The second slide is a queer photographic representation of triplets. The sister is dressed as herself and her deceased brothers. It’s from a 1978 paper I had laying about on Yoruba photography. Around town and by our beloved mum we were called the three musketeers. We all didn’t dress alike, but my mum definitely went out of her way to suggest my brother and I were twins. There’s something subtly radical about this coming from an Igbo mother given that twin infanticide was notorious in Igbo society. Maybe it’s my mum’s embrace of Christianity and disavowal of Igbo spiritual lore like Odinani. The 1930s saw a peak of child stealing and dealing for slave trading, with twins, boys born with one testicle, or failure to cry at birth all reasons for enslavement. If you’ve read Things Fall Apart you’ll recall among the Igbo “the offense on the land” brought on by twins and the need to dispose of these children in “earthenware pots” in the “Evil Forest.” Even in the face of economic benefit, this cultural custom was steadfast such that historians note the Igbo killed twins throughout the era of the Atlantic slave trade rather than selling them off and potentially fetching more money for two children. My brother isn’t here anymore. And I’m in therapy, tending to depression with moments of suicide ideation. So in many ways the queer fashioning in the triplet picture is not a distant possibility. At the same time, my sister looks nothing like my brother and I so that’s a bit of a pickle. Plus there’s also the historical present of Christian missionaries in Igboland turning to Deuteronomy 22:5 to forbid cross-dressing and trousers among women. Sitting with these photos, it’s worth meditating on the space we make in culture to mourn, grieve, and build from loss in queer ways, and how these methods fly in the face of the hostile LGBTQ rights in Nigeria. For example, the Igbo people of Idoha and Alor-Uno needed to repopulate after war and slave-raiding. Their respective deities, Efuru and Adorno, allowed woman-to-woman marriage such that female husbands could marry wives, who in turn would bear children through male surrogates. Perhaps we need death more than we think.