Who Fears Death (2010) by Nnedi Okorafor puzzled me at first. The central character, Onyesonwu, (whose name means “who fears death”) is an outcast figure, a child of rape, who is avoided by most people and as a result angry most of the time. But the story reveals her life on two levels, the physical plane of everyday life, which is hard for her to manage, and the spiritual plane, which she reaches with more and more confidence as her training as a sorcerer advances. The novel relates her struggles in both worlds but it seemed at first there were some rough edges in the execution.
On one level, I followed what seems to be a savior story, with an all too common type of impulsive misfit destined for greater things, and I often got a bit impatient with details of the plot – some characters seemed unnecessary, some incidents a little abrupt, some explanations missing. That surprised me since many of her shorter works, like Remote Control, and others in the set of prequels to this novel, are so flawless. But when I got to the end, all that faded away, and I was left with a deep feeling that this was a great book. The story carried its meanings on several levels, one of which hits a mythic significance that causes the ins and outs of conventional storytelling to fade into the background.
In her early years, Onyesonwu wanders in the desert with her mother, who had been brutally raped by a vicious sorcerer/warrior. The mother, Najeeba, is one of the dark skinned people called Okeke, who are, it is written in the Great Book that dominates spiritual life in this world, destined to be slaves to the Nuru, a lighter skinned people purported to have come from the stars. It is taken as an article of faith by both peoples that this subservience of Okeke to Nuru is the way things are meant to be.
We learn that the Okeke, born into a dark world without the sun, were “mad scientists” inventing the computers, portables and machines that draw drinking water out of the sky. The Nuru were born in the stars and emerged on earth along with the sun, and destroyed much that had been created by the Okeke. While many of their machines are still in use, much has been trashed and tossed aside as the product of an inferior people. The children of rape by Nuru men on Okeke women, like Onyesonwu, or Ewu, are a despised mixed race, regarded as evil.
It’s understandable that Onyesonwu operates with difficulty as an Ewu person in the world she was born into, but from her childhood she begins to emerge on a spiritual plane as a powerful force. It is on that plane, which she calls the wilderness. that she is at home, though each experience there comes at great cost and is never easy, while the normal human plane is a place she’s rarely comfortable in. She spends years in edgy friendship with another Ewu, Mwita, until one day they realize they are in love. But love is not easy for them, especially during her difficult period of spiritual training. The relationship becomes even more complicated when she learns that Mwitu’s spiritual mentor was none other than the Nuru Daib, her mother’s rapist and her biological father.
When she turns eleven, and her body has already matured, she volunteers for the circumcision ritual that all the Okeke girls in her town go through. It is a rite of passage, considered essential for a young woman to be eligible for marriage. Okorafor describes the circumcision ritual in explicit detail. The immediate result for Onyesonwu is her bonding with the three other girls who undergo the genital cutting with her. For the first time, she has friends, but she doesn’t really know what to do with friendship at first. She is used to being the outcast, not accepted by any group. But despite the ups and downs in their relationships, these three stick with her, even when she has to go on her long journey west to confront the evil sorcerer and rapist who is her birth father.
Another event occurs in that crucial year after she turns eleven. After a strange experience, she finds herself naked in the branches of a tall tree. She is observed by Mwita, who later reveals to her that she had transformed into a bird and flown up into that tree. She is Eshu, or a shape-shifter. She decides she has to be trained in the skills of sorcery so that she can control the powers that seem to be emerging from her deepest being. At first she is scorned by the teacher Aro because she is a girl, but Onyesonwu is not just persistent, she finally attacks Aro full on with all her wild force and injures him. Just when she thinks the town will hunt her down and kill her for this offense, he agrees to take her on.
The confrontation between Onyesonwu and her rapist/sorcerer father is the conventional climax I was expecting. There is a great build-up to that as Onyesonwu refines her skills as a sorcerer and then undertakes a long, arduous journey across the desert to find her enemy. (That journey is the part of the story that raised questions for me about some of the supporting characters and incidents.) But that is a story of revenge. What if she could not simply defeat the sorcerer manipulating the Nuru people to make genocidal war on the Okeke, but could change the belief system underlying that hostility? To do that, Onyesonwu must alter the sacred written book of their religion, long accepted by both Nuru and Okeke as the truth. This is a task that calls for even greater spiritual power, and that becomes the real climactic struggle of the story. The written word, magical to be sure, becomes the force that can change everything, but only at the cost of great sacrifice.
Though I had mixed feelings about some sections of the novel, Who Fears Death, especially when seen in the context of the many prequels (The Book of Phoenix and She Who Knows and others that share themes with these) that are still being written, achieves a power I have felt in few works of fiction. When the entire series is complete, I have no doubt it will be considered one of the great classics of Africanfuturism and SFF in general.
This was the first book by this author I read. I think she has fleshed out the story more with the prequels so if you read those first instead of the order in which they were written you notice her growth as a writer.
Thanks for stopping by – the next book in this series I’m reviewing is one of the prequels, The Book of Phoenix. Each of her books is amazing. I haven’t yet gotten a sense of her growth as a writer. That will come later.