens, attention is drawn to it (both within and without the text) as an aberration, a border crossing. Often, in the creation and sustenance of this "aberration", a reductionism occurs in which the deformity of the characters overtakes and drowns out their identity and personhood. This paper reads Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty against the grid of the established trope of the perfect body in African prose narratives, focusing on the novel's use of sexuality and deformity as inclusive (and not exclusive) identity markers. Okpewho's The Last Duty pays attention to the re-validation of the personhood of the body with deformity in a way that affirms the body's sexuality as well as its ability to give and receive pleasure, thereby challenging and shifting the borders that define who can(not) be sexual. Odibo's sexual experience marks his transition from "deformed" to "re-/fully- formed" and the beginning of his re-integration/inclusion into his society as a person and not a deformed body.

Key words: (dis)ability, deformity, sexuality, able/perfect body, identity, personhood