Writing the Queer Self: Autofiction and Autoethnography in Chike Frankie Edozien’s Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man

Abstract

This article examines Chike Frankie Edozien’s Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay
Man as a queer life writing that operates at the intersection of autofiction and autoethnography. While
the memoir is conventionally identified as an autobiographical account of Edozien’s experiences as a
Nigerian gay man, this article argues that its narrative strategies extend beyond straightforward
autobiography. Rather, it is a complex form of self-writing in which autofictional and autoethnographic
strategies are employed. The analysis employs a qualitative research method through close textual
analysis and finds that autofiction allows the writers to move beyond the conventional autobiographical
emphasis on factual narration by creatively reorganising memory, experience, and identity, while
autoethnography connects personal experience to the cultural, religious, political, and social contexts in
which queer identities are produced.