Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor's name is one that I have been seeing a lot lately.  My reading of her has been pretty limited so far, but she is an author whose books I keep wanting to pick up.  Last week at the library I found her newly released Broken Places & Outer Spaces.  This is not a work of fiction but is a book about the author's own life and development as a writer.  While I am in the process of trying to reinvent myself as a writer, I thought that it might be informative to gain some perspective on someone who makes a living this way.
Okorafor's book parallels her emergence as a writer with her recovery from a spinal surgery that left her temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
What stands out about this book is that it isn't just a story of development and it isn't just a personal recovery story, both of which this is.  I don't think that the book is meant to be blindly inspirational in the sense that any hardship or difficulty will lead to personal growth.  Rather, this is a a focused book about her own personal experiences.  I have read many other personal narratives that give the reader the impression that either one must experience hardship in order to be creative or that hardship will necessarily lead to personal growth.  Okorafor does not attribute her creative development to the difficulties that she faced.  She almost offhandedly mentions that a friend suggested that she take a creative writing course.
Okorafor's descriptions of her struggling to relearn how to walk, coupled with her memories of her young athletic life show how much she has lived in her own experience.  She has spent a lot of time thinking about these times in her life.  This is really what sticks for me.  Her story is personal and hopeful without being didactic.
While this is not normally the type of book that I would read, she brings a lot to the form.

Visual Kindred

While reading Octavia Butler's Kindred, I learned that it had been adapted into a graphic novel.  After searching this out online and seeing some of the artwork, I decided that I needed to have this version of the book as well.  After getting it home, I paged through it, glancing at the representations of the book that I was currently reading, but I decided that I wanted to shelve it for a while before reading it.  I wanted to come back to it with a fresher perspective rather than, essentially, reading it twice in a row.
I recently did pick this up and was very happy with this adaptation.  I really enjoyed Butler's novel and I think that this work really does it justice.  The artwork is very careful to show the passage of time on Dana and Kevin.  Their faces and forms change of the course of the narrative to reflect the trials that they endure.
Need Okorafor write in the introduction that this graphic novel serves both as a way into Butler's work for the uninitiated and as a new way to read this novel.  I definitely found this to be the case.  The visual aspect of this book represented both the horror of the novel and the moments of compassion that Dana is able to find with others.  This is definitely a book to pick up.

Who Fears Death

*I wrote this post a few months back after reading this novel with my sci-fi book club.  I haven't really read it over since then.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s novel, Who Fears Death, reminds me of a few other books that I have read in my life, and it puts the author in good company.  It reminded me of China Achebe’s matter-of-fact narrative style, particularly in the way that Okorafor describes violence and pain as things that are normal, natural, and to be expected in life.  This treatment actually underscores the impact that violence has on those involved: both on the perpetrator and the victim in different dimensions.  This book also reminds me of Ngugi wa Thi’ongo’s work Wizard of the Crow.  Magic exists in a realistic landscape, but not the magic of wizards and witches.  This is real magic made from human experience and connections to nature.  In this light, it also reminds of of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  But for as much as Okorafor’s novel reminds me of these others, hers is something apart and is uniquely her own.

I read this novel in the context of a science fiction reading group that I host in Cleveland and I think that the context led me to expect a different book. I had been wanting to read this novel for some time, and suggesting it to the group seemed like a good way to make the time for it.  I had been hearing about this novel as a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic novel.  I didn’t find it worked as well with that expectation.  My group tended to agree; they seemed to like it, but not as a sci-fi novel.   There is a sci-fi element, I would add for the sake of full disclosure.  The characters use some futuristic technology that resemble GPS systems and smart phones, but these are outclassed by Onyesonwu’s intuition and magic.  Mostly, the use of technology is glossed over in a society that uses older technology.  There is one passage that sticks out to me and seems to be the main connection to the post-apocalypse:

The Lost Papers go into detail about how the Okeke, during their centuries festering in the darkness, were mad scientists.  The Lost Papers discuss how they invented the old technologies like computers, capture stations, and portables.  They invented ways to duplicate themselves and keep themselves young until they died.  They made food grow on dead land, they cured all diseases.  In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild creativity.

Onyesonwu later thinks of the Okeke as “a sad miserable unthinking lot,” for the embarrassment that they feel about their own past.  This hint of lost technology does fit in with a lot of modern sci-fi that speculates on a world that turns its back on the high technological past in order to regain something human about itself.  But this is also theme that Asimov dealt with, along with many other authors.  

What I like about the novel is that it presents magic as a hard-earned skill.  I tend not to enjoy more traditional fantasy, but I wouldn’t lump this book into that genre, either.  To me, this book picks up on the best traditions it draws from.  The sci-fi/post-apocalyptic tones are there but they are minor.  What they add to the novel is a fresh conflict between modernity and tradition, between the mythic and the realistic.  Characterization is strong and the revenge plot works well to drive the narrative.