SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi: https://t.co/YIYRxw5ZpI
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 19, 2022
Short Review: 9 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): The Nommo Award winner for best SF/F by an African writer, The Death of Vivek Oji is a powerful but hard to read story of a younger queer generation struggling to understand their feelings in homophobic Nigeria, through the life & death of one queer teen
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 19, 2022
2/3
The Death of Vivek Oji is the third novel by author Akwaeke Emezi, who previously wrote the acclaimed books "Freshwater" and "Pet" (I reviewed Pet here). I really liked Pet, which featured a trans girl in a seeming utopia that had supposedly gotten rid of the "monsters" of society, and has seemingly forgotten how to recognize a monster when it comes back. This third novel of theirs was just declared the winner of this year's Nommo Award for best African Speculative Fiction book in 2020*, so I immediately picked it up from my elibrary to give it a read.
*Note: Though this won the Nommo Award, this book features only minor speculative elements - the eponymous character is implied to be the reincarnation of their grandmother, as exemplified by them being born with the grandma's distinctive scar/birthmark and then later seems to be viewing events as a ghost. So fair warning for those looking for explicit SF/F*
The Death of Vivek Oji is a powerful story of a younger LGBTQ generation in a still very homophobic Nigeria. The story is told from multiple perspectives: the two first person perspectives of its two main characters (Vivek and Osita) as they (especially Osita) struggle to understand their feelings and desires, and a third person more omniscient perspective following their parents and the older generation as they struggle to understand Vivek and themselves during Vivek's life and afterwards. It's a short novel, but took me a while to read due to its difficult and yet impossible to ignore material.
Trigger Warnings: Homophobia, Transphobia, Rape (off page, but an attempt on a prominent character), Domestic Abuse, Child/Religious Abuse, Incest (first cousins) etc. None of this is gratuitous and nearly all of it serves an essential purpose towards the story's message, but this is not an easy book to read.
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Vivek Oji was brought dead to the outside of their house by some mysterious person on the same day the market burned down. In life, Vivek was thought by strange by Vivek's parents and their parent's generation, driving Vivek's mother Kavita to desperation as she tried to find a way to help her son. Now Vivek's father can barely get out of bed and Kavita is desperate to find some answers as to why her son is dead.
But Kavita isn't the only one grieving, for she never really knew the real Vivek as well as others from Vivek's generation - most notably Vivek's first cousin Osita. Osita and Vivek's paths crossed and uncrossed repeatedly as they grew up, until the fateful time Osita tried to acknowledge a part of himself he desperately once tried to deny....a part that he was afraid of and Vivek was not.
It's a part of Vivek and Osita, and their friends, that would be anathema to their parents to find out, but Kavita's search and Osita's shame will not let it stay hidden forever....
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The Death of Vivek Oji is a story told in two styles - in third person for the parts seemingly told from the perspective of the older generations like Vivek's mother Kavita and their* father and in first person for the parts told from Vivek and Osita's perspectives, with Vivek sort of telling his parts as if they're a ghost in the afterlife. This allows for the book to illustrate two different perspectives of generations, for better or worse.
*It is fairly obvious that Vivek is genderqueer or trans early on, with them being implied to be the reincarnation of Vivek's grandmother who died on the date of their birth. For the most part, the book uses he/his pronouns for Vivek because this wasn't open to most of the characters, until near the end where it uses she/her from one perspective . For the sake of this review I'll be using they/their, since they aren't openly trans except in two scenes and most of the book uses he/him and it's not totally clear if they would always want to go by she/her instead. Apologies if this seems incorrect or offensive.
The older generation is massively homophobic just like the status quo in Nigeria, sometimes due to religion and sometimes just due to cultural homophobia. This is despite the fact that this culture is infused with the perspectives of others from outside the country, like the Nigerwives' group of foreign women who all married into Nigerian families and who meet up to share gossip and community. And this is despite the fact that these cis hetero families are often screwed up and abusive in ways that harm each other - far more than allowing people to love whoever they want could ever be. So you have a husband who has a second family openly and beats his first wife despite having a daughter with her, you have a mechanic with a devoted but seemingly barren wife who cheats on her until he realizes how much she's done for him, you have the wife who is devoutly religious and wants to commit an exorcism over a femme-demonstrating nephew, etc. etc. These families are hard to read because they're just consistently screwed up in various realistic ways, and their attempts to handle their children just are so screwed up because they can not understand.
And then you have the younger generation, embodied by Vivek and Osita, but not only them, who are often queer and experimenting in ways their parents could never understand - so besides those main duo you have a pair of girls who have no problem treating Vivek as another girl to play with once they're in young adulthood, or you have two young women falling for each other even as one of them is upset about the other being bi. But mostly we have the two main characters: Osita and Vivek.
Vivek always felt uncomfortable growing up, often spacing out due to feeling disassociated, as they and their parents tried to get themselves comfortable in being the boy they were supposed to be - Vivek even by trying to watch Osita have sex as a voyeur and by fighting; their parents by sending Vivek to a military-esque boarding school. But they could never fit, and when they came home from college, they stopped trying, letting their hair grow long, and shutting themselves in....until they found that a few of their childhood friends, girls, understood them...and then they found Osita once more. These friends, even the desperately afraid Osita, make Vivek more and more bold about showing who they actually are, despite the danger that could be in a country where being non-cis-hetero is illegal. For Osita, he doesn't struggle with his own gender identity the way Vivek did, but he struggles with the idea he might be attracted to someone other than girls, and that he could even speak that out loud, the opposite of Vivek. Much of this book is him in the past coming to terms that internally he has such desires, and externally in the present struggling with where he goes from here without Vivek with them.
I don't want to say any more since it's hard to without spoiling - you should get this experience for yourself. This is a hell of a novella, and despite the tragedy involved is arguably an optimistic one going forward despite it all. Definitely Recommended.
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