Oji is born on the day of their grandmother’s death, and there is a sense in which her spirit inhabits the person they will become. At the same time, The Death of Vivek Oji is shot through with mythic elements. As readers, we encounter these lives almost like “a stack of photographs” being handed around at a wake (to use an image from the novel). On one level, this is a very directly told story of two people coming of age and grappling with sexualities that struggle to find expression. Emezi’s novel manages to balance an unflinching realism with something of the quality of a folktale or a myth. Akwaeke Emezi’s novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, opens with a chapter of only one sentence: “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.” From that first sentence, we are immersed in contemporary Nigeria in all of its complexity, where tight family and community bonds are woven into the submerged stories of gay, bisexual and transgender people, and where groups such as the ‘Nigerwives’ (foreign-born wives of Nigerian men) form one of the cultures that make up the mosaic of Nigerian society.
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