The relationships between Osita and Vivek, Juju and Elizabeth was wonderfully tender and their relationships and sexual relations were fluid, creating its own problems and tensions, but resolving others. There is just so much contained in the 250 pages of this novel! So much that is makes it really difficult to review, in fact.
So: If nobody sees you, are you still there? I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change… the real me was invisible to them. His father, however, puts his behaviour and his growing hair down to mental illness his mother-in-law, Mary, who ascribes it to demonic possession. As we follow Vivek’s growing realisation of and reconciliation with his transgender identity as Nnemdi, the younger generation of friends – the daughters of the Nigerwives organisation, supporting those who married in Nigeria from abroad – love and support him.
And this fracturing, this disjointing of the novel feels just so right and organic somehow.Įmezi creates a potent sense of community, set in their native Nigeria, bound up by the traditional taboos and prejudices whilst also confronting new ideas of identity. We shift between third person and first person. We see his father Chika paralysed by his grief his mother, Kavita, manically seeking the truth around his death Osita, Vivek’s cousin and lover, losing himself in drink and sex Juju, his friend becoming mute. In a slim novel, his presence was powerful.Įmezi plays fast-and-loose with chronology and narrative voice here as Vivek’s death fractures the world around him. We see his birth and his childhood and his quest for his own identity we also hear his voice from beyond the grave and those were perhaps the most poignant passages. We learn who Vivek was we learn to love him we learn (eventually) how he died we learn the impact his death has had on his family, friends and community.Īnd despite being dead, Vivek remains a vital character in the novel: we are treated to flashbacks all the way back to to his parents’ courtship in a bravura opening chapter imagining a sequence of photographs telling their own own stories. And this image of Vivek, naked, wrapped in a cloth, delivered dead to his parents door is the brutal central moment around which this novel revolves. This is one of the most potent opening lines I have come across. They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died. And the opening line delivered exactly that: What was I expecting? The usual from Emezi: brutal and unflinching honesty, glorious language, compelling characters and heart ache. Their novels are glorious, but also challenging. A release of one of their books is an event in my literary calendar and I have been looking forward to this one from the moment it was released, but I did not feel that I was in the right place to read it. Akwaeke Emezi is one of my favourite contemporary writers.
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