Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”

Abstract

The concluding remarks revisit the question first posed in the introduction when the study asked what (im)possible worlds and (im)possible loves might look like. Throughout this book, both space and love have emerged as verbs, not nouns. The worlds constructed and the loves materialised in the texts by contemporary African diasporic women writers have opened up possible and still unexplored new pathways; they have wilfully engaged in processes of imagining be/longing-together, being-with-another. Their imaginaries of longing and belonging, which delineate the oppressive dynamics as well as the resistant revisionings of space while also, importantly, writing about love, intimacy, desire and romance, collectively constitute a heterogeneous body of texts which tell no single story but instead bear witness to the different geographical and affective border-crossings that happen when combining these two spheres.

Freedom and love are doing words. They are we-forming, we-sustaining words. Their conjoined impulse is toward making collective living more possible and more pleasurable.

—Keguro Macharia, “Political Vernaculars: Freedom and Love” (2016, n. pag.)