Nnedi Okorafor Gets Real

Nnedi Okorafor has won pretty much every prize in SF in the past 10 years, but she produces adult and YA novels at such a prolific rate that though most are worth reading, not every one is notable. Her new novel The Death of the Author, though, is a significant departure for her, with her customary africanfuturist storytelling balanced by the depiction of a large Nigerian-American family in Chicago.

Like the rest of her oeuvre, the book treats Nigeria as the center of the future world but, unlike most of her other work, she frames the novel within the story of a Naijamerican family somewhat like Okorafor’s own. Okorafor has talked about how the sudden death of her younger sister Ngozi at the age of 48 prompted her to write more autobiographically and this lengthy novel centered around two novelists — one a robot, the other a paraplegic — has a different feel to her recent work.

The novel follows the second-oldest daughter Zelu, one of six children of a mixed Yoruba-Igbo Nigerian family in Chicago. She is a creative writing adjunct and a paraplegic after a childhood fall from a tree. At rock bottom she scraps her literary novel and writes the instantly successful SF book Rusted Robots about a future world where humanity has died off and Automation— comprising Humes (humanoid robots), NoBodies (network-based AIs) and a number of other types of robots—populates the Earth.

Okorafor balances the human protagonist Zelu and the hume protagonist Ankara—both of whom she shows writing important novels that illustrate the enduring importance of storytelling, even after authors (humans) are dead. Indeed, even in the marketing of the book, Okorafor’s publishers show how the two protagonists are almost of an equal level by issuing two covers to the book: one for Zelu, one for Ankara.

Zelu’s three attributes — sister, paraplegic, critic — give the novel its unusual dimensions. Okorafor herself lost the use of her legs temporarily as a young adult after a back operation went wrong. Unlike Zelu, she recovered to be able to walk without the use of prosthetics but clearly there are commonalities (as well as differences) between the Nigerian-American SF novelist from the Midwest within the book and the one writing it.

The similarity between her and her human protagonist allows Okorafor to delve into the complicated sibling and family relationships in Zelu’s life in a way that feels real, though not particularly profound. There are, paradoxically, too many siblings and their partners — as well as the robot stories and love interests — for Okorafor to properly explore any of the relationships. She writes some fascinating set pieces around weddings and funerals that give insight into the tensions of an upwardly mobile, immigrant Naijamerican family — how they relate to each other and to the family back “home.” But this is no Henry James or even Amy Tan,

Having Zelu as a creative writing teacher and novelist gives Okorafor the freedom to yell at entitled creative writing students, to bemoan the crass Americanization of film adaptations, and to repeatedly use Joseph Campbell’s phrase “ultimate boon” from the tacky narrative bible ”The Hero with a Thousand Faces” to describe the final goal the hero achieves, fulfilling his (or in this case her) initial call to action. It also allows her to knowingly refer to Roland Barthes famous essay The Death of the Author which gives the title its name. Barthes’ “death” is figurative, meaning, as one “smug” student summarizes, paraphrasing Zelu back to herself: “what I [the author] think of my own work doesn’t matter. The reader decides what it’s about, right?”

But the novel does not bog down in theory. It is fun, bright, and evocative. Okorafor’s present is full of life: with spicy food and prickly, loving humans. And, though without humans, her future is still lively—full of stories, conflict, personalities and redolent of Nigerian folklore. We do not so much forgive the clunky plot as, within the action, forget that the plot matters. Ironically for a novel and a novelist for whom the primacy of narrative is so important, Death of the Author is best when its heroes are short of their ultimate boons and just dealing with the obstacles of life.