“Midway between the Old Oda-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto.”
This is the first novel by Chinelo Okparanta, who had already released a story collection a few years earlier, and more recently the novel Harry Sylvester Bird, which I read the other week and really enjoyed. This novel is also enjoyable but very different from that. This takes place entirely in Nigeria beginning during the Biafran War and its aftermath, and then spending the bulk of the novel in the next two decades. Ijeoma is a young Igbo girl during the time of the war when her father is killed as the family is escaping an air raid. From there the novel follow Ijeoma as she is raised by her mother. While at school she meets another girl who she develops strong feelings for, and she grows up a little she, the girl, and Ijeoma’s other realize the feelings are more than just friendship and affection. Her mother is horrified and begins the process of trying to root out the homosexuality that Ijeoma doesn’t even really understand at all, falling back to easy Biblical tropes to justify the cruelty of trying control her daughter. The novel follows Ijeoma as she grows into adulthood as the feelings inside her and pressures outside her are in constant battle against one another.
The moment in an early section of this novel in which her mother talks about the words “man” and “woman” and how woman comes from man, and you get the sense that while she seems to believe it it’s on very shaky ground. Ijeoma also notices the vast inconsistencies in the Biblical teaching and the supposed lessons to be drawn from them. She doesn’t yet notice that in saying woman and man are related in both English and the Bible that well, the Bible wasn’t written in English and not every language links the words for man and woman in this way. Regardless, the novel really plays upon the ways in which the Bible, and colonialism more widely, sought to create divisions among peoples (especially in the sense of beginning the novel during the civil war), among language, and internally with homophobic liturgy. The novel at times (in the narration of Ijeoma) looks backward to older cultural stories to try to think about what the world was like before these new structures were in place and whether there’s an answer to explain the turmoil she feels inside herself.
