Who Fears Death

“The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did [raped the Okeke women] for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence. […] These Nuru had planted poison. An Okeke woman who gave birth to an Ewu child was bound to the Nuru through her child. The Nuru sought to destroy Okeke families at the very root.”

Okorafor has stated that the genesis of this novel was a newspaper article about the real life use of “weaponized rape” by Arab militiamen against Black African women in the Darfur Conflict in the early 2000s. The purpose of the practice was similar to the novel—to bring shame upon the women and weaken the bloodline. In the novel, the practice appears to stem from Daib’s control over the Nuru people; through his campaigns, which include weaponized rape, he uses the Nuru in order to attempt to eradicate the Okeke, and it is suggested that when Onye breaks the men of Daib’s spell, they are appalled by what they have done. Regardless, it is important to note that these actions—as well as many of the core conflicts of the novel—are very much rooted in practices and conflicts that exist in our own world (and we learn at the end that the Seven Rivers Kingdom is meant to be a future version of Darfur).

“‘Because of what you carry here! You can bring life, and when you get old, that ability becomes something else even greater, more dangerous and unstable!’”

This is a complicated quotation that reads as a backhanded compliment. On the one hand, Mwita—really, Aro—is calling motherhood extremely powerful. On the other, he is claiming it is volatile, and therefore a liability. It’s a tool of oppression that is similar to so-called positive stereotyping. As we’ll see, Aro and Mwita aren’t wrong—Onye in fact does use pregnancy as a weapon, though it is suggested she has some control over it when she does. Actually, this is really just an excuse to reinforce gender roles—it is difficult to imagine Aro refusing to train a man who promises to be very powerful, and in fact Sola is turns out to have been responsible for Daib.

“Ono the Ponderer stood up and spoke. ‘I have considered probability, margin of error, unlikeness. Though the plight of our people in the West is tragic, it is unlikely that this hardship will affect us. Pray to Ani for better things. But there is no need to pack your things.’ He sat down. I looked across the crowd. People seemed persuaded by his words. I wasn’t sure what I felt. Is our safety really the point?”

This reinforces a key theme of the novel, which is the necessity of action. The horrors in the West continue because people believe it isn’t their problem until it is too late, or that this is simply the natural order of things. Ono’s argument is entirely beside the point—when confronted with violence they believed had ended, he counsels inaction based on the belief that they will be protected. This is not likely to be true, for one, based on statements made elsewhere in the novel and what we learn about Daib, but it also suggests that the town of Jwahir is only obligated to fight Daib’s army if Daib’s army is at its doorstep—which, of course, by that point, would be too late.

“I considered ripping the gold chain from my waist and spitting the stone in the garbage, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Somewhere along the way, these two items had become part of my identity.”

In some ways, this foreshadows Onye’s experience with the Okeke once they reach the Seven Rivers Kingdom. It’s hard for her group to understand their actions—or inaction, more precisely—but the point is that they have been told for so long that they are slaves that to be a slave is their identity. The belly chain and the stone are similarly part of a repressive and regressive practice, but Onye is unable to cast them aside because they’ve become part of her.

“‘Under the new sun, most of what the Okeke built crumbled. We still have some of it, the computers, gadgets, items, objects in the sky that sometimes speak to us. The Nuru to this day point at the Okeke and say, slave and the Okeke must bow their heads in agreement. That is the past.’”

This is a companion quotation to a later passage in the novel, and it represents the common belief of the Nuru and Okeke, which is fundamentally negative. Later, though, we see a contrasting version of events in which the technology developed by the Okeke was quite ingenious and positive, raising the question of why this is the dominant narrative.

“People repeated it to each other: Ewu children are born from violence and so it’s inevitable that they will become violent. Days passed. Aro remained ill. I readied myself for a witch hunt.”

This is circular logic that is rooted in confirmation bias, and it is what Mwita will try to break Onye of throughout the text. The novel does not make claims that there is no time for violence; in fact, it explicitly makes a different claim at points. However, Onye’s (and Mwita’s) burden is that they cannot get angry or fight back; even if they are in the right, as soon as they do, people blame them because they believe they are naturally angry as Ewu.

“Then I understood what I had sensed in Mwita. It surprised me. I took his hand. If I didn’t address this now, our friendship would die. Even back then, I knew that disregarded jealousy eventually turned poisonous.”

Onye’s burden is passion and stubbornness; Mwita struggles with something similar, though it comes from a different place. It’s not clear that Mwita ever truly gets past this, in fact—even at the end of the novel, Mwita gets frustrated at times when he is reminded of how little Onye understands the Mystic Points as opposed to naturally harnessing them. Fortunately, Onye addresses problems head on, and the novel implicitly suggests that this helps Mwita and Onye through.

“‘Then don’t continue with these assumptions! If you’re going to teach me, I don’t want to hear any of that! I’ll stop having intercourse with Mwita. Okay. I apologize. But he and I will both make the effort to refrain. Like two humans!’”

Again, this points to the nature of personal responsibility and how it is unfairly placed on the shoulders of women in this society. Aro continues to place responsibility for intercourse on Onye alone, as if Mwita has nothing to do with it, using backwards logic of control—Mwita can’t control himself, according to Aro’s patriarchal attitudes, so it’s entirely on Onye. This is neither fair, of course, nor correct. It’s interesting that Onye finishes her thought by emphasizing their humanity. The analogy would be that Mwita is animal-like, which demonstrates the strange logic: if a wild animal bit Onye, Aro wouldn’t blame Onye, yet if Mwita is unable to control himself and they have intercourse, Aro would blame her.

“I expected to see Okeke people slaving for Nurus. I expected to see Nuru people going about their business as if this were normal. I must have tuned in to the worst part of the West. The rainwater showed me ripped oozing flesh, bloody erect penises, sinew, intestines, fire, heaving chests, mewling bodies engaged in evil. Without thinking, my hand slapped the clay bowl away. It crashed against the wall, breaking in two. ‘It’s still happening!’ I shouted at Aro who was outside tending to his goats. ‘Did you think it stopped?’ he said.”

As noted above, at various points the novel criticizes the way people grow complacent when the horrors taking place are far away; even Onye criticizes that idea elsewhere. It’s an easy idea to succumb to, however, and Onye demonstrates this as she has done so, as well. Wrapped up in her magical training, without her father’s red eye to haunt her, she let the violence in the West fall from her mind.

“I took the moment to decide, too. To decide if I was being manipulated. If we all were. Since I was eleven, things had been happening to me, pushing me toward a specific path. It was easy to imagine that someone of great mystical power was manipulating my life. Except for one thing: the shocked and almost scared look on Daib’s face when he saw me.”

A question hanging over much of the novel is that of fate and destiny. Onye and Mwita, of course, know how they will die because they went through initiation, but there they are also choosing to accept that fate by traveling west, and that they might just as easily not. Here, the question is even more poignant—are they working to confront Daib, or is Daib bringing them to him? Onye believes not, but that does not make it so.

“Over the next few weeks, Mwita and I found it hard to talk to each other. But when we retired, we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other. I was still afraid of getting pregnant but our physical needs were greater. There was such love between us, yet we couldn’t speak.”

Love is not a simple, single thing in the novel. Love takes on many forms, and even as Mwita and Onye exemplify great love, we see how complicated this can be for them. They are passionate toward one another, but external issues nevertheless make this difficult; however, the novel does not claim that they love each other any less, only that that love requires complex and nuanced understanding. Still, this is contrasted against other versions in which the external complications do interfere—what works for Mwita and Onye might not, and literally cannot, for others.

“As we walked, that brothel not far behind us, I felt a wave of anger. To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you … and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them. Look at those Ewu girls and women. Look at Fanta and Nuumu. Look at Mwita and me.”

Again, this captures the bind Onye and others like her are in. There is no winning here—if Onye had been born powerless in Banza, she could either serve the Okeke as a sex worker and reinforce their beliefs, or she could refuse and still face a similar, or perhaps even worse, backlash, as demonstrated by her experience with the group of young men.

“You know what happens next. You know it because you’ve heard me speak of a similar incident. I still had the scar on my forehead from it. Was this the same town? No, but it might as well have been. Not much had changed since my mother had had to run with me, an infant, from a crowd of people throwing stones.”

It’s interesting that Onye chooses to describe this in banal terms. What’s extraordinary about the event is her reaction, but her description reinforces just how normal it would have been otherwise. If it hadn’t been Onyesonwu in Papa Shee, the people would have stoned them to death and gone on with their lives as if nothing happened.

“‘Must all their names start with S or have S’s in them? You’d think they were descendants of snakes,’ Fanasi said. ‘That’s the sound that travels best, the ssss sound. They live in all this noise from the dust storm, so it makes sense,’ Mwita said, going into our tent.”

Mwita and Onye—and by this point, Luyu—differentiate themselves from Diti and Fanasi in part through their ability to adapt and understand. Fanasi can only zero in on the fact that Vah speech is different; there’s no real room for understanding. Mwita may have already been familiar with the reasoning from the legends, but there is no indication that this is the case—the novel suggests he is simply able to consider things from the Vah perspective, whereas Fanasi is unable to.

“Those old beliefs about the worth and fate of men and women, that was the only thing that I didn’t like about Mwita. Who was he to think he was entitled to be the center of things just because he was male? This had been a problem with us since we’d met. Again, I think of the story of Tia and Zoubeir. I despise that story.”

Ironically, Mwita ends up dying for Onye, which he already knows by this point, and which may be a source of some of his bitterness—if the story is an analogy, even between Onye and Mwita, Onye would technically be Zoubeir rather than Tia. Still, Mwita’s issues run deeper and more conservative than that, though the novel demonstrates that one’s predisposed beliefs do not dictate their actions.

“The Vah weren’t sorcerers. Only Ssaiku and Ting knew the Mystic Points. But juju was part of their way of life. It was so normal that they felt no need to ever fully understand it. I never asked them if they knew these minor jujus instinctively or had been taught. It seemed a rude question, like asking how one learned to control his urine.”

The naturalness of juju in Vah society reinforces the idea that what is normal is dependent on context. Juju is only vilified in Okeke society because it has been previously, and there’s no real reason the entire town can’t learn minor juju—in fact, it is suggested that Aro has many casual students who learn minor juju as a consolation prize when they do not pass initiation. However, society insists that juju is evil, and thus it remains hidden (although often in plain sight) and continues to be considered evil. The Vah offer a different version of events, one in which it’s perfectly reasonable for people to learn minor juju which helps them in daily life. This further mirrors the larger question of technology in previous Okeke society—as we learn later, the science of the previous Okeke seems to have greatly benefited society; yet, it was determined to be evil, and now the dominant narrative is that it was evil. But who decided this?

“What I remember most about it was the deep sense of hope it placed in my heart. If a forest, a true vast forest, still existed someplace, even if it was very far away, then all would not end badly. It meant there was life outside the Great Book. It was like being blessed, cleansed.”

We’re reminded here how small Onye’s world is—just a few hundred miles. This is symbolized in the idea of life outside the Great Book; it’s suggested that the Book does not allow for something like the forest, and yet it exists. It’s a small thing, but it pushes Onye to think even further outside the box, outside of her societal norms.

“We’ll return to Jwahir, Ani willing, and have the life we are meant to have. Onye, thank you. This journey has changed us forever, for the better. We simply wish to live, not die like Binta.”

There is a question not only of choice, here, but of loyalty. It is interesting that Luyu is the one who remains steadfastly by Onye’s side rather than Diti (leaving Binta aside; we already know what kind of sacrifice she was willing to make). Diti and Fanasi are only angered by the violence up to a point; they are only willing to end the violence if they do not have to take risks. It’s not clear Onye has a choice, but they make a choice here, and they choose to leave Onye and, in theory, to allow the violence to continue (or at least not to aid in its ending). It only adds insult to injury that they choose to leave while Onye is struggling to survive her father’s poison, and that they leave not knowing if Onye will even survive.

“A wind blew it all away, clearing the air. The night sky was full of stars. I’d gotten so used to the constant background noise of the storm that the silence was profound.”

This is symbolic of the larger theme of norms and conventions in the novel. Societal norms become like the background noise of the storm—we grow so used to them that we don’t even notice them, or how dangerous they can be.

“There is a portion of the Great Book that most versions exclude. The Lost Papers. Aro had a copy of them. The Lost Papers go into detail about how the Okeke, during their centuries festering in the darkness, were mad scientists. […] They made food grow on dead land, they cured all diseases. In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild creativity.”

This is a companion to an earlier quotation. The dominant narrative is that the Okeke destroyed the world with their technology, calling to mind other post-apocalyptic works in which human hubris is humanity’s downfall. In fact, the novel slowly backpedals this, and now reveals that the technology developed by the Okeke seems to have been rather good. It is interesting that this is only stated in a portion of the Great Book that is excluded from the canon. This also calls to mind other sacred texts with similarly excluded books—e.g., there are a number of books of the Bible which are excluded depending on the denomination, and still others that are never included but are known to scholars and historians.

“Every single one who came to me in those hours, I made better. Yes, I was a different woman from the one who struck the people of Papa Shee blind. But I will never regret what I did to those people because of what they did to Binta.”

This quotation demonstrates the limits and nuance of change. Onye acknowledges that she has grown without claiming that her earlier actions were wrong. Further, shortly after this moment, Onye will choose not to heal but to fight. The novel does not suggest one single, simple version of development; control in the novel does not mean peace, per se, but learning when to fight and when to heal.

“I lost parts of myself with each of his [Daib’s] words. Once my belief in the prophecy began to crumble, my courage went right with it. I was struggling to breathe. […] My journey had been a waste. I was nothing.”

This reinforces the power storytelling can have over our actions while dovetailing with the notion of destiny in the novel. Onye found hope in the fact that there was a prophecy, then gained even more hope once she believed the prophecy was about her. Daib undoes that confidence simply be remaking it about himself, instead; the narrative changes, and Onye loses faith.

“Those Nuru men saw a beautiful Okeke woman [Luyu] protected only by her sense of duty and her two bare hands which had grown rough with use in the last few months. And they pounced on her.”

Of all the characters, Luyu has grown the most throughout the novel. When we first meet Luyu, she is a spoiled, arrogant, troublemaking child; even at the start of the journey, she complains that Onye refuses to take camels, which will make the journey much longer. By the end, however, while remaining fundamentally true to herself, Luyu has developed still into something much stronger and fiercer, allowing Onye to fulfill her goals.