On paper, The Death of Vivek Oji is about what it is like to be a genderqueer in a country that kills queer people for existing. While yet another queer story that ends in tragedy, Akwaeke Emezi flexes their agency by refusing to rewrite state violence, turning the final tragedy into something that is relievingly incidental in its mundanity. Emezi has said many a time that they do not fear death: death is a natural occurrence that gives life flavour, and not a necessarily tragic one. In The Death of Vivek Oji, tragedy exists in everything leading up to death. As Sarah Neilson writes in her review for Lambda Literary, “the inheritance of reductive and harmful colonial structures of gender is a great arcing tragedy of the story.”
“In The Death of Vivek Oji, tragedy exists in everything leading up to death.”
Not seen or accepted for who she is in life, in death, Vivek’s family finally see her clearly and inscribe her gravestone with her true name, Nnedi. The narrative opens with a thunderous line about how “they burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died”, organising the retroactive narrative around a continual echo of overarching death. The initial image of a young corpse wrapped in colourful fabric placed on her mother’s doorstep launches a meandering journey towards understanding how such a tragedy came to unfold.
Who did it? An intolerant society weaning intolerant families that drive queer children to create their own when biological ties disappoint, Emezi writes many options into this parody of a whodunit. What is apparent is that this author intimately knows the world they are writing about. The hot and heady suburban setting is rendered so imaginable that intimate characterisation is allowed to take centre stage, where even the well-meaning but ultimately destructive parents are animated in all their human complexity. The Death of Vivek Oji is told from an assortment of various perspectives of which Vivek’s is only one. Emezi employs a strategy of communal narration that makes the already-revealed final death a non-issue, situating the real story in how the characters respond to circumstance.
The Igbo-Tamil world of Emezi’s childhood is also one where ex-pat mothers married to native fathers create their own middle-class ‘Nigerwives’ community consolidated by the fact of their collective foreignness. Facing an older generation that refuses to see her for who she is, Vivek finds her own acceptance, love, and community in the community’s daughters and her own beloved cousin, Osita. We get a clear sense of what it feels like to be trans in this time and place through two distinct narrative worlds: one populated by an older generation synonymous with the persecuting nation, and another by a younger generation in which we can find a brief respite.
“This author intimately knows the world they are writing about.”
The Death of Vivek Oji is primarily interested in all the ways that love manifests itself and how limited understandings of sexuality constrain a more expansive understanding of everything love can be. While the concern with familial love quickly slides into one with familial incest that enormously complicates the character map, the intention is clear. Society blinds itself to the limitlessness of human identity and connection witnessed in The Death of Vivek Oji through binary notions of gender, love, biology, and family.
A child who was born on the day her grandmother died and experiences intermittent fugue states that have no rational explanation, Vivek is something of a unicorn in a community too afraid to challenge the status quo. She is the near-supernatural repository of magical realism that the narrative drinks from. A brief moment in which a market man perceives a mysterious beautiful woman he assumes to be a village newcomer seems an apt encapsulation of The Death of Vivek Oji, a story in which Emezi continuously highlights the fallibility of social perception and limits of what we think we know.
By Jane Link
JANE LINK is a master’s student and an editor for Split Lip Magazine, The Publishing Post, and her own beloved bigblackbooks. When not trying to land her first job in publishing, Jane loves to read historical fiction, self-help, and everything by our voices. She dreams of one day setting up an independent dedicated to publishing our voices. You can find her on Twitter @verybookishjane.
AKWAEKE EMEZI (they/them) is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Vivek Oji, which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Pet, a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature; and Freshwater, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Selected as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation, you can find them in liminal spaces or on their website.
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
Published by Riverhead on 4 Aug 2020
Genres: African, Coming-of-age, Contemporary, Literary fiction, Queer, Romance
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
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One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colourful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.
