“The Death of Vivek Oji” by Akwaeke Emezi - review

 “The Death Of Vivek Oji“ by Akwaeke Emezi:

“They burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died”, that’s how the book starts. It is very clear from the beginning that the titular Vivek Oji will meet death in this story and this knowledge, much in the same way as the imminent death of Giovanni in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, casts a dark, moody shadow of anxiety and apprehension that up until the end never leaves. 

The novel tries to solve the mystery of Oji’s death. His mother desperately wants to find out about the last hours of her son but is deflected by his friends who want to spare her but also have their own reasons not to tell. 

The narrative moves around in time and from viewpoint to viewpoint and paints, with recollections of Oji’s life from his friends and family and his own thoughts from beyond the grave, a richly layered picture of a middle-class community in Nigeria. Slowly it becomes evident that Oji is a person torn between the desire to be what he feels to be and the realization and fear how dangerous it would be to live out such a life in an antiquated, often barbarically relentless and cruel Nigerian society. Oji in the book is dead as well as alive, sometimes on the same page. One instant we see him as a boy playing with his mother’s jewelry, the next he lies dead in the garden of his parents or comments actions of his friends and family from his grave. 

Oji is a beautiful child and, as his cousin and best friend Osita remembers: “… so beautiful he made the air around him dull”. Much to the chagrin of his parents and the disappovement of his relatives, he never cuts his hair and lets it grow into a beautiful mane way below his shoulder blades. Oji was born on the same day his grandmother died and, like her, he is born with a scar like a “soft starfish” on his foot. This spiritual sign later becomes significant when Oji tells his friends that they can “refer to him as either she or he, that he is both”. 

But Oji has to hide, from society as well as from his parents. He knows he cannot open up to them, they would never understand. Some of their relatives even think him “sick” or being possessed by a demon. Even his own overprotective, loving mother, has no conception of what her child really is, both male and female. Her failure to do so is emblematic of the blindness of so many others who claim to love and adore him. Oji is someone who is painfully misunderstood.

In a beautifully corporeal, often heartachingly tender prose, the novel investigates ideas of selfhood that transcend the boundaries of the body and interrogates its meaning respectively meaninglessness. It draws a connection between existence and invisibility when Oji asks: “If nobody sees you, are you still there?”. Invisibility is, following his death, just Oji’s latest existential rendering, before that he experienced erasure while “walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong … the real me was invisible to them”. 

Against all the pain the world inflicts on him Oji shields himself with a strong self-acceptance and when finally Oji decides to live and break free the mood shifts from melancholy to triumph. He opens up to his friends and insists on living openly as both he, Oji, and she, Nnemdi, and becomes “bright and brilliant and alive”. Throughout most of the novel, Oji is referred to as “he” but towards the end she is given what is rightfully hers.

A deeply affecting novel, beautifully written. 

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