Matthew Blaise wants to be your friend and neighbor

Matthew Blaise and I must have been in our mid teens when we first met. I don’t remember the exact year, but I remember that it was on Facebook. It did not take long for that online connection to become a real friendship, and it is one that has persisted despite life carrying us in different directions.   

When we sit down for this conversation in September, I am in Philadelphia and Matthew is in Brazil. He is preparing for Friends and Neighbors, a new art and literary festival in Lagos built around a deceptively simple question: What responsibility do we have to the people we call our friends and our neighbors?

It is a question that makes our own friendship an interesting place from which to begin. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Caleb: Something I find provocative about the title “Friends and Neighbors” is that you also seem to be making a statement about the ways queerness shows up in the ordinary. I’m thinking about this song, “Your driver could be LGBT, your friend could be LGBT, your neighbour could be LGBT.” Was that part of the conceptual framing?

Matthew: Actually, that’s another way to see it. When I thought of this concept, I thought of proximity within our community. A trip from Lagos to Europe is cheaper than a trip from Lagos to Abidjan, which is a neighboring country. For me, that’s a metaphor for what a lot of friendship within the African continent, especially around queerness, has been due to bad policy, homophobia and criminalization.

Queer people within Africa are not so familiar with themselves. And in that sense, we really haven’t constructed what queer Africanness is because we are still not so close to ourselves. But I find it interesting that you also see it from the point of everyday life, where people you come in contact with could be of this community or could possess these identities without you knowing.

Caleb: That’s what immediately came to my attention. Even when you say, “Hello, friends. Hello, neighbors,” you’re talking to all of us, right? It’s not “queer friends and neighbors.” The implicit read is that even if you’re straight, queer people are all around you. They’re your friends. They’re your neighbors. They might not tell you that they’re queer, but they’re there.

Matthew: From the perspective of bell hooks, societies should be built on love and friendship. This very important foundation of love has been taken away from queer people, or we’ve not been given that due to our queerness. Governmental policies and criminalization also make us live our lives in isolation. What it means to be friends right now is also very transactional, especially for queer people.

Caleb: One thing that has defined our friendship, at least for me, is honesty. There are things I can tell you that I can’t tell anybody else, obviously, so a sort of radical honesty. And as you were talking about transactional relationships, it made me think, what is the place of honesty in friendship, especially in a context where being honest about yourself can carry consequences?

Matthew: I think you don’t owe everyone that truth about yourself. For those who I truly trust, I owe them that responsibility of truth. And I do believe, for every friendship, there has to be that investment in honesty.

Caleb: But friendship in and of itself is a risk. I don’t think we realize that, but every friendship is a risk.

Matthew: Yeah, friendship sometimes, I mean, it’s not a constant state of feeling a certain way. It’s a roller coaster of emotions. It’s a journey. It’s an adventure. So you encounter a lot of things on the way.

You stretch your hand to someone and they actually bite your hand, then you know they are not really having that good intention towards you. So you can decide to stretch your hand again or push them away. But for me, I think it’s important that we’re able to stretch our hands and bring people together and do the work of educating them until we just know they’re irredeemable.

Caleb: Yeah…

Matthew: What responsibility do you think you owe me as your friend?

Caleb: You are now the one asking me questions. But no, I mean, I think you owe your friend loyalty. That’s one of the things that I’m non-negotiable on. I mean, there are many other things you owe your friend.

Matthew: You owe them honesty also?

Caleb: You owe them honesty. You also owe your friends grace. I give grace a lot. Maybe it’s not even grace. I’m also like, oh, this is not what the person… this is not what they are. They’re probably going through something. You owe your friends grace, honesty, loyalty.

I’m inclined to say those three are my non-negotiables, because I think when you start saying things that are a bit more like… For example, some people think that if your friends can’t attend all your events or your destination wedding, they are not your friends. I don’t think so.

Matthew: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of performative friendship where people deep down actually do not give a fuck about you, but they’re able to perform that they care for you, so you feel you are able to trust them enough to be vulnerable with them. Friendship allows for a lot of vulnerability, but in the end, I think it’s risky because a lot of people do not have that good intention.

There’s a lot of things that you have to navigate socially, culturally. There’s just so much you have to navigate in friendships that should be more like a learning journey instead of this walk towards utopia or perfectionism, because that’s not the reality.

And I think also with Obodo, a lot of the work we do as an organization, we very much use that spirit of friendship, collaboration, and a lot of friendships have been formed in our space, a lot of chosen families. People call our space home. So I think if you’re able to do all of that, you also need to be able to reflect on what responsibility you owe to this place, or to those around you, or those you call your friends.

Caleb: Something I know you’re very interested in is the “necropolitical condition” that queer people live in on the continent and in Nigeria. When you’re talking about bell hooks, love and friendship, do you think of love as an antidote to those conditions? What does love offer when you’re living in a state of perpetual precarity?

Matthew: I would say love offers you a free conscience. It might not offer you protection, but it does offer you something to hold onto and be proud of. We’re living in a world where it’s so dark and evil that sometimes you can’t really think of a future.

For me, growing up, I wouldn’t say I saw a lot of love around me. There were aspects of it that I held onto, but I wouldn’t say it was everything around me. At this moment, I think love offers us a freedom of conscience and some kind of peace. It wouldn’t provide us safety when we get into the real world, because when you love someone and become vulnerable to them, a lot of them respond in a way that is not reciprocal. So I think what love has to offer is that peace internally.

Caleb: What do you want people to take away from Friends and Neighbors?

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Matthew: I want people to understand better what it means to say they love someone, what it means to say they care for their friends, and what it means to love their neighbors and themselves. I think people do not know that love and friendship come with responsibilities.

And I’m not meaning neighbor as in the person you share a compound with, because we’re still living in a very homophobic society where your neighbor can actually be someone who could kill you because you’re gay. The sense of neighborhood would be that sense of community that goes beyond borders, that treats African queerness as a site of similar realities due to a shared history of colonization and neo-colonial politics.

Caleb: And what can people expect from Friends and Neighbors?

Matthew: It’s a lot of reflection and a moment to celebrate joy and African queerness and literature. But what is most important is to reflect on what it means to possess a queer African identity and ask questions which are not so common on this side of the world. What would it mean for us to define queerness in our own terms and in our own language, and not through a lot of Western frameworks we’ve seen on social media? What would it mean to live on our own terms?

With friendship also comes that realization of oneself and feeling safe enough to be what you’ve realized. I think that space will provide a chance for people to know that they do not have to mold themselves into something else just to be friends with one another.

Caleb: One thing I was curious about in thinking about how to approach this interview was how you describe yourself now. Do you think the term “activist” encompasses the breadth of your work currently?

Matthew: No, I don’t think the term covers everything I’m doing currently. There’s a way the term boxes you, where people have an idea of who you are and what you have to do. They prescribe what you have to do and expect you to do it the way they want, and that takes away from your autonomy as a person.

I’ve been in that position where people kind of dictate what I do, who I am. I want the freedom to think and imagine new worlds, not just for myself, but also for my community. That’s why I really do not call myself that anymore. I appreciate more expansive terms that allow me to fly and also dream and imagine.

Caleb: Have you told your friend that you love them today? Or your neighbor? Have you told me, your friend?

Matthew: I’ve said that to you many times. What else do you want to hear from me?

Friends and Neighbors festival runs from October 1 to 3 in Lagos, Nigeria.