Book World: ‘The Death of Vivek Oji’: A tale of several selves

By Akwaeke Emezi Riverhead. 245 pp. $27 --In 2018, Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel arrived like a revelation. With its incantatory prose, “Freshwater” disrupted conventional ways of thinking, pushing readers outside the dualistic frameworks of body and spirit, male and female, psychotic and sane. The story describes the harrowing experiences of a young Nigerian woman who contains several distinct selves. But for Emezi, a non-binary trans person, the disparate voices that deliver this story are not merely a sophisticated narrative technique. They’re a literal representation of the interior voices that Emezi hears. “My brain works like this,” Emezi once told me. “I don’t consider it a mental illness. I consider it real.”

Emezi’s new novel continues the exploration of lives that fracture rigid attitudes about selfhood and sexuality. The whole story takes place in the penumbra of grief. Even the book’s title, “The Death of Vivek Oji,” leaves little room for optimism, and the first chapter - just a single sentence - reveals the time of death: “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.” But over the course of the novel, Emezi constantly affirms and resists the inevitability of that tragedy. If only, if only, if only. ... Vivek’s death is emphasized so often that it acquires an odd kind of mystery, like the blurry edges of a legend.

Although the presence of spiritual forces is muted in “The Death of Vivek Oji,” the possibility of ancestral reincarnation frames the story in tantalizing ways. Vivek is born in Nigeria on the same day his grandmother dies. A starfish-shaped scar on one of the baby’s feet resembles a similar scar on one of the old woman’s feet. “Superstition,” the boy’s father insists. “It was a coincidence, the marks on their feet - and besides, Vivek was a boy and not a girl.”

This is largely the story of a family that clings to a strict demarcation between boys and girls even as that distinction poisons their only child.

Emezi opposes such linear attitudes with the very structure of the novel. Rather than progress from beginning to end, “The Death of Vivek Oji” swirls around incidents, before and after Vivek’s passing, not so much rising toward its climax as gradually accruing power. Again and again, we learn of events long before we understand their cause or significance. Such a presentation could easily become a muddle, but Emezi is a remarkably assured and graceful guide through this family’s calamity of silence.

Vivek’s adolescence passes quickly with alarming but only glancing references to his trance-like episodes and his temper “like gunpowder packed into a pipe.” Soon his ambitious college plans in the United States are scrapped. He moves back home in 1998. He loses weight and grows his hair long. His father becomes impatient and drifts away. His mother dotes, nervously. “It’s just hair! It doesn’t mean anything,” she says. “He’s fine, really. He just needs some time.” But later Emezi notes, “There was a tendril of shame unfurling into a leafy plant inside her.” The atmosphere of depression and denial in their house grows toxic.

“I’m not what anyone thinks I am,” Vivek says in one of the very short chapters he narrates himself. “I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and 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.”