Dressed to impress

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Today, October 1st, 2011 is the 51st anniversary of Nigeria’s Independence. I am participating in the Nigerian Independence Day Reading/Reviewing Project hosted by Amy of AmyReads fame.  Below, you’ll find my contribution.

 

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Nigeria is that one can see its potential lying there beneath all its flaws. The possibility of a better place and a better people sharpens the pain of the present.  In many ways, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death presents a similarly painful duality.

Like its protagonist, Who Fears Death is a mixture of many things: science fiction, the classic bildungsroman, dystopian fiction + feminist fiction and fantasy. It is the tale of Oyesonwu, a young sorceress who is a conceived when a light skinned man from an oppressive tribe, the Nuru, rapes her dark skinned mother who is from the oppressed tribe of Okeke. The novel tracks Oyesonwu as she comes into her magical powers, gather’s companions and sets off to destroy her father/rapist and end the oppression. The plot can easily be summed up as: village life (Things Fall Apart) + coming of age and power (Harry Potter) + fantasy quest (LOTR).

The author lays a story of greater dimensions on this simple foundation and explores a staggering range of issues.

There’s the aforementioned rape, which is much worse than it sounds because it is a weapon, a tactic used by the Nuru to impregnate Okeke women with lighter skinned children and so destroy their families and communities. The author does not shy away from these events and readers unfamiliar with the horror of rape will find themselves confronted with its details.

Oyesonwu is one of these biracial offspring, an Ewu. Through her, the author explores all the emotional trauma that comes with belonging to many and no places at the same time. It is this profound loneliness that leads Oyesonwu to Mwita, the Ewu man who eventually become her companion.

In what may be the best written section of the novel, Oyesonwu and three girls gets their clitorises cut off at the age of eleven. It is a crushing rendering of the confusion, pain and long-lasting damage caused by female circumcision. The author confronts the details and practicalities- what to do with the knife, what to wear home after, the reasons and emotions, the traditions that force such horrors upon children. Very well done.

The author has an impressive eye for physical and emotional detail, a talent for capturing spiritual movement and energy in concrete ideas readers can understand. Here she describes one of Oyesonwu’s transformations:

 ”When I’d changed into a mouse my dominant emotion was fear. Fear of being crushed, eaten, found, starving. When I changed back, the residual paranoia was so strong that I couldn’t leave my room for hours.”

and here after showing (through sorcery) her townspeople the happenings in a distant town:

“I pulled in the vision as one folds up a map.

There are gems in other places. When the protagonist and her companions come across a town in the throes of violence, they try to stop it and Oyesonwu:

“knocks men off women, their penises still erect and slick with blood and wetness.”

and

“Leaving this body will be easy, she’d always loved travelling.”

Meta-victories abound. Africa has a specific and ancient relationship with sorcery/witchcraft/juju. This relationship persists today despite serious efforts (by Africans themselves who are mostly now devoutly Christian or Muslim) to leave that portion of history behind. Accusations of witchcraft still hold serious consequences for the accused including physical harm and expulsion from communities. It is a victory of sorts to make readers who have a strong reflexive distaste for witchcraft (include evangelicals) sympathize with Oyesonwu.

By the end of Who Fears Death, the author has explored horrifying or controversial issues such as weaponized rape, tribalism, racism, female circumcision, pedophilia, motherhood, patriarchy, genocide, mankind’s potential for self destruction, gender roles and so on. A coherent, insightful and well written novel containing all these issues, the fantasy arc and a dystopian vision of Africa would be a marvelous thing indeed, a work of genius even. But this is not that novel. Its imperfections are too strong and woven in too deeply among its strengths. We see the potential but it is unfulfilled.

The prose is mostly awful. Who Fears Death is a frame story and Oyesonwu narrates the entire story (to someone who records the details). Significant portions of the story read as if the writer was taking dictation while someone else told a story, complete with all the authorial intrusions. While very authentic to the story structure (someone is telling a story), we don’t read the same way we hear and the words and sentences seem less to flow across the page than to fall down a stairway. Of the recognition of love, the author writes:

“…, but in this moment we realized we were in love. The realization was like flipping the power on.”

and here an aside, after which the story slows down considerably.

“Dare I say that just after the Rain Festival, when I returned to Aro’s hut, the rest of my story, though it spans over four years, begins to move very fast.”

and this:

“THE PAIN OF STONES AND RAGE FOR WHAT I had yet to do threatened to pull me underground.”

Writers from oral cultures face interesting dilemmas when they try to capture the casual intricacy of oral storytelling in prose. This requires some translation, a process that usually involves losing some of the rhythm of the spoken word in exchange for a smoother reading experience. The author appears to have skipped this translation in favor of authenticity (“On top of all of this, at eleven I still had hopes”). It was the wrong choice in this case.

There are other craft failures. Very little is shown, everything is told and even when something is shown, it is still told. (“I was sad…I was angry…I gnashed my teeth. I was angry.” ) The pacing can be problematic; the final confrontation which the 300 prior pages build up to is quick and ineffectual.  Coincidence and prophecies are deployed for maximum but ultimately unbelievable effect.  There is a great temptation to ignore these failures, after all we’re talking about rape, and female circumcision and genocide, we can’t expect the writing to be perfect. But the cumulative effect of these small missteps serves to distract and irritate.

Also: The word “intercourse” is used to describe sex countless in the story and it is incredibly grating. I think it’s fair to say that the “intercourse” will never be an evocative, accurate or even cool way to describe the act, not even in post-apocalyptic way. Authors would do well to think of alternatives that do not evoke ships scraping through a dry Suez Canal.

Complex, controversial issues are mixed blessings. The novel deserves praise for managing to fit so many in but it would have benefited from authorial restraint. Very early in the story, a reader learns that this will be an “issues” book, not because the author is preachy or to brazen in the handling of the issues (only occasionally with dialogue), but because the sheer number of issues requires the story to pivot and turn to engage each new one. The reader can see these turns and it can be tiring.

And then there is the penis question. The author sometimes paints too broad strokes of men as rapists, murderers, sexually aggressive morons:

“I also had to deal with stupid leering and grabbing by both men and boys”,

and

“All the filth those men had heaped on me with their filthy actions and filthy words and filthy ideas, none of it mattered now. Mwita, Mwita, Mwita.”

child abusers:

“In the market, men had tried to grab me”…”All this confused my six-year old mind.”

avenged oppressors

“Every single male human capable of impregnating a woman was dead”.

This does reflect reality in many ways, men are the major perpetrators of crimes against women. Still, one never hears of the Nazi men, Hutu men, Janjaweed men or American men. In these cases of genocide and racism, the (mostly male) perpetrator’s actions are greater than their gender; they come to represent the ideology of ALL their people. But in who fears death, the Nuru and Okeke men are distinctly terrible, separate from their society’s psychosis. While reading, I thought:

1. Are there sympathies, insights and understandings in this story that a woman would be more receptive to than I am? This could either mean that I’m an asshole or the text relies too heavily on gender context and doesn’t do enough to make them available to men.
2. If these sympathies insights and understandings do exist, I desperately want to partake of them. I want to receive the full richness in all fiction and this particular fiction, despite my gender.
3. As a reader of a novel that explores these issues, can I expect the text to make them available despite my gender? Isn’t it a writer’s duty to show us more than what we would normally see?
4. I need to read more feminist fiction. Is castration (mentioned by multiple characters in this story) and a cutting down of men to their correct ape-like level necessary for the uplifting of women?

The mystical elements – sorcery, magic, juju – blend in with the themes and issues in rather interesting ways. But those same mystical elements also weaken the themes and issues. The effects of female circumcision are healed by magic. Too many significant characters turn out to be sorcerers and this clouds the motivations for their actions with respect to the themes and issues.  It turns for example, that Oyesonwu’s father, the dark lord/rapist, specifically raped her mother in order for her to conceive a sorcerer. This revelation ruins the more nuanced exploration of weaponized rape that came in the pages before.

Who Fears Death has been well praised – PW Best Book of 2010, Nebula Award Nominee  and Tiptree Honor Book –  and while I find significant problems with the text (and wonder at how few of the reviews bring up these problems), I believe the praise is well deserved.The author’s bravery and ambition are impressive and remain undiminished by the final result.  Few books elicit a strong reaction from readers, most books that do cause a reaction, cause either strongly positive or negative ones. Who Fears Death unleashes a conflicting conflagration of emotions and ideas, positive and negative, and lasting. Like Nigeria, it is to be loved, to be disliked and to be thought of constantly.

Read this book.

 

 

 

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