Wednesday, December 23, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Rebel Sisters by Tochi Onyebuchi

 



Rebel Sisters is Tochi Onyebuchi's follow up to his YA novel "War Girls" (see my review here) one of my favorite - and easily one of the most devastating - novels of last year.  War Girls was a novel essentially in the vein of RF Kuang's The Poppy War - in that it took a real world conflict, filled with horrible atrocities, and shifted it into a genre setting.  And well, moving the horrors of the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War into the future and adding giant mechas didn't make the story any less devastating, especially as it followed two sisters on opposite sides of the conflict.  And the story concluded in a satisfying if heartbreaking fashion, all the while making serious points using its historical background, that it never really made me think it needed a sequel, so when I found out it was getting one I was both frightened and excited.

And Rebel Sisters is....a hell of a sequel, although a much harder book to pin down than its predecessor.  It once again features past and present atrocities shifted into the future or at least referred to, although those atrocities are more from all over the world rather than specifically from its mainly Nigerian setting (the exiling of refugees and their physiological reaction to the threat of deportations, the adopting of such refugees by privileged white folk, and the genocide and erasure of the Uyghur people by China, etc.).  It combines these historical and present day horrors into a plot featuring characters who are forced to react to it all and try to find answers....but it stops well short of trying to suggest there are answers at all.  Indeed, one of the book's central arguments is left with an "answer" that is so ambiguous as to leave many readers thinking about it for days afterwards...and I'm not quite sure it how to feel about it.  

More specifics after the jump (Spoilers for War Girls are unmarked below, although I don't think they matter too much to your enjoyment of that book):

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
5 Years have passed since the end of the Biafran war, and since Ify's sister Onyii pushed Ify into a space ship to send her to a better place - the space colonies.  In the time since then Ify may have stopped using her Accent, but she has been adopted by a loving white family, found a friend with a heritage at least a little like her own, and has started to make a name for herself as a medical officer - with the eventual goal of becoming a full doctor who can help refugees like herself.  But when Ify's new mothers adopt another refugee from her homeland, one who is clearly lying about his background, it seems that Ify's horrific past is coming back to haunt her.  And when refugee children, threatened with deportation, all suddenly begin to collapse into comas, Ify finds herself doing the unthinkable: going back to her homeland of horrors to try and find an answer to save them.  

But the Nigeria of Ify's childhood, torn apart by Civil War, no longer exists.  Instead what is there is an authoritarian state, which has resorted to highly advanced measures to erase the fact that the war ever happened.  Inside that state awakes Uzo, a young synth given memories by Xifeng, the Chinese chronicler who once helped Ify and Onyii at the end.  At first confused by the memories, Uzo begins to help Xifeng try to restore the memories and history of the tragedy to the Nigerian people...in defiance of the authorities.  

And so when Ify - who has tried to forget the past - and Uzo - who is trying to help restore it - meet in a land now filled with a different type of horror, they will each have to make decisions about the right way, if any, to try and make a new future...
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War Girls flipped between Ify and Onyii's perspectives, as they were separated by the civil war, found themselves on opposite sides - both committing atrocities for their new sides - and then reunited first in hate and then in one final moment of love, with Onyii sacrificing her last few moments to get Ify safely away into space.  Rebel Sisters, taking place five years later, also flips between two perspectives:  Ify's once more, but also that of a synth named Uzoamaka ("Uzo").  Uzo's perspective is a bit different than what we've had before - first, it comes in first person (Ify's remains in third) making her view a little more personal, and second in that Uzo is essentially child-like in personality: she has the memories of other humans - older humans - but she doesn't quite connect them fully with her own experiences, and as such her perspective is always that of a child doing things by instinct, without quite fully understanding what is going on around her.  It's an interesting choice that comes to head in the book's final chapter.  

These perspectives, Ify's and Uzo's, are used to tell a story that again deals heavily with time-displaced versions of atrocities from our own world.  So we have an advanced country - in this case the space station colony - threatening deportation of refugees, which might have resulted in a large number of those refugees falling into comas in a physiological reaction to terror (as indeed seems to have happened in Sweden).  You have modern surveillance tech used for fascist purposes, and you have the story of the genocide and the erasure of the memories and culture of the Uyghur Muslims by China - still ongoing at this very moment - being not time displaced but a very real memory driving one of the book's major characters.  As with War Girls, Onyebuchi deftly manages to merge these events into his plot and setting, so they only enhance the book's impact if you recognize them rather than distracting you instead.  

These plot elements are combined heavily to form a plot that deals heavily with the question of the value of memories and a person or people's past:  When those memories/pasts are horrible horrible things, is it better to remember them or to try and forget?  If one can forcibly erase such memories, is such a cause justified?  A major conflict of views comes from these questions, between Ify who desperately wants to move forward without recalling the atrocities she's committed and Xifeng, the Chinese woman who in War Girls acted as a neutral observer of the conflict and who now wishes to restore the memories taken away from the Nigerian people.  Xifeng's goal, is both seemingly noble and horrifying, as demonstrated by Ify when the two eventually come into conflict, and the question of what gives her the right to do it as someone not actually from Nigeria, but one whose people has once experienced similar atrocities of their own she's determined not to see repeated elsewhere.  

I don't want to spoil anymore than I already have, and Rebel Sisters is honestly deeper even that I portray above, sometimes beyond its ability to actually pull off - for example, a major side character is Ify's medical assistant Grace, who is hinted to also have suffered from atrocities...but we never get to hear her perspective, and so she feels sometimes just kind of there and unexplored despite all the book hinting that she will make a bigger impact.  And what makes Rebel Sisters so hard to qualify is that like its predecessor it does not attempt to provide any answers to its questions, and the answers that provide seem to suggest that every answer is wrong, with the book concluding in devastating fashion for both of its protagonists once again.  I did not come into this book expecting a happy ending of any sort, but Rebel Sisters tremendously pulls the rug under both its protagonists feet in its final chapters, which just didn't quite feel as setup well as in its predecessor, and just almost felt mean.  

The result is a fascinating book looking at how one approaches atrocities, who has the right to do so, and what it means to move on or to remember, through the eyes of a trio of fascinatingly strong characters.  It's not quite as strong as its predecessor, perhaps because it is stitching together a series of in unconnected events from our world, but it is still well worth your time and an impressive work in its own right.

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