FICTION

THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI

By Akwaeke Emezi

Faber & Faber/Paperback/248 pages/$27.82/Available at bit.ly/DeathofVOji_AE

Rating: 4 Stars

On the day that the market burns down in a riot, Vivek Oji's mother opens the door of their house to find her son lying dead on the veranda, wrapped in woven akwete cloth, the back of his skull broken.

Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi, whose much-lauded debut novel Freshwater was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, delivers a sorrowful, evanescent tale of young Nigerians growing up in a community that lacks the language, let alone the space, to hold them.

The tragedy of Vivek Oji begins when he is born the same day that his grandmother Ahunna dies, a scar on her foot inexplicably appearing as a birthmark on his. "They brought him into a home filled with incapacitating sorrow; his whole life was a mourning," writes Emezi.

Vivek is a strange and beautiful child. He has blackouts and speaks of things nobody else can hear, like the sound of rain. As he grows older, he begins to grow his hair longer.

His parents try to love him without fully knowing how. His father Chika sends him to a military academy to toughen him up. His mother Kavita, who left Delhi to escape the mark of her father's caste, brushes and oils Vivek's hair, yet feels shut out from his inner life.

After his death, she is determined to find answers, even though the friends closest to him - including his cousin Osita, grappling with a guilt of his own - fear the truth she seeks will destroy her.

The Death Of Vivek Oji is not told in a linear fashion, nor confined to a single perspective. Rather, it is a cacophony of voices - Vivek, Kavita, Osita and more - that form the fragmented impression of a person.

Emezi disrupts boundaries, letting past and present circle fluidly in the narrative such that Vivek is at once dead and not dead, male and not male, scattered and whole.

Vivek throughout is a flickering, undefinable presence, even as his body is marked viscerally again and again. Cigarette burns appear on his skin after he returns from boarding school, welts on his flesh after a particularly horrifying experience with exorcism at his aunt's church.

Especially powerful are the words Emezi finds for dysphoria: "I felt heavy my whole life... Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body."

The Death Of Vivek Oji is a heartbreaking, yet uplifting attempt to voice difference. It rejects the singular narrative and seeks multiple ways to be.

If you like this, read: Freshwater by the same author (Faber & Faber, 2018, $18.27, available at bit.ly/Freshwater_AE), about Ada, a young Nigerian woman haunted by the ogbanje, spirits from Igbo cosmology that give her multiple personalities and self-destructive tendencies.

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