Review: The Death of Vivek Oji

 

It is commonplace to find dope Black gender-variant creators on Instagram and Twitter. 

Akwaeke Emezi was a name I became familiar with through social media: their sibling, Yagazie, is a photojournalist, whose work covers Nigerian working class reality, healthcare, down to scars on dark skin, existing beyond conventional colonial photojournalist depictions of Black African people, place, and things. Both Emezi siblings are grounded in a Nigeria not seen on this side of the Atlantic, one which is being shared by and for young Black queer and trans people. Akwaeke is changing the literary game, with fresh new work spanning across genres, they are a kind of nourishment. 

I recently finished their 2020 novel The Death of Vivek Oji, while working through my first (and hopefully only), bout of COVID. Gifted to me as a late birthday present, I devoured it, like the mangoes which a pregnant Satchi inhaled; skin, stringy flesh, and attempt at its rough, flat seed in Freshwater.

Like the sensual, satisfactory experience of eating mango, Emezi is fertile and expansive; they have written four books during this pandemic, all of which span various genres. Thus far, I have only read two of their books, both of which bubble and breathe a new kind of life into novel genres, stretching themselves into corners untouched by the rays of other bestsellers. 

Set in southern Nigeria, the story follows Vivek and Osita, cousins closely raised and bonded, navigate their youth and sexuality. Like Emezi's ancestral background, Vivek is raised by a slightly overbearing but understanding Tamil mother, Kavita, and an increasingly distant and obvious Ibo father, Chika. 

Kavita, part of an organization-like group of  foreign women who married and had families with Nigerian men, called the Nigerwives, all of whom raised their mixed children in close proximity to each other, is the doggedly investigator, in search for answers to her son's tragic death. But it seems despite her persistence to get answers out of her nephew, and his friends, she hits wall after wall. She goes after Osita and the other Niger children she knew to be housing Vivek. The reasons for his emergency sheltering?

 Vivek increasingly evades binary norms and standards for to boy-children: he lets his hair grow into a luscious mane, ruffling his family flock's collective feathers, raising concerns about his safety out in public. Eventually, he has an encounter with a local boy from school at night. But after a family member's violent intervention, who believes his divergence to be demonic, Vivek seeks refuge with the daughters of Nigerwives Inc. Sheltered from the outside, he gains autonomy and allowance to come into his femininity, and quietly bloom into the young woman she truly is.

As we follow Osita and Vivek into teenage years, Vivek experiences convulsive, black-out episodes, one of which occurred leading him to get caught being a peeping tom at Osita and Juju. While Osita's love for Vivek becomes incestual, it asks the question of the fullness of queer love and love for and inspired by queer people. 

 

Author Akwaeke Emezi (left); cover of The Death of Vivek Oji. 

Like Freshwater, Emezi's characters' transness is in conflict with contemporary neo-colonial Nigerian society, and a resurfacing that is not only indigenous to African people, but what the evils of Western colonialism could not annihilate. 

The pace of the book is steady, cleverly hooking you in, eventually picks up speed, as you become more and more eager to find out: how did Vivek lose his life? 

This book, however, is more than just a steadily paced mystery crime novel: it is not a contribution to the desensitization of Black trans murder and death. It is not about the socio-colonial forces which drove it. There is a whole world in writing yet to be tapped into which is not predicated, nor weighed down by the unending (and ongoing) terrorism of this reality. Our undoing can be liberated from this pain. It is about how death is not an ultimatum and ceasing of a person's vitality even, of the pure love of their survivors. I send Emezi nothing but the highest praises for this reminder.