BOOK: The Death of Vivek Oji
AUTHOR: Akwaeke Emezi,
PUBLISHER: Faber & Faber
PRICE: £12.99

To most readers unfamiliar with Nigeria, the title of Akwaeke Emezi’s novel might sound foreign and foreboding. The second assumption is quickly dispelled as the title, when peeled back like a bit of sticky tape, reveals a lusty, sparkling world with many characters and their connections. As it suggests, the death of the protagonist, Vivek, who is presumably little more than twenty and born of an Indian mother and Nigerian father, is the central thematic of the novel. But the melancholy permeating it does not weigh the novel down; rather it is a viscous animated matrix in which the characters and their lives are suspended like luminous particles. The readers feel an intimacy with the characters because of the sensuousness of the descriptions. People are described in terms of skin, teeth, fabric, hair, touch and smile — which materialize them as bodies.

Set presumably in the 1990s, the author traces the lives of Vivek, his family and friends, going back and forth in time. A principal character is Osita, who is always more than a cousin to Vivek. All relationships in the novel’s universe gravitate towards intimacy or become terse, including Vivek’s relationship with the children of his mother’s friends, the Nigerwives. This inherent changeability of people and relationships is the subject matter of the novel. The descriptions are more enlivening than ornate, such as those of the two sisters, Somto and Olunne, who look like two “bubblegum fairies”. The material universe of the characters is mapped through referents which readers who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s would be delighted to recognize. The references to the transcultural economy producing Bournvita, Sunsilk, Milo and Archie comics are likely to evoke a sense of kinship in the Indian readers for the middle class, cosmopolitan Igbo adolescents of the novel. An allusion to the death of General Abacha and a reference to Mariah Carey imply that it is located in the late ’90s.

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, Faber & Faber, £12.99 Amazon

Vivek’s mother’s speculations about the circumstances of her son’s death occupy the last portion of the novel. That apart it cannot be categorized as being about any one thing even if Emezi’s public image and other novels provide classificatory schemes to describe it. More than other literary works, it fits in with a larger animated discussion in contemporary anthropology about relatedness. Houses, mothers and food are dotted across the novel’s universe, forming people and determining relationships. In his most transformative months, Vivek spends time in various houses. The characters are related by blood and law as well as by what they consume or what consumes them — desire, shared pasts and death. Relationships often draw from all of these, accruing complexity. The boundaries of selfhood, personhood and of bodies are effaced in the novel as substance is uncontainable. But there is a fixation with the formal aspects of people, not just the softer, squishier substance. Emezi shows how even hard matter — bone, teeth, hair — can be infiltrated, reaching into people, entwining them in kinship.

Form and content are almost fungible in Emezi’s work. Fixity of shape is anathema to Vivek. In Chapter 10, Vivek describes the oppressive nature of shapes, a disquietude that is likened to being dragged through wet concrete which set when Vivek grew up: “But then I got bigger and it started drying on me and eventually I turned into an uneven block, chipping and sparking on the hard ground.” But for the denouement, the narrative also defies form. Towards the end, it becomes funnel-shaped — Vivek’s death pulling the universe from all directions and driving it to an end. The novel’s content nourishes and summons its form into existence. Its formal peculiarities are reflected in its first chapter, which comprises a single line, and in the constant back and forth in time, eluding sequence.

At the end, the work is an exercise in uncontainability. Having already established that hard matter can be chipped or broken, Emezi leaves the book as a timid container. Its skeletal structure can barely hold the life, which pulsates from within it.