Written by Akwaeke Emezi, published last year, and sensitively read in my audio-version by Yetide Badaki and Chukwudi Iwuji, this is a beautiful, luminous, sad-but-joyous book.

The story -- and don't read this before reading the book itself -- starts with a one-line chapter: "They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died."

Some unknown person delivers his body, wrapped in a length of red and black cloth, to the doorstep of his parents, who have no idea what led to his death.

The rest of the book slowly peels back the layers of what happened, how those two events -- the death and the burning -- are connected, and who Vivek Oji was.



We're in southern Nigeria. Vivek is the child of Chika, a Nigerian, and Kavita, his Indian wife. Chika has an older brother, Ekene, married to the increasingly dour and devout Mary, and their only son is Osita. Ahunna, the mother of Chika and Ekene, dies the day Vivek is born. He has a starfish-shaped birthmark that resembles the scar on his grandmother's foot: "This is how Vivek was born, after death and into grief. It marked him, you see, it cut him down like a tree. They brought him into a home filled with incapacitating sorrow; his whole life was a mourning."

And yet it wasn't. It should have been, and it was for a while, because Vivek not only suffers from strange absences (never specifically diagnosed), but also feels "different", and therefore isolated. "I’m not what anyone thinks I am," Vivek tells us early on. 'I never have been. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt needed to change."

But bit by bit he finds himself. He grows his hair long. He starts to come to terms with his ambivalent sexuality. He experiments with make-up. And eventually, in the shelter of the "bubble" formed by supportive friends, Vivek starts to wear dresses, and assumes the name (Nnemdi) and the identity that she feels she should have had from the beginning. The pictures that the youngsters take -- which they're eventually brave enough to show to Kavita, who is still totally in the dark about how her child died -- show a happy person, cherished and bold and beautiful.



Lily Meyer puts this very well: "Emezi abandons death to focus on the complicated joys of Vivek's life... Instead of getting flattened by death, Vivek becomes more vivid on each page. He glows like the sun, impossible to look at directly yet utterly charismatic. I missed him when the novel was done."

In many ways, then, the whole life of Vivek/Nnemdi is a journey of self-discovery, and the more that is discovered, the more happiness becomes available.

Except, of course, that Vivek can't be himself out in the real world. Not in conservative Nigeria. Mary at one point dragged him off to church for a (pretty violent) exorcism... People whose difference upsets the mobs that so quickly gather in these circumstances can find themselves ending up in tyres on road junctions. Kavita, having found his body but no explanations as to what happened, fears that the mob that burned the market down also killed her son.

Osita, Vivek's cousin and lover, knows better. He knows that Vivek died by accident. He knows that he went out, with his long hair and his dress, knowing that every time he did this he was courting danger (but, as he asks at one point: "If nobody sees you, are you still there?"). Osita, terrified that today, when the mob is on the rampage at the market, will turn out to be particularly dangerous, sets off to find her. He tries to compel her to come back. In the tussle that ensues, she loses her balance, and bangs her head on the kerb.



The young people who really knew Vivek try to explain to Kavita who she was. Osita, however, the only one who really knows how those last minutes went down, doesn't feel able to share this knowledge. You hope he will, given time. Because, as Nnemdi explains from beyond the grave, she actually died the best death: in the arms of a person who truly knew and loved and respected her.

So, we're relieved about that at least. We've been teased by questions and doubts about Osita. We've dreaded finding out that he was somehow culpable.

And we're relieved that there was no humiliation for Vivek at the end. No moment of terror. Just the stupidity of an accident brought about by the noblest motives.

But at the end of the day, his life has been cut short. And you feel acutely sad that there are places -- many places, actually -- where people like Vivek can exist only behind closed doors, in hermetically sealed and trusted communities. They cannot be themselves everywhere. And you profoundly wish they could. 



As Constance Grady comments: "On a literal level, [the death] was accidental... But on another level, Vivek was killed by exactly the forces Emezi implicated in the book’s very first sentence: by the people who burned the market down. By THEM. By a violent world that destroys what it does not understand. Terror of THEM pants through this whole book... 'The boy is slim, he has long hair,' says Vivek’s aunt Mary. 'All it takes is one idiot thinking he’s a woman from behind or something, then getting angry when he finds out that he’s not.' The 'idiots' who make up this 'them' never resolve into specific figures in The Death of Vivek Oji, and they don’t have to. Everyone who loves Vivek has one of 'them' living in their heads, spurring them to try to force Vivek to live as a man when he is in public. It’s for his own good, they keep insisting; it will protect him. But that protective impulse doesn’t keep Vivek safe. In the end, it’s what kills him."   



Akwaeke Emezi is someone who identifies as nonbinary, and prefers to avoid all the messing about with he/she and his/her by using "they/them" as a singular non-specific pronoun. It sounds grammatically odd to my ears, but I can see how the English language is a pain in this respect (many languages, after all, don't distinguish genders in the third person singular), so I'll follow suit.

They grew up in the part of Nigeria where the action of the novel takes place, and in the period (the late 1990s) in which it is set. (We learn at one point of the death of Sani Abacha, military-leader-turned-head-of-state, which I vividly remember covering as an editor with the BBC.)

Their childhood was lived out against the background of political and religious violence. But they grew up among the "Nigerwives", an association set up by foreign women married to Nigerian men to help them assimilate into their new community: "And so they raised all their children together. So we've got riots going on outside and all this kind of violence. And then we have this community of aunties from all over the world. And my Austrian auntie is teaching me how to make waffles from scratch, and my German auntie is teaching me how to swim in the pool. And it was such a surreal world to grow up in, because it felt like they created a bubble for us and they made sure they raised us inside that bubble despite what was happening outside."

This "bubble" is replicated in The Death of Vivek Oji. There too we meet a selection of "Nigerwives", whose children -- themselves learning to navigate multiple racial and gender identities, and/or dealing with issues within their parents' marriages -- nevertheless form a warm and supportive little cocoon in which Vivek can blossom into Nnemdi.



But we have to be careful in talking about Vivek's journey, and maybe "blossom into" is not the right expression. I'm going to quote Emezi quite extensively here, as I fear any paraphrase I attempt might not reflect the subtleties involved.

They explain: "With Vivek, I wanted to show a character who is true to himself the entire way. There is no version of him that is more or less authentic than the other. What he's doing is exploring additional aspects to himself, like through the book you see him explore with fashion and makeup and his gender expression. And ... it's an additive process. He's not hiding who he is. Everyone else is uncomfortable with it, but he's actually very centered. He knows how he wants to look."

In another interview, they enlarge on the decision to avoid labels such as "queer" or "transgender": "One of the first reasons was that Vivek is set in the Nigerian community that I grew up in. Growing up, queer and trans just weren't part of our vocabulary, at all. And it also is a very Western thing, these specific labels. And I wanted to write a story about a queer kid who doesn't need to use these specific labels to still be what they are... Vivek is gender nonconforming. I think there's only one point where something is said explicitly about how he identifies and it's said by his friends, by the people who are closest to him. It says that he was okay with either/or... What does it look like to not buy into a very Western binary where you have one name and then you have another name? And that means that your identity before was invalid, your self-expression before was invalid. And I wanted readers to sit with [the fact] that he was valid the entire time. No matter what he wore, no matter what pronouns she used, Vivek was Vivek the entire time."



They also discuss the element of reincarnation, an Igbo concept. The story suggests that Vivek is a reincarnation of his grandmother, but he was not given the appropriate reincarnation name because he is assumed to be the "wrong" gender: "And what if this just causes spiritual turmoil because they didn't name the child properly? It's a thing about naming and spirit, not about gender, actually. Gender is involved in it, but the thread that's really the point of it all is spiritual."

Emezi comes from a background that fosters eclecticism. She has a father who is Nigerian, and a mother who is variously described as Tamil, Indian, and/or Malaysian (there's no reason she can't be all three, of course). I was happy to see that Emezi is also an admirer of Zen Cho.

I'll close with the book's central message, again in Emezi's words: "I think that there are multiple realities, and we might be centered in our own, but that doesn't invalidate a reality that someone else is centered in. And a lot of the time, the violence that we see in our world today is because people are trying to make their reality a dominant reality, and to say that the rest of these other realities don't exist. And the best way to make sure that someone's reality doesn't exist is to make sure the person doesn't exist."

May we live to see a more tolerant time.