“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”
In Akwaeke Emezi's novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, the interplay between relentless self-reinvention and spiritual eternality serves as the fulcrum upon which the characters' journeys pivot and effectively encapsulates the above-mentioned quote from Franz Fanon. Through nuanced character development and evocative narrative techniques, Emezi explores how the quest for self-discovery and acceptance intertwines with the timeless essence of spirituality, belonging, and the fluidity of existence.
First, Emezi challenges the borders separating terror and pleasure, vulnerability and strength, and death and birth. In Chapter 13, Osita conveys his sexual encounter with Vivek in these lines: “I died at his mouth. It was the clearest terror and pleasure I had ever known. I could feel the shame like a shadow in my chest, but it was faint, insignificant. I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I would do it again, all of it, for him, always for him. I clutched at his head and cried out as I came, my whole body a naked wire”. By describing his whole body as “a naked wire,” Osita elucidates the dissolution of his physical and mental boundaries that had once disjointed his internal and external identities. The introspective evocation of his newfound queerness to be both “the clearest terror and pleasure” charts a certain defiance towards an institutionalized binary logic, one that revolves around the categories of heterosexual “norms” and homosexual “abnormalities.” In Trans*, Jack Halberstam explains that the asterisk in the title of his book “modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity” (4). The juxtaposing diction of “terror and pleasure” in Osita’s language wields a power of transgression that questions normativity and thus highlights the unstable, emotionally tumultuous space that “transitivity” inhabits, where his annoyance and rage at his cousin Vivek mixes with desire and fear merges with elation.
Most of all, Akwaeke Emezi examines the primal instincts of the human body in relevance to our contemporary perception of the world. Though technology has evolved our bodies to be relatively free of mortal disorders, climate, contingency, and fate, the truths of individual emotions, desires, and the body politic remain inexorably linked. In the “Vivek” chapters, she writes from his point of view:
“I fought with almost everyone because I was slim and some suspicion of delicacy clung to me and it made boys aggressive, for whatever reason. Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it.
Here, Emezi introduces the idea of a transitive kinaesthetic body that combines various interpretations of space against other bodies in our community. The intimidating soundness of Vivek’s “softness” proves his extraordinary ability to influence the motion of his surrounding bodies and the level of combativeness within their actions, allowing us to reflect on the revelation of the mind through movement. Through the juxtaposing descriptions of “delicacy” and aggression, Emezi illustrates compelling qualities of appearance and kinaesthetic and postulates on the concept of libido energy that is suggested through posture, facial expression, gesture, variety, and appropriateness of motion and consequently drives sexual, artistic, and violent urges—Vivek’s softness functions as the locus classicus for inflecting the mental movement in his surroundings. His power lies in his gentle, mute, and almost invisible testimony that challenges the effectiveness of dominant narratives on hypermasculinity and heterosexuality. As a result, Emezi collapses the softness/toughness dichotomy and creates an abject fiction of resistance, where power dwells and resides in dream-like borders of feminine-presenting aesthetics.
In conversation with libido and desire, Emezi writes in Vivek’s voice:
“But after I came back, after growing out my hair, Tobechukwu didn’t react like other guys in the area did—calling out insults and sometimes hurling empty bottles my way so they could laugh and watch me dance to avoid the spray of broken glass. He reminded me of the senior boys from when I was in boarding school, their complete assurance that it was well and right for me to provide them with pleasure, an assurance so solid that nothing they did shook up who they believed themselves to be boys who could not be broken, boys who broke other boys and were no less for it.”
Upon close reading, this extract studies the equivalency of reaction between protagonists within the narrative of femininity (Vivek’s grown-out hair) and the reaction of the spectators. Emezi moves from a sexual perspective of the body to a behavioral one and reproduces the cognitions, fantasies, imaginations, judgments, and empathies of “boys” with a crystalline clarity. In the categorization of “boys who could not be broken, boys who broke other boys and were no less for it,” Emezi stalks the phenomena of hypermasculinity from intriguing angles. This symbiotic interplay between victim and aggressor simulates, bridges, and converges Emezi’s portrayals between primal appetites of aggression and the libido of men, and thus epitomizes Emezi’s delineation of internal homophobia.
Emezi explores the instability of “transitivity” in Osita’s words: “His strength was much more than I’d expected. I could barely move in his hold. How stupid I had been, to assume that I’d been the one restraining him earlier, the strong one.” Here, Vivek’s gentle strength and quiet conviction in his sexuality subverts the veneration of existing normative gender-based conceptions of power or masculinity—the “strong” Osita was rendered motionless in Vivek’s hold. Emezi further realigns the conventions of the gaze and the mechanisms of desire within a sapphic perspective as Juju expresses: “She had been looking at girls that way, with an interest in the texture of their flesh, for some time, but she was always afraid that they’d catch her and see into her head, into the places even Juju was a little scared of seeing.” Her “interest in the texture of (women’s) flesh” offers room for queer potentiality and transitivity within the context of the spectacle, the male gaze, and the power dynamics in representations of the female body; her act of “looking at girls that way” resists absorption into the objectifying gaze that seeks to contain her sexuality. Additionally, Emezi writes of Juju’s conflict with her lover Elizabeth and wonders, “if you didn’t tell other people, was it real or was it just something the two of you were telling yourselves?” Juju’s stamp of queerness amidst her community’s homophobia emphasizes the realm of the fantastic that “transitivity” occupies—an unfixed, conscious confusion between possibility and reality.
In Trans*, Halberstam illustrates David Bowie’s “gendered appearance” as “part man, part woman, part space alien” (xi). Emezi’s depiction of Vivek mirrors this notion of incongruity and juxtaposition of opposites in the line “Vivek looked at her, and his eyes were soft and dark pools, floating under long lashes.” While both Juju and Kavita recognized and loved Vivek’s otherworldly beauty, Kavita expresses that “Somehow she felt like they didn’t have the right to cry in front of her. After all, was it their son who had died?” Halberstam identifies this phenomenon and reminds readers not to fight the oppressive power of hegemony “by battling over the relations between signifiers and signifieds while leaving the structures of signification itself intact” (16). After all, the project of exhaustive classification (or Kavita’s incessant need to solve Vivek’s “mystery”) and its consequences of unacceptance is a powerful discourse for control and institutionalization against the state of transitivity, and by extension, the elusive, irreconcilable life and death of Vivek Oji.
Second, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel about intimacy and fiction as a technology of the self. Its story of necropolitics necessarily stretches across generational consciousnesses within the Oji family and community, and impeccably delineates the consequences of neglecting and misunderstanding an individual’s true essence—their namesake. At the end of her novel, Emezi formulates her thesis within Vivek’s life-in-death scene, that the manifesto and inheritance of queerness is the state of transitivity, of both potentiality and irresolution: “I often wonder if I died in the best possible way—in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true… I want to tell him that I knew I was dancing with death every day, especially when I walked outside like that. I knew it, and I made my choices anyway. It wasn’t right or fair, what happened, but it wasn’t his fault. I want to thank him for loving me.” As Vivek’s mother changes the inscription on his grave and writes, “VIVEK NNEMDI OJI BELOVED CHILD,” Emezi evokes the porous, conscious, and glistening birth of Vivek’s queerness in his mother’s eyes and celebrates the communal actuality of Vivek’s self-defense and self-creation for his existential identity.
In Sara Collins’s The Guardian book review, “A Painfully Invisible Existence,” she cites a quote on the healing properties of friendship from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind… The pieces I am, she gathers them and gives them back to me in the right order.” Throughout Nnemdi’s faint yet self-preservatory existence, her friends Somto, Olunne, and Juju all function as antidotes to society’s modalities against Nnemdi. Together, they form a world-building shield that allows space for Nnemdi’s peace and reality:
“That was how we found each other again, in a blocked-off room filled with yellowing light: two bubblegum fairies there to drag me out of my cave, carrying oversweet wands. I don’t know how deep I would have sunk if not for them.”
Emezi swirls an abundance of interrelated concepts around the edges of this core of reality protection: the desperate human need for spiritual fulfillment, the fluidity of history as written by hegemonic structures of power, the power in words and touch, the intrinsic dignity and value of human beings, and the heart-wrenching consequences of forsaking such dignities. In “Uncomfortable Truths: Queer Strangers and Gendered Necropolitics in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji,” Emilia Durán-Almarza introduces Sam Naidu’s conceptualization of African noir, a “form of postcolonial, transnational crime fiction that, being firmly rooted in the African continent, successfully extends classic noir into new literary, geopolitical, and moral terrains.” By investigating the abovementioned themes within the close-knit circles of Nigerwives’ families and children, Emezi engenders the charting of intersections of sexualities, bodies, desires, and psychology within the genre of African noir in contemporary Nigeria.
In the article, Durán-Almarza explores the mark of grief of grandmother Ahunna’s death: the stamped starfruit scar on Vivek/Nnemdi that renders him a “spirit child who transcends the more ordinary bifurcated ‘otherness’ of gender,” who engages “in repeated reincarnation,” who has come to “embody the living dead.” In the novel, Emezi imbues Vivek’s burial with meta-cinematic natural imagery:
“I wasn’t sure why Aunty Kavita had picked a fruit tree that would feed on Vivek’s body… Did she look forward to the day when it would actually have star fruits hanging from its branches? Would she pick them and eat them as if she was absorbing him, bringing him back inside where he’d come from? It would be something like Holy Communion, I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice. Or maybe she would never touch the fruit—maybe no one would—and they would fall back to the ground to rot, to sink back into the soil, until the roots of the tree took them back and it would just continue like that, around and around. Or birds would show up and eat the fruit, then carry Vivek around, giving life to things even after he’d run out of it himself.”
Here, Emezi reflects on the lack of comfort in the face of death—on its lack of rules, reason, and consolation—and emphasizes the futility of dominating loss and the randomness of violence. The incongruous diction of flesh and vegetation in the line “It would be something like Holy Communion, I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice” symbolically portrays the irreducible chaos and beauty of Vivek’s “invisible” life and the impacts of his lingering, unmistakable death. Durán-Almarza suggests by substantializing the reality of Nnemdi’s identity, Emezi offers a process that engages with “death-worlds that enlighten the vocabulary of ungrievable and necropolitical lives.”
Overall, the world of The Death of Vivek Oji is absolute and transcendent. It indicts optimistic humanism without collapsing into nihilistic ennui and simultaneously constructs an intimately Nigerian vision of existence. In Ilana Masad’s Los Angeles Times book review, “Not how he died but how he lived,” she writes that “the novel’s greatest strength lies in creating a community of fully realized people, each touched in some profound way by Vivek’s existence… [and] brief yet gloriously expansive life.” In terms of narrative structure, The Death of Vivek Oji consists of a riot of complex personages mysteriously tangled together, rendered in dynamic orientations and seeming randomness. Although the fragmentary characters of Chika, Kavita, Ahumma, Osita, Ekene, Mary, Elizabeth, Somto, Olunne, Juju, and the Nigerwives initially display no general agreement to Nnmendi’s eventual destination to her identity, Emezi carefully pens the abstracted coalescence of these characters’ multi-form consciousnesses to create the visual, impressionistic cacophony that is Vivek’s death.
I would liken the narrative structure of The Death of Vivek Oji itself to a work of art: Adejoke Tugbiyele’s AfroQueer. Created in 2014 with its medium being palm stems, steel wire, metal, wood, and US dollar bills, Tugbiyele’s sculpture depicts discarded and low-value materials weaving into a figure who is imbued with the colors of the pride flag. The figure has scrappy ropes for legs, sits in a contrapposto gesture that evokes a life filled with strife, and wears a mask to conceal the subject’s identity—I find this form to resonate with the tantalizingly incomplete composition of Nnemdi’s necropolitical existence. The fluency of both Nigerian creators, Emezi and Tugbiyele, in representing the contortion, detachment, and tension within queer bodies in Nigeria and the US engenders innovative systems for coordinating multiplicities in narratives on gender and sexuality, thus stamping an achingly resilient and postmodernist birthmark on the death of whitewashed, Western structural narratives in art. Emezi’s emphatic closure of Oji’s internal dialogue and his surrounding characters’ agglomerated whispers of fear and beauty ends in a trickle, a trickle that streams with the vibrations of resistance, transitivity, and transcendence:
“Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.”
Works Cited
Collins, Sara. “The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi review—A Painfully Invisible Existence.” Review of The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi. The Guardian, 3 Sep 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/the-death-of-vivek-oji-by-akwaeke-emezi-review-a-painfully-invisible-existence.
Durán-Almarza, Emilia María. “Uncomfortable Truths: Queer Strangers and Gendered Necropolitics in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2022, pp. 70–94.
Emezi, Akwaeke. The Death of Vivek Oji. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.
Jack Halberstam. Trans*. University of California Press, 2017.
Masad, Ilana. “The mesmerizing mystery of ‘The Death of Vivek Oji’: Not how he died but how he lived.” Review of The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi. Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug 2020. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-08-11/review-the-mesmerizing-mystery-of-the-death-of-vivek-oji.
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