The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
Book Review
There’s something about the title: “The Death of Vivek Oji” that makes you want to know more.
The Death of Vivek Oji is a coming-of-age novel built around the event of the protagonist, Vivek’s mysterious passing where his mother opens the front door to find his dead body. To summarise it in one word, I’d settle with “identity”. The struggle for it and the series of events that occur with this struggle.
The book follows the life of Vivek’s family: his grandmother, parents, uncle and aunt as a sort of introduction to his own story.
Vivek is born to Chika and Kavita. This blend of an Igbo father and an Indian mother automatically puts him amid other children of similar ancestry. The children of the ‘Niger wives’ — a club made of foreign women married to Nigerian men — along with his cousin, Osita, are the company that frame his childhood.
As they get older, Vivek and Osita’s relationship strengthens and when Vivek experiences blackouts, Osita is the first to notice, but he keeps this to himself. When Vivek’s parents notice it, they dismiss them as quiet spells and deem them as unimportant. It isn’t until Vivek’s deteriorating mental health affects his school and he acts in ways that are unacceptable and strange to his parents — like growing his hair out — that they accept there is a problem.
The book revolves around how everyone in Vivek’s life reacts to his ‘strange behaviours.’ We observe totally conflicting reactions from the adults in his life with their aggressive approach and his friends with their more understanding approach.
Vivek’s short life was filled with secrets and the varying narrative point of views from Vivek, Osita and an omnipresent narrator in different chapters all do their share in gradually revealing these deeply buried secrets which have a part to play in both Vivek’s life and death.
This book covers a myriad of themes and issues like parent-child relationships, sexuality, queerphobia, masculinity and the girl-child struggles of existence. I recommend this book because it challenges your beliefs and makes you expand the horizons of your mind.
This is the first book by Akwaeke I’ve read, and when I started, I didn’t know they were born and raised in Umuahia. So, I assumed there would be a lot of awkward sounding parts in it, like they sometimes are in novels written by African authors born and living in diaspora. I was pleasantly surprised when the pidgin didn’t come off weird and their use of Nigerian slangs didn’t make me cringe.
Akwaeke adopts a plot style that jumps back and forth in time between life before and after Vivek’s death. This arrangement is intentional, intricately created and frankly, a bit confusing, but it leaves you wondering how someone could sit and create all these connections.
I admire the fact that in this book, Akwaeke does not italicise Nigerian language, words and slang. Their Igbo is Igbo, and their ‘if you know you know, if you don’t know you don’t know’ attitude to it is refreshing.
It seems irrelevant, but one thing I love about reading African literature is that feeling when you notice tiny, familiar details you can relate to. The mention of the “black-and-yellow polythene bag” brought a smile to my face. Even at the point where they referenced okada drivers saying, ‘’okada drivers were a pack, as anyone who knocked one of them down on the road soon discovered” was nice to read.
I like the brashness they take on when discussing topics we usually shy away from. Questioning the way some Nigerians embrace religion and how it changes them, Osita reminisces on the stories he had heard of who his mother was before his birth and how different she was from them. He thinks that, “maybe she’d been sanded down into dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered… what do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God?”
They explore the inevitability of change in marriage, especially when grave circumstances take a toll on it. We see the cycle of the relationship between Vivek’s parents and how it starts with love and pretty visualisations of the future. Love-filled midnight walks in the garden slowly regresses into Kavita, Vivek’s mother thinking of her husband and saying, “She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it.”
The book also gives us a glance into the pain of a girl who knows her father wants a male child. It relays her feelings of inadequacy and believing she is a mistake. Juju, one of the children of the Niger-wives, says to Vivek about her father, “He always wanted a boy. Maybe if I’d been a boy, he wouldn’t hit mama so much.”
This story holds the ability to challenge both your beliefs and the standards of normalcy. It asks why difference is such a big deal and why it invokes fear in us. “Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it.” Vivek says. “Why are you so afraid? Because something is different from what you know?” He asks Osita.
It addresses mental health. It isn’t a topic we give enough thought to in Nigeria, and we watch how the same is done to Vivek’s mental health.
He says, “I was drowning. Not quickly, not enough for panic, but a slow and inexorable sinking, when you know where you’re going to end up, so you stop fighting and you wait for it to all be over.”
In retrospect, I wish that as readers, we could connect more to Vivek’s character. More than what he narrated to us before he died. We got to know him through the eyes of others, but we never really heard from him. I guess that’s the point of the book. People see us the way they want to.
*Trigger warning for sexual scenes, mention of rape and incest.*
The Death of Vivek Oji is an unconventional book. It discusses topics that are highly controversial to Africans, and it will attempt to stretch your mind. If you cannot be stretched or not willing to explore something different, I’d advice that you don’t attempt it. But if you are willing, it will take you on a journey that will open you up to a different worldview and you won’t come back the same.
