Nnedi Okorafor's Blog
April 1, 2024
It's been a long time...
Greetings,
I don't spend a lot of time here but I'm here today because I was finally able to sign back into my account. The last blog post on here was from 2012! Wth! 😆. Therefore...
Hiiiiiii, everyone, haha.
While I'm here I might as well take the moment to let you know what you can expect to come from me in 2024 and 2025.
The publishing order is:
Book 1 of SHE WHO KNOWS: Firespitter- August 2024, novella 🐲: This is Najeeba's story, the mother of Onyesonwu from Who Fears Death. It's a novella trilogy. I've wanted to write this for years and I finally did. There is mysticism, there is technology and it's all in the future. It features a badass woman. Book one is while she's in her teens and book 2 and 3 are when she's well into her 40s.
[Adult novel, book title soon to be released]-Winter 2025, novel 🤖🐬: This is the most ambitious and personal novel I've written so far. I've been rolling it around for nearly 30 years, since I began telling stories. My sisters and I used to talk about me writing it. This one is a Nnedi novel, but it's different. It is not very categorizable, so just let it be what it is, minus expectations and what you've read from me previously. It is those things, but it is much much more, as well.
THE SPACE CAT- Spring 2025, graphic novel 🐱: This is written by me and illustrated by Tana Ford. It features Periwinkle Chukwu who is based on my cat Periwinkle Chukwu. Tana and I have been through so much in our lives while making of this book and that layer to it comes through in the art. It's beautiful, at times meditative, whimsical and it has bite (though some purrs too...and some bark and it's a hoot). Nigeria is part of the story, as is outer space. Oh, and I'm in it, too. Yep.
Also, my milestone birthday is April 8, and I get an eclipse (plus some other very cool things, 🤫😉🤓).
Ok, that's all for now. Off to hit the gym.
Happy April 1st (none of this is an April Fool's joke, so leave that out of it, heh).
Nnedi
I don't spend a lot of time here but I'm here today because I was finally able to sign back into my account. The last blog post on here was from 2012! Wth! 😆. Therefore...
Hiiiiiii, everyone, haha.
While I'm here I might as well take the moment to let you know what you can expect to come from me in 2024 and 2025.
The publishing order is:
Book 1 of SHE WHO KNOWS: Firespitter- August 2024, novella 🐲: This is Najeeba's story, the mother of Onyesonwu from Who Fears Death. It's a novella trilogy. I've wanted to write this for years and I finally did. There is mysticism, there is technology and it's all in the future. It features a badass woman. Book one is while she's in her teens and book 2 and 3 are when she's well into her 40s.
[Adult novel, book title soon to be released]-Winter 2025, novel 🤖🐬: This is the most ambitious and personal novel I've written so far. I've been rolling it around for nearly 30 years, since I began telling stories. My sisters and I used to talk about me writing it. This one is a Nnedi novel, but it's different. It is not very categorizable, so just let it be what it is, minus expectations and what you've read from me previously. It is those things, but it is much much more, as well.
THE SPACE CAT- Spring 2025, graphic novel 🐱: This is written by me and illustrated by Tana Ford. It features Periwinkle Chukwu who is based on my cat Periwinkle Chukwu. Tana and I have been through so much in our lives while making of this book and that layer to it comes through in the art. It's beautiful, at times meditative, whimsical and it has bite (though some purrs too...and some bark and it's a hoot). Nigeria is part of the story, as is outer space. Oh, and I'm in it, too. Yep.
Also, my milestone birthday is April 8, and I get an eclipse (plus some other very cool things, 🤫😉🤓).
Ok, that's all for now. Off to hit the gym.
Happy April 1st (none of this is an April Fool's joke, so leave that out of it, heh).
Nnedi
October 30, 2012
Zahrah the Windseeker wins the Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature (Fiction)
Last night, my novel Zahrah the Windseeker was awarded the Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature (Fiction). The award was presented by poet and the publisher of Third World Press Haki Madhubuti and sponsored by the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago.
Oh, what a night!! I'll tell you, I did not expect to win. Not-at-all. But I should have known something wonderful was going to happen when I got the PERFECT parking spot right in front of the entrance (the place was packed and I'd arrived five mins late!) and the spot was behind a shiny black Bentley.
This lot was full but for some reason, I drove up to the entrance, anyway. I was shocked as the security guard moved the "lot full" sign for me and told me that there happened to be exactly ONE spot left. :-D!! "Don't scratch the Bentley," she warned me.
It was such an honor to be recognized in this way, in this city (Chicago). Zahrah the Windseeker had such a rough start when it was released in 2005 because bad luck (including my editor Andrea Pinkney leaving my publisher Houghton Mifflin a week before Zahrah the Windseeker's release).
Then in 2008, the novel won the Wole Soyinka Prize in Nigeria. It was presented to me by literary/political icon Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka in Lagos. That night was the first night I felt truly recognized as a novelist. From then on, Zahrah the Windseeker was on the radar. And now, Zahrah has been recognized in the United States by the African American community (in this case, the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago) and the prize was presented by another literary and political icon, Haki Madhubuti.
It's poetic. And there's a lesson in here somewhere. I know what it is.
The stage. The Award ceremony was held in the historical Dusable Museum of African American History .
October 31, 2011
WHO FEARS DEATH wins the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
And where was I when this awesome news was announced? In a maximum security jail in Chicago visiting one of my students who'd gotten into some trouble. I needed to make sure he was ok. He was. As much as he could be. He’s maintaining.
It was good to see him. He said he was enjoying the latest book I’d sent him- a copy of His Dark Materials. Regardless, seeing him there made my heart ache and eyes burn (as it did back in April). He’s a brilliant young man.
But when I got there, my family had already heard the news from my editor and I could do nothing but give in to the happy dancing and confetti throwing. Now, only an hour later, I sit here smiling.
I am really proud of this novel. I worked so hard on it. It worked so hard on me. This is beautiful.
May 10, 2011
Concept art for WHO FEARS DEATH: The Movie
This is the first piece of concept art for WHO FEARS DEATH: The movie (click on the image for a larger view). It was created by Kenyan painter Yvonne Muinde (who has worked on many films including- Avatar, Happy Feet, and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith). Learn more about my novel Who Fears Death here.
This scene depicts Onyesonwu and her companions' initial encounter with The Red People. The sandstorm parts and the next phase of the journey begins.
This scene depicts Onyesonwu and her companions' initial encounter with The Red People. The sandstorm parts and the next phase of the journey begins.
April 2, 2011
A Review of WHO FEARS DEATH by acclaimed author Steven Barnes
Beyond Mere Genre
By Steven Barnes
originally published in The American Book Review
Who Fears Death
By Nnedi Okorafor
DAW Books
http://us.penguingroup.com
304 pages; cloth, $24.95
“What makes you think that you should understand it all?” he asked. “That's a lesson you have to learn, instead of being angry all the time. We'll never know exactly why we are, what we are, and so on. All you can do is follow your path all the way to the wilderness, and then continue along because that's what must be.”
A fascinating passage from a remarkable book, an exploration of hate and love, sex and power, male and female, life and death by a young writer in enviable control of her craft. Make no mistake: Who Fears Death is not a polemic, but it contains strong views on some very difficult subjects indeed. The author, Nnedi Okorafor, has been lambasted for her thematic explorations of the practice of female genital mutilation (I refuse to call it “circumcision”: circumcision does not prevent men from achieving orgasm. This practice is the removal of the clitoris and critical nerve tissue. Its value and purpose may be debatable; the neurological result is not). This section of her book, which deals with the education and ascendance to near-godhood of a young woman named Onyesonwu (literally, “Who Fears Death”), is but one set of wrenching, powerful images in a book filled with them.
Set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, we never quite see what has happened to Europe and Asia, although remnants of relatively advanced technologies remain among the tribal trappings. Computers still flicker to life, and odd machines seem to gather water from the clouds. But communications have broken down, there are few machines, and most technology seems archaic or on the edge of collapse.
Tribal wars threaten genocide constantly, and villages can turn from welcoming to suspicious to mob-homicidal in the turn of a page.
It is fair to say that women are the center of good in this book: you really wouldn’t want to be a man in Onyesonwu’s world. Men are either rapists, betrayers, helpless, or helpmates who meet ugly ends. The question of gender identity and roles looms hugely, and if one senses an ocean of boiling anger behind some of the images and linguistics, that can probably be understood, given the historical facts underlying the fantasy here.
Make no mistake, for all the post-apocalyptic trappings, this is not science fiction in any classical sense. This is fantasy, dealing with the yearnings of the human heart for individual emotional reality to be directly extended to the outer world. While Okorafor is initially coy about it, by halfway through the book, we can be certain that, yes, her characters are not hallucinating, not insane, not confusing the inner world of meditative or shamanic experience with the outer objective reality.
In this world, magic works. Human Beings really can transform into animals, and summon elemental powers. It is to Okorafor’s considerable credit that she slides us into that world as gradually as she does, playing peek-a-boo with our assumptions: are they or aren’t they? Is she or isn’t she? As her half-breed protagonist struggles to understand the power within her by seeking mentors or teachers, who she is never quite certain she can trust.
Who Fears Death is also about personal responsibility, community, and the creation of family, as the Okeke woman Onyesonwu travels through an African wasteland of desert, tiny villages, war-torn landscapes, and waterholes, seeking vengeance against the man who raped her mother and sired her, a wizard of such power that even Onyesonwu’s mighty gifts seem insufficient, and the outcome of the book held in serious doubt.
This is not a pretty world, although it holds gentle values, and is told in oft-exquisite prose. Sexuality is a respite from almost unendurable despair, and love is so volatile, so fragile, that even to hope for its existence, let alone growth and prospering, would seem to be like betting on a butterfly in a blast furnace.
And yet…hope exists, between mother and daughter, father and daughter, lover and beloved. As much pain and betrayal as can be found in Who Fears Death as it winds its way closer and closer to the inevitable confrontation, as allies and friends die, are torn to pieces or fall by the wayside, as betrayal and disappointment seems to dog their every step, the book never loses hope.
And that is where the quality of an African Magical Realism seems to come in. The question of what is subjective and what is objective, what we should believe- our heads or our hearts- never seems far from the page. Okorafor almost dares us to disbelieve, to assume, to demand that Onyesonwu conform to our expectations, or the world that she walks to our maps of reality. If the gender philosophy beneath the prose seems scathingly radicalized at times, it never feels dishonest. If the violence is occasionally operatic, never is it inappropriate or exploitative.
Who Fears Death strikes one as a work grounded in an understanding of life, emotion, and the cycles of existence decidedly non-European, and as such is a terrifically valuable addition to the fantasy cycles published in the bleached annals of traditional speculative fiction. But the intense emotions and suspicion that Okorafor has a very serious intent indeed, as well as her linguistic gifts make Who Fears Death a serious work, with values beyond “mere” genre, and a work that speaks very well for the future of an exceedingly promising young writer.
Steven Barnes is the author of 23 novels, has written for television’s Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, and with his wife novelist, Tananarive Due, was the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for the mystery novel In the Night of the Heat.
READ THE FIRST TWO CHAPTER OF WHO FEARS DEATH HERE
By Steven Barnes
originally published in The American Book Review
Who Fears Death
By Nnedi Okorafor
DAW Books
http://us.penguingroup.com
304 pages; cloth, $24.95
“What makes you think that you should understand it all?” he asked. “That's a lesson you have to learn, instead of being angry all the time. We'll never know exactly why we are, what we are, and so on. All you can do is follow your path all the way to the wilderness, and then continue along because that's what must be.”
A fascinating passage from a remarkable book, an exploration of hate and love, sex and power, male and female, life and death by a young writer in enviable control of her craft. Make no mistake: Who Fears Death is not a polemic, but it contains strong views on some very difficult subjects indeed. The author, Nnedi Okorafor, has been lambasted for her thematic explorations of the practice of female genital mutilation (I refuse to call it “circumcision”: circumcision does not prevent men from achieving orgasm. This practice is the removal of the clitoris and critical nerve tissue. Its value and purpose may be debatable; the neurological result is not). This section of her book, which deals with the education and ascendance to near-godhood of a young woman named Onyesonwu (literally, “Who Fears Death”), is but one set of wrenching, powerful images in a book filled with them.
Set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, we never quite see what has happened to Europe and Asia, although remnants of relatively advanced technologies remain among the tribal trappings. Computers still flicker to life, and odd machines seem to gather water from the clouds. But communications have broken down, there are few machines, and most technology seems archaic or on the edge of collapse.
Tribal wars threaten genocide constantly, and villages can turn from welcoming to suspicious to mob-homicidal in the turn of a page.
It is fair to say that women are the center of good in this book: you really wouldn’t want to be a man in Onyesonwu’s world. Men are either rapists, betrayers, helpless, or helpmates who meet ugly ends. The question of gender identity and roles looms hugely, and if one senses an ocean of boiling anger behind some of the images and linguistics, that can probably be understood, given the historical facts underlying the fantasy here.
Make no mistake, for all the post-apocalyptic trappings, this is not science fiction in any classical sense. This is fantasy, dealing with the yearnings of the human heart for individual emotional reality to be directly extended to the outer world. While Okorafor is initially coy about it, by halfway through the book, we can be certain that, yes, her characters are not hallucinating, not insane, not confusing the inner world of meditative or shamanic experience with the outer objective reality.
In this world, magic works. Human Beings really can transform into animals, and summon elemental powers. It is to Okorafor’s considerable credit that she slides us into that world as gradually as she does, playing peek-a-boo with our assumptions: are they or aren’t they? Is she or isn’t she? As her half-breed protagonist struggles to understand the power within her by seeking mentors or teachers, who she is never quite certain she can trust.
Who Fears Death is also about personal responsibility, community, and the creation of family, as the Okeke woman Onyesonwu travels through an African wasteland of desert, tiny villages, war-torn landscapes, and waterholes, seeking vengeance against the man who raped her mother and sired her, a wizard of such power that even Onyesonwu’s mighty gifts seem insufficient, and the outcome of the book held in serious doubt.
This is not a pretty world, although it holds gentle values, and is told in oft-exquisite prose. Sexuality is a respite from almost unendurable despair, and love is so volatile, so fragile, that even to hope for its existence, let alone growth and prospering, would seem to be like betting on a butterfly in a blast furnace.
And yet…hope exists, between mother and daughter, father and daughter, lover and beloved. As much pain and betrayal as can be found in Who Fears Death as it winds its way closer and closer to the inevitable confrontation, as allies and friends die, are torn to pieces or fall by the wayside, as betrayal and disappointment seems to dog their every step, the book never loses hope.
And that is where the quality of an African Magical Realism seems to come in. The question of what is subjective and what is objective, what we should believe- our heads or our hearts- never seems far from the page. Okorafor almost dares us to disbelieve, to assume, to demand that Onyesonwu conform to our expectations, or the world that she walks to our maps of reality. If the gender philosophy beneath the prose seems scathingly radicalized at times, it never feels dishonest. If the violence is occasionally operatic, never is it inappropriate or exploitative.
Who Fears Death strikes one as a work grounded in an understanding of life, emotion, and the cycles of existence decidedly non-European, and as such is a terrifically valuable addition to the fantasy cycles published in the bleached annals of traditional speculative fiction. But the intense emotions and suspicion that Okorafor has a very serious intent indeed, as well as her linguistic gifts make Who Fears Death a serious work, with values beyond “mere” genre, and a work that speaks very well for the future of an exceedingly promising young writer.
Steven Barnes is the author of 23 novels, has written for television’s Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, and with his wife novelist, Tananarive Due, was the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for the mystery novel In the Night of the Heat.
READ THE FIRST TWO CHAPTER OF WHO FEARS DEATH HERE
January 23, 2011
Ms. Magazine reviews AKATA WITCH
WORLD OF MAGIC: Review of Akata Witch
by Nisi Shawl
originally published in Ms. Magazine (Winter 2011)
Akata Witch
by Nnedi Okorafor
Viking
release date: April 2011
Young-adult fiction is influential; women and men often act out stories they read as teens. But try finding feminism in popular fantasies such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, or communities of color in Rowling's best-selling Harry Potter series. Nnedi Okorafor's books are a welcome contrast. The author of several award-winning fantasies for young people and an acclaimed novel about rape, Okorafor writes strong heroines making magical journeys of discovery through culturally diverse landscapes.
"This world is bigger than you," the adults in Sunny Nwazue's life keep telling her. Sunny, 12-year-old heroine of Okorafor's latest young adult novel, Akata Witch, lives in a world very much like our own: vital, busy, and in no way limited by national borders. Born in the U.S. of Nigerian parents (like her creator), Sunny returns with her family to Africa at the age of 9 to happily eat roaring hot pepper soup with Igbo, Efik, and the many other ethnic groups who call their town of Aba home. But she faces discrimination as an albino and an akata, or "foreign-born" black, and boys refuse to take her soccer playing seriously. Then Sunny's dawning adolescence awakens her latent magical abilities, and she's more different than ever. She can turn invisible. She can see the future.
Now Sunny must navigate her way not just among Nigeria's many ethnicities but between the pan-tribal practitioners of juju (a West African term for magic) who are known as the Leopard People, and the Lambs--this book's counterpart to the non-magical Muggles of Harry Potter fame. Leopard People inhabit all nations under a multitude of different names, forming secret societies in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America--everywhere.
Naturally, Sunny's parents are Lambs. They're ignorant of their daughter's juju initiation, a grittily literal journey to the center of the Earth, and of her further magical adventures, and she has to keep them that way--even when Sunny's disregard for juju's rules gets her spirited away for punishment to the secret neighborhood of Leopard Knocks His Foot. Even when she and her fellow apprentices are given the task of stopping a seral killer who targets children.
As they make their constant pronouncements about the world's immensity, adults tell Sunny that it will go on without her. Feisty Sunny protests her teachers' callous attitude, though the idea reassures as much as it horrifies her. She faces down the serial killer with a smile, knowing that she will die someday but the world will continue and that its end, which she has magically foreseen, can become a new beginning.
As the readership for young adult fantasy widens and deepens, attracting adults of all ages, more of us will be looking for books by authors whose imaginations surpass the restrictions of the past: sexism, colonialism, and the rest. And we'll find them. Akata Witch is a spectacular tale of a young woman coming to power in a truly global environment. Sunny's adventures give her a context for her special abilities and a gloriously huge arena in which to work her innate magic: the wide, wide world.
NISI SHAWL is the author of Filter House and a winner of the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award; she will be the 2011 Guest of Honor at WisCon, the annual feminist science fiction convention.
Pre-order Akata Witch at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. The novel will be released April 14th, 2011.
by Nisi Shawl
originally published in Ms. Magazine (Winter 2011)
Akata Witch
by Nnedi Okorafor
Viking
release date: April 2011
Young-adult fiction is influential; women and men often act out stories they read as teens. But try finding feminism in popular fantasies such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, or communities of color in Rowling's best-selling Harry Potter series. Nnedi Okorafor's books are a welcome contrast. The author of several award-winning fantasies for young people and an acclaimed novel about rape, Okorafor writes strong heroines making magical journeys of discovery through culturally diverse landscapes.
"This world is bigger than you," the adults in Sunny Nwazue's life keep telling her. Sunny, 12-year-old heroine of Okorafor's latest young adult novel, Akata Witch, lives in a world very much like our own: vital, busy, and in no way limited by national borders. Born in the U.S. of Nigerian parents (like her creator), Sunny returns with her family to Africa at the age of 9 to happily eat roaring hot pepper soup with Igbo, Efik, and the many other ethnic groups who call their town of Aba home. But she faces discrimination as an albino and an akata, or "foreign-born" black, and boys refuse to take her soccer playing seriously. Then Sunny's dawning adolescence awakens her latent magical abilities, and she's more different than ever. She can turn invisible. She can see the future.
Now Sunny must navigate her way not just among Nigeria's many ethnicities but between the pan-tribal practitioners of juju (a West African term for magic) who are known as the Leopard People, and the Lambs--this book's counterpart to the non-magical Muggles of Harry Potter fame. Leopard People inhabit all nations under a multitude of different names, forming secret societies in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America--everywhere.
Naturally, Sunny's parents are Lambs. They're ignorant of their daughter's juju initiation, a grittily literal journey to the center of the Earth, and of her further magical adventures, and she has to keep them that way--even when Sunny's disregard for juju's rules gets her spirited away for punishment to the secret neighborhood of Leopard Knocks His Foot. Even when she and her fellow apprentices are given the task of stopping a seral killer who targets children.
As they make their constant pronouncements about the world's immensity, adults tell Sunny that it will go on without her. Feisty Sunny protests her teachers' callous attitude, though the idea reassures as much as it horrifies her. She faces down the serial killer with a smile, knowing that she will die someday but the world will continue and that its end, which she has magically foreseen, can become a new beginning.
As the readership for young adult fantasy widens and deepens, attracting adults of all ages, more of us will be looking for books by authors whose imaginations surpass the restrictions of the past: sexism, colonialism, and the rest. And we'll find them. Akata Witch is a spectacular tale of a young woman coming to power in a truly global environment. Sunny's adventures give her a context for her special abilities and a gloriously huge arena in which to work her innate magic: the wide, wide world.
NISI SHAWL is the author of Filter House and a winner of the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award; she will be the 2011 Guest of Honor at WisCon, the annual feminist science fiction convention.
Pre-order Akata Witch at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. The novel will be released April 14th, 2011.
December 30, 2010
Nnedi Okorafor on The Africa Channel's "Behind the Words" Part 1
View the first ten minutes of my episode on the Africa Channel (it's a full hour long) here
It was taped back in July 2010. It's always hard for me to watch myself, so I haven't watched this yet. Hope you like it and hope I don't put my foot in my mouth too many times, ha ha. The taping was rather lengthy, so after a while, I was just talking and talking.
Enjoy.
Nnedi
It was taped back in July 2010. It's always hard for me to watch myself, so I haven't watched this yet. Hope you like it and hope I don't put my foot in my mouth too many times, ha ha. The taping was rather lengthy, so after a while, I was just talking and talking.
Enjoy.
Nnedi
October 13, 2010
Who Fears Death Optioned for a Film
My novel, WHO FEARS DEATH, has been optioned by film producer Kisha Cameron-Dingle. Kisha is the program director of the Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program, a program for filmmakers from Africa. She produced the Kenyan science fiction short film “Pumzi” (http://www.pumzithefilm.com/index.php) and was an associate producer on “Sometimes in April” and “Bamboozled.”
Needless to say, I’m very excited. This is one of those things where it is clear that the ancestors helped this to happen.
Kisha and I met up some weeks ago. When I handed her a copy of Who Fears Death, I didn’t expect her to get to it for a while. Nevertheless, days later, she found herself in the hair salon needing something to read. She happened to have Who Fears Death with her. Once she started it, she devoured it in a matter of days.
Most intriguing is the group of artists Kisha is gathering to push this film into being. Things are still coming together but I can say that award-winning Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu (who wrote and directed Pumzi) will direct the film.
As all this was coming together, two weeks ago Wanuri and I both happened to be in Port of Spain, Trinidad at the same time (I was there to do some author events for Trinidad/Tobago's National Library Week and she was the for the screening of Pumzi at a film festival). And so it was here that we met in person for the first time.
Wanuri and me at the library in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
When we spoke, it was clear that we had potent creative chemistry. She had read two thirds of Who Fears Death and the ideas she was throwing at me had me grinning for the rest of my time there. Respect to the ancestors.
I’m not going to dwell on the likelihood/unlikelihood of books making it to film…just as I never dwelled on the likelihood/unlikelihood of having my strange African speculative fiction stories make it to print. I’ll just keep doing what I do and celebrating such landmarks as they come. This one is cool as heck.
See me doing a happy dance and throwing confetti!
June 25, 2010
Penguin Books Blog: Meanings and Pronunciations in Who Fears Death
In my stories, there is much to a name.
In my first novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, I gave my main character the name "Zahrah" for many reasons. 1. The name is beautiful. 2. Zahrah is from the Northern part of her world and her world is based on Nigeria. The majority of people in Northern Nigeria are Hausa and Fulani (I am Igbo) and "Zahrah" is a Hausa name (Northern Nigeria is mainly Islamic). 3. I have a fondness for Northern Nigeria because my mother was born in the North (specifically in Jos, a city that used to be peaceful and is now sporadically problematic) and her first language was Hausa (English was her second and Igbo was her third). 4. Lastly, Zahrah means, "flower". Zahrah the Windseeker is a coming-of-age story and Zahrah lives in a technologically advanced floral world. It was perfect.
There is a web of stories connected to just about every name I choose for my characters. In Who Fears Death, this is no different. To begin with, all the names are from a part of Africa but it's the future, cultures have mixed, names have migrated.
The main character's name, "Onyesonwu", is an Igbo (Nigerian) name, which means "who fears death?" Her stepfather's last name is "Ogundimu", which is Yoruba (Nigerian). It's a name I've always loved. Plus Ogun is the Yoruba god of iron and Onyesonwu stepfather is a blacksmith. Her mother's name is "Najeeba", which is of Arabic origin but in this case a Sudanese name. "Binta", the name of one of Onyesowu's best friends, is a name from Sierra Leone. It means "with God"...
Read the rest here
In my first novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, I gave my main character the name "Zahrah" for many reasons. 1. The name is beautiful. 2. Zahrah is from the Northern part of her world and her world is based on Nigeria. The majority of people in Northern Nigeria are Hausa and Fulani (I am Igbo) and "Zahrah" is a Hausa name (Northern Nigeria is mainly Islamic). 3. I have a fondness for Northern Nigeria because my mother was born in the North (specifically in Jos, a city that used to be peaceful and is now sporadically problematic) and her first language was Hausa (English was her second and Igbo was her third). 4. Lastly, Zahrah means, "flower". Zahrah the Windseeker is a coming-of-age story and Zahrah lives in a technologically advanced floral world. It was perfect.
There is a web of stories connected to just about every name I choose for my characters. In Who Fears Death, this is no different. To begin with, all the names are from a part of Africa but it's the future, cultures have mixed, names have migrated.
The main character's name, "Onyesonwu", is an Igbo (Nigerian) name, which means "who fears death?" Her stepfather's last name is "Ogundimu", which is Yoruba (Nigerian). It's a name I've always loved. Plus Ogun is the Yoruba god of iron and Onyesonwu stepfather is a blacksmith. Her mother's name is "Najeeba", which is of Arabic origin but in this case a Sudanese name. "Binta", the name of one of Onyesowu's best friends, is a name from Sierra Leone. It means "with God"...
Read the rest here
May 14, 2010
The writing of Who Fears Death
This is an essay I wrote that describes the genesis of my forthcoming novel Who Fears Death. There is so much to this particular novel, I'm glad I was given the space to explain some of it:
“My life fell apart when I was sixteen. Papa died.”
Those are the opening lines of Who Fears Death. I remember when I wrote them. I was thinking of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I was thinking of change, cultural shift, chaos. Okonkwo’s death. And my own father’s very recent death. Yeah, all that in those two lines.
In more ways than one, the opening scene of Who Fears Death, titled “My Father’s Face”, was the beginning of it all. Originally, it was not the beginning of the novel. This scene takes place well into the story when my main character Onyesonwu is sixteen and has been through so much. The original beginning was when Onyesonwu was five years old and happy, living with her mother in the desert. Nevertheless, “My Father’s Face” was the first scene I wrote.
Though my stories tend to be mostly linear, I’m a non-linear writer. I’ll write the middle, then the ending, then the beginning and kind of jump around until I’m done. Then I’ll tie all the scenes together and neaten it up. Nevertheless, when Who Fears Death was all said and done, I wasn’t surprised that “My Father’s Face” turned out to be the beginning of the actual book.
I started writing Who Fears Death just after my father passed in 2004. I was very very close to my father and writing was my way of staying sane. I based “My Father’s Face” on a moment I experienced at my father’s wake when everyone had cleared out of the room and I found myself alone with his body.
I was kneeling there looking at his face, thinking how much it no longer looked like him and how terrible that was. My morbid thoughts were driving me into deeper despair. Then suddenly I felt an energy move though me. This energy felt highly destructive, as if it could bring down the entire building. Almost all the details in the scene I went on to write were true, I felt them…well, up to the part where Onyesonwu makes her father’s body breath.
As soon as I wrote that scene, everything else rushed at me. My father’s passing caused me to think about death, fear, the unknown, sacrifice, destiny and cosmic trickery. Only a week or so after my father’s passing, I read the Washington Post article, We Want to Make a Light Baby: Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing by Emily Wax. I was absolutely infuriated. The storytelling spider in my head started weaving faster. I realized that this article was showing me why the people in my story’s town disliked Onyesonwu and why she was so troubled.
My mother, my sister Ifeoma and my brother Emezie flew with my father’s body back to Nigeria for his burial. When they returned, I learned through my siblings about the way widows were treated within Igbo custom, even the ones with PhDs…like my mother. I was again infuriated. And I was reminded yet again of why I was a feminist.
A year later, I went to Nigeria for the one-year memorial where I met my cousin Chinyere’s fiancé Chidi. His last name was Onyesonwu. I was intrigued. I knew “onye” meant “who” and “onwu” meant death. I wondered if it was an ogbanje name (these named often have the word “death” in them). I’d always been interested in the concept of the ogbanje. Amongst the Igbos, back in the day, girls who were believed to be ogbanjes were often circumcised (a.k.a. genital mutilated) as a way to cure their evil ogbanje tendencies.
I asked my cousin’s fiancé what his name meant (I thought it would be rude to ask if it was an ogbanje name. Plus it was his last name, not his first.). He said it meant, “Who fears death.” That night, I changed my character’s name and the title of the story. When I did that, it was as if the novel snapped into focus.
During that trip, I touched my father’s grave. I heard stories about the Biafran War and arguments about how what happened during this civil war was indeed the genocide of the Igbo people. I saw death on the highway and thanked the Powers That Be that my daughter (who was some months over one year old) was asleep. I got to watch the women in my father’s village sing all night in remembrance of my father. My maternal grandmother, mother, daughter and I were all in the same room at the same time- four generations. My sister Ngozi and I visited the lagoon that seemed so huge when we were kids but was really quite small. It was populated by hundreds and hundreds of colorful butterflies.
I wrote, conceived and incubated parts of Who Fears Death while in my father’s village, sometimes scribbling notes while sitting in the shade on the steps outside or by flashlight when the lights went out. I wrote notes on the plane ride home, too. When I think back to those times, I was in such a strange state of mind. My default demeanor is happy. I think during those times I was as close to sad as I could get.
When I got back to the States, I kept right on writing. Who Fears Death was a tidal wave and hurricane combined. It consumed all of my creativity and sucked in all the issues I was dealing with and dwelling on. It mixed with my rage and grief and my natural furious optimism. Yet when it came to writing the story, I was more the recorder than the writer. I never knew what was going to happen until my character told me and my hands typed it. When I finished Who Fears Death, it was seven hundred pages long. A Book 1 and a Book 2. Don Maass (my agent) felt this size was too great and suggested that I pare it down. This process took me another two years.
One of my favorite quotes is from one of my greatest idols, Nigeria’s great writer and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces.” This tiger of a story definitely pounced on me without proclamation or warning. I’m glad I was ready for it.
“My life fell apart when I was sixteen. Papa died.”
Those are the opening lines of Who Fears Death. I remember when I wrote them. I was thinking of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I was thinking of change, cultural shift, chaos. Okonkwo’s death. And my own father’s very recent death. Yeah, all that in those two lines.
In more ways than one, the opening scene of Who Fears Death, titled “My Father’s Face”, was the beginning of it all. Originally, it was not the beginning of the novel. This scene takes place well into the story when my main character Onyesonwu is sixteen and has been through so much. The original beginning was when Onyesonwu was five years old and happy, living with her mother in the desert. Nevertheless, “My Father’s Face” was the first scene I wrote.
Though my stories tend to be mostly linear, I’m a non-linear writer. I’ll write the middle, then the ending, then the beginning and kind of jump around until I’m done. Then I’ll tie all the scenes together and neaten it up. Nevertheless, when Who Fears Death was all said and done, I wasn’t surprised that “My Father’s Face” turned out to be the beginning of the actual book.
I started writing Who Fears Death just after my father passed in 2004. I was very very close to my father and writing was my way of staying sane. I based “My Father’s Face” on a moment I experienced at my father’s wake when everyone had cleared out of the room and I found myself alone with his body.
I was kneeling there looking at his face, thinking how much it no longer looked like him and how terrible that was. My morbid thoughts were driving me into deeper despair. Then suddenly I felt an energy move though me. This energy felt highly destructive, as if it could bring down the entire building. Almost all the details in the scene I went on to write were true, I felt them…well, up to the part where Onyesonwu makes her father’s body breath.
As soon as I wrote that scene, everything else rushed at me. My father’s passing caused me to think about death, fear, the unknown, sacrifice, destiny and cosmic trickery. Only a week or so after my father’s passing, I read the Washington Post article, We Want to Make a Light Baby: Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing by Emily Wax. I was absolutely infuriated. The storytelling spider in my head started weaving faster. I realized that this article was showing me why the people in my story’s town disliked Onyesonwu and why she was so troubled.
My mother, my sister Ifeoma and my brother Emezie flew with my father’s body back to Nigeria for his burial. When they returned, I learned through my siblings about the way widows were treated within Igbo custom, even the ones with PhDs…like my mother. I was again infuriated. And I was reminded yet again of why I was a feminist.
A year later, I went to Nigeria for the one-year memorial where I met my cousin Chinyere’s fiancé Chidi. His last name was Onyesonwu. I was intrigued. I knew “onye” meant “who” and “onwu” meant death. I wondered if it was an ogbanje name (these named often have the word “death” in them). I’d always been interested in the concept of the ogbanje. Amongst the Igbos, back in the day, girls who were believed to be ogbanjes were often circumcised (a.k.a. genital mutilated) as a way to cure their evil ogbanje tendencies.
I asked my cousin’s fiancé what his name meant (I thought it would be rude to ask if it was an ogbanje name. Plus it was his last name, not his first.). He said it meant, “Who fears death.” That night, I changed my character’s name and the title of the story. When I did that, it was as if the novel snapped into focus.
During that trip, I touched my father’s grave. I heard stories about the Biafran War and arguments about how what happened during this civil war was indeed the genocide of the Igbo people. I saw death on the highway and thanked the Powers That Be that my daughter (who was some months over one year old) was asleep. I got to watch the women in my father’s village sing all night in remembrance of my father. My maternal grandmother, mother, daughter and I were all in the same room at the same time- four generations. My sister Ngozi and I visited the lagoon that seemed so huge when we were kids but was really quite small. It was populated by hundreds and hundreds of colorful butterflies.
I wrote, conceived and incubated parts of Who Fears Death while in my father’s village, sometimes scribbling notes while sitting in the shade on the steps outside or by flashlight when the lights went out. I wrote notes on the plane ride home, too. When I think back to those times, I was in such a strange state of mind. My default demeanor is happy. I think during those times I was as close to sad as I could get.
When I got back to the States, I kept right on writing. Who Fears Death was a tidal wave and hurricane combined. It consumed all of my creativity and sucked in all the issues I was dealing with and dwelling on. It mixed with my rage and grief and my natural furious optimism. Yet when it came to writing the story, I was more the recorder than the writer. I never knew what was going to happen until my character told me and my hands typed it. When I finished Who Fears Death, it was seven hundred pages long. A Book 1 and a Book 2. Don Maass (my agent) felt this size was too great and suggested that I pare it down. This process took me another two years.
One of my favorite quotes is from one of my greatest idols, Nigeria’s great writer and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces.” This tiger of a story definitely pounced on me without proclamation or warning. I’m glad I was ready for it.