Author: Akwaeke Emezi

Publication Details: Riverhead Books, 2020, 175 pages

Titled after its eponymous character, Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi’s chef d’oeuvre chronicles the experiences of characters who strive to define their existence amidst repugnant forces of social conventions and crowd mentality. Weaved in the garbs of complexity, this narrative spreads its wings across the genres of crime fiction, queer literature, mysticism and, bildungsroman, thus, resisting the attempt to be holistically grasped in a single reading. It is a story that incessantly lures the curios reader back to itself. 

In The Death of Vivek Oji, Emezi fashions a correlate to their Freshwater, thereby maintaining the momentum it built . The Death of Vivek Oji have garnered several accolades ranging from the Stonewall Award Honor, to the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction in 2020. 

Amazingly, the peculiarity of Emezi’s works is in their ability to harness the consciousness of characters amidst the bustling dictatorship of social model of existence. Of course, with the character of Vivek Oji, this narrative is not left out of the trope. 

Vivek Oji, the text’s protagonist, unfortunately inhabits  a world where identity must conform to established ideologies of being. This reality erects his greatest unbecoming as he is crushed in-between feminine consciousness and the biological makeup of a man. For this reason, Vivek emerges a victim of the tides of identity crises. Underlining this identity issue is the bildungsroman perspective which entirely captures his\her  experiences from childhood up until maturity. The personal pronoun her and his, used in identifying Vivek Oji is a narrative technique that communicates the fluid identity of the eponymous character which is an outcome of identity crises. As a male child, his parents, Chika and Kavita, beholds him a male child. Growing into maturity, he metamorphoses into a female identity, haven eventually eaten the forbidden fruit which opens his eyes to the events surrounding his birth. Now as a female, Vivek assimilates her reincarnation of Ahunna, her grandmother, after Mary, her uncle’s wife who can pass for an Eve, makes him aware of the death-rebirth sequence that marks his existence. This earns him the name “Nnemdi” which is interpreted “my mother lives on”-identifying the immortality of Ahunna in Vivek. 

Explicitly, it is the aforementioned history of Vivek’s birth that facilitates the comprehension of his/her strange behaviors that suggests alienation from the universe. The narrative boils down to one effect which is to portray the painful experiences of a transgender who seeks to be accepted without prejudice from the society. Here, Vivek’s desire is socially inappropriate and it is aptly embodied in the secretive nature of his/her homo sexual relationship with Osita, his\her cousin. In devicing a means out of this net, secrecy becomes their response and survival strategy to society’s homophobic and eccentric view of queer folks. On the contrary, it is a premeditated attempt to sneak out of the shells of secrecy that tragically ends Vivek’s life. 

 From the lenses of detective fiction, the narrative is like an onion ball that unfurls the intricacies enshrouding the dead of Vivek Oji. Structuring the narrative to begin with Vivek’s  death,   one’s antenna of curiosity is aroused to fully lure one  into the narrative world where the mystery behind Vivek’s death must be unravelled. Occupying this position of detectives are Kavita and the curios reader who stands offish from the truth pertaining Vivek’s murder. With this seeming suspense surrounding Vivek’s death comes the driving force that motivates the reader to navigate the text in search of the villain. Furthermore, the suspense is a web of events that implicate a dramatic irony where the authorial audience is aware of the full course of Vivek’s death, whereas Kavita, so long as this case is considered, is in the shades of oblivion. This knowledge of Vivek’s murder is a property that only Osita and the reader possesses. 

In a magical realist approach, Vivek is still another possessor of the information concerning his own death. The narrative expounds this by giving him/her a voice where he/she is fully recognized as Nnemdi. Intentionally, Vivek’s posthumous voice  is to avow the persistence of intimidation undeterred by martyrdom : to allow him narrate his feelings towards his demise. The nitty-gritty of it all is that Nnemdi Vivek Oji remains a sad and unfulfilled character who is angry at the universe for victimizing him over a decision that is entirely about him.

Consequently, this sparks his promise and fulfillment of a return (reincarnation) : “I don’t mind anymore. I see how things work now, from this side. I was born and I died. I will come back.

Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive” (180). At the same time, in his reincarnation he no longer appears a human, he already metamorphosed into a fruit tree growing on top of his grave.

Trailing this path of complexity, the twenty-four chaptered book actually begins from the end of it’s storyline to end at it’s beginning. In this way, the cord of events enhance comprehension through a thorough grasp of the narrative sequence as it comes as an episodic plotting. These chapters come with an irregular narrative style that communicates Vivek’s iconoclasmic inclination. Encoding this in a fluid narration tossed within the borders of first and third person point of view, every chapter that is rendered in the first person narration identifies the character who speaks as its title. On the other hand, the third person omniscient narrator accounts for chapters which deviate from the first person narration. With this variation in narration, the narrative already foregrounds the hurdles that Vivek encounters on the ticklish path of individual freedom. Notwithstanding, the larger chunk of chapters coming in the voice of the first person narrator announces an imbalance between both perspectives of narration that subtly communicates the preference for individuation over social systems of being. 

The narrative is mainly set in Ngwa where Ekene and Kavita, Vivek’s parents grooms him into maturity. Vivek’s birth and death are incidents that happen in Ngwa, the city of Aba. Focalizing his birth and death sequence, Ngwa passes for the predominant setting of the narrative. Nevertheless, cities like Owerri, Osita’s domicile, hosts a large part of the incidents in the text. Ekene’s love attempt to Mary, his brother’s wife, and her Pastor’s assaultive deliverance on Vivek among other occasions are all incidents that occur at Owerri. The city of Port Harcourt also appears  as the exilic enclave of Osita, at the death of Vivek.

Being the ideal prototype of a misfit, Vivek is thrusted by Emezi to ideate man’s Sisyphean quest to define himself. Verbalizing his frustration at this repulsive nature of society to his self-discovery mission, Vivek affirms: “And every day it was difficult walking around knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them” (32). While it seems Vivek is a lone voice crying out against the forces plaguing individuation, it subtly appears that a faction of characters in the text are equally configured after his/her minority identity— Osita, Elizabeth and other children of the Niger wives exist in this mode of being. Their identities are concealed and removed from the socially regulated lifestyles of other characters. Fashioned as the custodians of social patterns of being, Kavita, Mary, Ekene, Mike and the Niger wives are characters whom Emezi positions to foil the minorities in the text. It becomes obvious that Emezi’s characterization is bifurcated to portray the disorderly relation of conflicting perspectives and ideologies that maintain  tradition of anomalies in the universe. Vivek and his cohorts possesses a different view of sexuality and humanity which the other group of characters disavow. 

Wielding a powerful command of narration that comes with a fervor of orality, Emezi tells more than she shows in this narrative. While some readers tend to hail a writer that exercises their imaginative capacity in the descriptive trope of narrative, Emezi’s style of narration which “tells” seems to arouse the taste buds of an African reader who is immersed in the moonlight tales of the Igbo civilization. Exerting hperceived pendous command over language, Emezi blends Igbo vernacular, pidgin English and American English to connote the cultural temper of the text’s setting. Occasionally, words and phrases like “Biko, Fashi”, “Gorimakpa”, “Hapu m aka” and “knacked” are used to express the narrative’s cultural ambience.

Grossly rich in mysticism, The death of Vivek Oji imbricates the world of the human and non-human entities. Vivek’s strange manifestations which occasionally occur at those moments he shares with Osita are indices that point to his dual personality. Perceiving him/her  as an “ogbanje”, or “Abiku” in the words of Wole Soyinka, Vivek’s life is largely characterized by comings and goings. Being the incarnate of Ahunna, his grandmother, defying biological appropriation as a male, he dies to reincarnate as a fruit tree and no longer a human. Communicating his bewilderment at this unending death-rebirth sequence that characterizes ogbanje’s, Osita imagines Vivek metamorphosing into a tree,

I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice. Or maybe she would never touch the fruit—maybe no one would—and they would fall back to the ground to rot, to sink back into the soil, until the roots of the tree took them back and it would just continue like that, around and around. Or birds would show up and eat the fruit, then carry Vivek around… (161).

These instances are gamuts of thought that confirm the self-duality that complicates the identity of Vivek Oji. This is the justification for the complex  use of him and him/her to identify Vivek.

Identifying with the literary tradition, beyond crime fiction, magical realism and bildungsroman genre, the narrative is a crime and punishment sequence, thus tragically oriented. It is said that writers of every epoch will always show a trait of the preceding generations in their works, and as such validates the literariness of their works. Emezi toes this path by their replication of this pattern in the character of Vivek Oji. His death is considered as  punishment for being queer. The universe  no longer can host him as he is considered an errant figure who should be ejected for order to persist. Furthermore, Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Image is richly typified in the life of  Vivek Oji whose fantasies are fraught with antagonizing social realities. 

Literary activists, undergraduate students and researchers will find this text sumptuous. For the literary activist, the text promises an experiential tour into the realities of those at the social margins. Researchers who are passionately curios about queer literature and the LGBT community will fill their intellectual trunks with enough data from the text to facilitate publication in an impact factor journal. In this way, the text is open for further readings by critics who are willing to work on it using a range of theories at their disposal. 

Conclusively, the text remains loyal to Northrop Frye’s appropriation of the text as a fountain like object that never ceases to awe the reader with fresh insights in every encounter.  As earlier stated, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel that defies total assimilation in a single reading. It must be read again and again. 

Obayi, Onyekachi is a buding literary critic with a high regard and value for knowledge. He is currently a final years English Student at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. His Philosophy of life is that man only begins to live when the divinity of God begins to find expression in hs being. Onyekachi is currently the associate editor for critical writing for Muse 49. He believes that literature is a platform that offers man access to come to a deep contemplation about his existence.