BOOK REPORT: WHO FEARS DEATH BY NNEDI OKORAFOR

 



I went to the library the other day and did a search for “apocalyptic fiction” because I was in that kind of mood. I picked a couple of titles. One was a trilogy set in post-nuke Arizona—and well, there were the usual cannibals and crazies. I made it through the first book but it was chewy and without much flavour. So, I tossed it out the window as I was driving by a herd of walkers.

But my second pick, Who Fears Death, is the kind of novel you just don’t want to put down. The story is set thousands of years in the future, in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nnedi Okorafor evokes a society in conflict, with warring groups divided by clan, skin-colour* and historical enmity.  However, it is her depiction of life in the village of Jwahir, the coming of age struggles of Onyesonwu, and richly detailed, complex characters and nuanced layers of relationships that are so rewarding to read. When you feel you’re reading about a real place and people, the storyteller has hit the mark! It should be noted that Okorafor’s depictions of inter-tribal warfare are graphic and difficult to read, and bring to mind the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the recent attacks by Boko Haram cultists in Nigeria, and warfare in Sundan. Her writing has a visceral effect on the reader.

Onyesonwu is a child of rape, a “Ewu”, whose mother, after her ordeal, escapes the brutal campaign led by a cohort of Nuru attacking her village. She later gives birth in the desert to a daughter, whose distinctive,  tan-coloured skin will mark her as a societal outcast. The story is told in the first person by Onyesonwu (her name means “Who Fears Death?”)  She dictates her story to an unnamed scribe during what we learn are her final days before she is to be executed.

I can’t say enough about the ease with which young Onyesonwu’s tale is told. Okorafor's voice is that of a true story-teller—simple, direct, calm, like someone saying: “Here is what happened. Let me tell you.” Even her descriptions of horrific inter-tribal carnage, rape, genital mutilation, as well as Onyeswu’s terrifying visions and transformations, are done with a stoic voice that reveals how and why such things happened, and then says: “Let me tell you what happens next.”

Nnedi Okorafor

The story of Onyesonwu is set in a time when sorcery and “ju-ju” magic exist alongside elements of modern technology—there are some computers, cellphones, electricity and amenities such as running water—but on a more limited ‘village-scale’. One passage relates a tale from the “Great Book”, the Okeke bible. It is a creation story describing how a great civilization was destroyed because of the hubris of the Okeke, who thereafter are relegated to the status of slaves for their punishment. Consequently, the dark-skinned Okeke live on the edge of destruction and adopt a fatalism that may doom them. As Onyesonwu matures and discovers her latent magical powers under the tutelage of Aro, the village sorcerer, she rebels against such fatalism. As a young adult, she leaves Jwahir, accompanied by Mwita, her “life’s companion” and a group of her childhood friends. She embarks on her quest with two purposes in mind: The first is to discover the truth around a prophesy telling of a saviour who will liberate the Okeke people. Her second purpose is to find the man who raped her mother—her birth father—and kill him.

Her journey is like those found in many spiritual quests: A small group accompanies an anointed saviour, who we learn is Onyesonwu, herself. They travel through desert lands**, where Onyesonwu undergoes hardships and is tested by supernatural powers, and at last arrives at the place where she will be sacrificed, something she has seen in a vision. Her subsequent death is to signal a great change in the world.

Okorafor draws on myth and legend, as well as from Islam, Christianity and other traditions to create a richly evocative and magical journey one woman makes to fulfill her destiny. 

Cheers, Jake.  

*I am reminded of Rwanda, and the divisions between the light-skinned Tutsis and the darker Hutus. In Okorafor’s future, the Nuru and Okeke are the equivalent of these groups, with the Nuru more war-like and bent on a campaign of genocide, and whose goal is the eventual eradication of the Okeke people.

** Nnedi Okorafor provides the reader with little back-story as to the setting of this future time. Much later in the book we are given a detail: As they journey west, Onyeswu muses that most of the world was now desert and the oceans have all dried up.)

[In her Afterword, Okorafor states that she was inspired to write the story of Onyesonwu after she read an account of organized rape by combatants in Sudan. She calls it “weaponized rape”, a truly reprehensible practice and a war crime in anyone's book.]

Some reviewers of her book have compared Nhedi Okorafor's writing to Octavia Butler's. I’d agree with that assessment, and I would add that her book, in its details of people, their thoughts, temperaments, relationships , etc., as well as the creation of Okeke village life, reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal Always Coming Home, with her portrayal of life in a post-apocalypse California (and which I reviewed in an earlier post. Ed.)

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death, Daw books, Inc. New York, 2010.

BOOK REPORT: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS BY KURT VONNEGUT

Just a short note on Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I found reading it to be exhausting, but in the end very rewarding. Characters, dialogue, histories and situations flowed like a torrent from Vonnegut’s rapid-fire pen, and at times I felt I was drowning in all the details and anecdotes, asides and observations etched with his rich, acerbic and sardonic humour.  One section in particular was notable for its thoughtfulness. In what he calls the “spiritual climax” (224) of his novel, Vonnegut—speaking directly to the reader and writing himself into the story—sits in the cocktail lounge at Midland City’s Holiday Inn (where the last third of the novel is mostly set). He describes how the artist, Rabo Karabekian, in explaining the meaning of his abstract painting—purchased at public expense by the city council of Midland City and about which its citizens could make neither hide nor hair of—has “rescued” (225) him. “I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day.” (ibid)  

Previously, Vonnegut states he had been “enraged and mystified” by the irrationality and ill-behaviour of his fellow humans. He suggests, with his usual, brilliant satire, that they behaved much like characters in novels. Americans shot each other, he says, because it was “a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.” Or governments treated their citizens like they were “as disposable as paper facial tissues” because “that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up stories.” He resolves therefore to “shun storytelling” and “write about real life”, to give equal weight to every character and all facts within his stories. He would, he says, “bring chaos to order”, instead of the other way around, like is traditionally done in most fictional writing,  which shapes plot and characters to suit some preordained outcome.

Before he has Karabekian address his critics in the Holiday Inn lounge, Vonnegut, as both author and character (and drinking a “Black and White with water”), says to the reader that he had,

“…come to the conclusion that there is nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide…I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me.” (ibid)

      What Karabekian says is this:

      “I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the ‘I am” to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.  

     “I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown [A nearby federal prison]. Very well—let a five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.” (226-7)

"The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Rabo Karabekian" *

Vonnegut’s  earlier vision of his fellow humans as soulless, mindless machines has been replaced with one envisioning all living creatures, at their cores, as being luminous bands of light, all of equal weight and importance in an ever-evolving universe.  And that’s quite the pep-talk coming from a made up character in a novel! Finally, the question of what we do with all the messy layers that life tends to deposit atop the luminous bands of our lives is one that Breakfast of Champions attempts to answer, and is a question that is asked, in one form or another, throughout Vonnegut's novels.

Cheers, Jake.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Vonnegut, Kurt, Breakfast of Champions. Delacorte Press, 1973. Random House. NY, NY, 2006.


*Just as a point of interest, Saint Anthony (b. circa 251 AD) was an Egyptian monk who is known as the father of Christian monasticism. He is said to have been supernaturally tempted while in his hermitage there, and throughout the centuries there have been numerous artists who have depicted his struggles--notably Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch and in modern times Max Ernst and Salavador Dali. This version by Bosch I like the best because of the tranquility of the setting, suggesting that Saint Anthony has 'tamed' many of the demons tempting him. In Ernst and Dali's versions--not so much.
p.s. The version by 'Rabo Karbekian' is not a 'real painting', I don't see any artist asscociated with it. So perhaps it was an illustration for another edition to Vonnegut's book? I think we get the minimalist idea, though the painting itself sucks! 
[Thanks to the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, for the info and snaps. What will we do without thee, when ye finally wend thy way?]

by Bosch (c. 1500)

by Ernst (1945)

by Dali (1946)