Life has changed immensely since my last post back in April- the world is simply on fire. Again. But 'again' would imply that at some point our hellscape stopped burning: it most certainly has not. So, I rephrase: the world continues to burn in many ways all at once and intensely.
HOWEVER- Where there’s suffering there must be beauty, and as long as people are pushed and shoved for whatever reasons there shall be voices speaking back. The book I'm going to discuss is a potent blend of this mix: pain and grace, survival and humanity. The Death of Vivek Oji is the latest offering of Akwaeke Emezi (one of my most beloved writers), tracing the outlines left by a life through voices and memories of those who loved them most.
But just because you love someone, does that mean you can ever truly understand them? Is it even necessary to understand everything about somebody in order to love them? Is it possible to love without making the loved one suffer? These questions hover round my eyes like dizzy blindspots in the wake of being swept up by Emezi’s arresting world.
Vivek’s story begins with a succession of photographs being fanned out: a plain, factual perspective detailing one life’s family history. And this realistic, undeniable quality of sincere authenticity – the familiarity of a family photo-album – continues throughout; or rather, Emezi continues to complicate what we name and esteem as the ‘truth’. Photographs document tangible aspects of Vivek’s family’s attributes– Mary’s youthful splendour, Kavita’s eyes to die in – but can never capture the simmering mutability of emotion possessed by their subjects. Nor do photographs fully reveal the social backdrop within which the family is trying to flourish: Nigeria, redolent with multi-cultural communities and busy towns. But broiling beneath the energetic location is deep-rooted, conservative reluctance to embrace outsiders of any kind. Even, or especially, if said outsiders happen to end up being family.
The central outsider of this novel is Vivek, a slender-framed young person who gets into endless fights as a boy. Later, Vivek mysteriously is removed from university by their parents – Chika and Kavita – and grows out their hair to a thick, curly mane of disobedience. Much like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, though, Vivek is mainly spoken for and about from the perspectives of others. Or rather, the story is dictated by the holes Vivek’s death leaves behind, as Kavita attempts to piece together what happened to her baby. Even whilst breathing Vivek is a walking puzzle, a black hole of heavy absence in their parents’ house. Family and friends are never able to fully construe Vivek’s reasons or rhymes, but that’s part of the charm for me. Emezi’s dedication to celebrating new directions for friendship and relatability. Osita (Vivek’s cousin) along with Juju, Somto, Olunne and Elizabeth provide Vivek with the buffer they need to let down their hair (literally), without ever demanding answers.
Another book The Death of Vivek Oji reminded me of a great deal is Love by Toni Morrison, and when I saw in the acknowledgements page Emezi had thanked it as an influence I felt quite clever. The plot is not linear or ‘easy’ to track. The story slowly thickens and dissipates in the velocity of its spilling secrets: like clouds in a sky loaded with light, revelation teases through varying spells of obscure doubt, of fresh reckonings felt in pinpricks on the skin. As I read along I would try and place events in an arc but found it tricky, Emezi so effortlessly weaves together different characters’ perspectives and time-frames it feels more like mind-reading than literary fiction. There’s a seamlessness between voices as they catapult your senses to different scenes, reading becomes daydreaming. A familiarity and trust develops despite the evasive plot, which waits until the final pages to unfurl its last devastating secrets.
This book will appeal to anyone who remembers the wrenchings of growing up, all the different selves that break apart from us: some fall flat without ever taking seed, whilst other versions live on to either split once more into a thousand new fibres, or finalize themselves in knots. There’s the countless other possibilities our minds entice themselves with; selves we wish and inhabit only in shadows or seconds. The ones we keep chasing. It’s a novel of those who can’t speak for themselves. A novel for the beautiful people who want to be only themselves, to love and dress how they want in a world which thrives on dreadful absolutes. The Death of Vivek Oji is about how we can love our brothers, sisters and soul-siblings without suffocating what lives underneath. Inside the bodies we capture on film, trapped in our hearts. Beneath the smiles on the photographs we will leave behind.