GLENNA GORDON is drawn to “alternative narratives, surprising subcultures,” and themes “outside of the realm of mainstream photojournalism.” So in 2012, when, in the conservative region of northern Nigeria, the documentary photographer encountered littattafan soyayya—a genre of romance literature penned by women—she knew she had stumbled upon her next project.
Littattafan soyayya consists of many types of works, including “morality tales and pulp fiction,” Gordon said, though most of the stories are about love and marriage. Composed in Hausa, the most dominant of the Chadic languages, these stories are usually handwritten in small composition notebooks by women in and around the northern Nigerian city of Kano. The stories are then typed up, mimeographed, assembled by hand, published and sold in markets across the Sahel region, just below the Sahara…
