Editor’s Note
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” — Carl Jung
What does it mean to come out? Beyond the popular sense that’s bound to sexuality or gender, what does it mean to truly emerge from concealment, to step from shadow into light, to declare one’s presence in a world that has not always made room for it?
“Coming Out” is an anthology preoccupied with the struggle between being and seeming, between the self we know and the self we show. It concerns itself with the distance between our inner landscapes and the faces we present to the world, a distance that, for many, feels like an ocean crossed in the dark, without promise of shore.
To “Come Out” is to say: I am. Not I wish, not I might be, not I apologize for being, but I simply am.
From Doyin Ajayi to Crystal Murr, our contributors look into the cost of performing versions of ourselves that others find palatable? And what becomes possible when we finally refuse that bargain? These stories, poems, essays, and visual arts document the archaeology of self-discovery, the painful excavation of authenticity from beneath layers of expectation, fear, and inherited silence.
But we must understand that even though coming out is commonly seen as an ‘event’, it is, in actuality, often a lifelong process of continuous revelation and rerevelation. We come out to our families, our communities, and our lovers, but first, and perhaps most crucially, we come out to ourselves. This is the most difficult emergence of all: to admit to ourselves what we have long known but refused to name, to finally grant ourselves permission to be as we are.
And this is where literature becomes essential. Literature does not give us identity; it gives us language for identity. It offers us mirrors where we might recognize ourselves and windows through which we glimpse other ways of being. Through stories, we rehearse versions of ourselves not yet lived. Through poems, we name what we thought was unspeakable. Through essays, we think our way toward clarity. Read these pages and know that every act of literary creation is also an act of self-creation, that every story we tell about others teaches us how to tell the truth about ourselves.
James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This anthology is an act of facing. Since our founding by students of the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin, Akpata Magazine has understood literature as a space where we meet versions of ourselves we didn’t know existed. With thousands of readers engaging with our work, we have witnessed how stories create permission to question, to grieve, to hope, to become.
“Coming Out” continues this sacred work. It is our most daring issue yet, both because of what it reveals and because of what it refuses to hide.
Nwodo Chukwu-Divine
Chief Editor
