Hate has always a place

Nice cover Mass Market Paperback.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

This is a difficult book in different ways. After some intriguing comments, my curiosity went up and when I started reading, I was blown away.

I think the world would be richer if we could get a wider narrative than the traditional white/west. Not to say that it is problematic per se, considering the whole wide world it is just that… narrow, a fraction of the perspectives and mindsets of humanity.

It is a very powerful dynamic, a complex and at the same time, simple social structure, ripe with brutality. The post-apocalyptic African setting has also a very sad and timeless resonance. Race, gender and otherness, that nasty human need to exert power over others, for whatever reason and feeling rightful about it. One race violently oppresses another and then, filled with righteous fury, the genocide begins. Both races violently oppress women. Everybody violently oppresses mixed race partners, victims of sexual violence and children born of violence become a token of hatred. Brutality in so many levels.

Rejection, inequality, lack of opportunity, violence, stigma, hatred, oppression, mutilation, rape, religion, tradition. The importance of talking about these themes, to delve in uncomfortable points of view and to show with raw power what it does to people who suffer from it and also in what the people who have this behavior transform themselves. We can’t be better by turning the blind eye or refusing empathy because it is comfortable, just saying.

After been blown away for about half of the book, things began to feel confusing, nothing very big, but it bugged me. There were a couple of red flags for me that kept going on to my bewilderment. The protagonist, Onyesonwu, feisty, impulsive and passionate is heavily discriminated because she is a girl and also for being a child of rape, "the bad kind" (for them), that is: a mixed race born of rape. She finds love in a boy who shares her “condition”, but he is a bit better off, because he is male and basically a sexist prick. Yes, he is devoted, deeply in love and when he gets angry tells her that she should kill herself, that she is a dumb woman, (that is double the dumbness) and continuously points her stupidity and ignorance, contrary to her, you know, he has been an apprentice for a couple of teachers, she has none or very little and so… stupid woman of course. And I get the part of how much he loves her, that he will go to deaths end with her and he is “trying to learn” or to consider her better, but with that much love… he is doing a terrible and amazingly slow effort, … I don’t know, maybe the people are so bad that this is the best that she can get, and it is troubling for me to consider this a very loving and romantic situation, like the first passionate encounter they have (spoilers I guess): she is squirming from terrible pain (because plot) and he nonchalantly notifies her that she should remain untouched… for now (like a new pot… you know?) and where the pain comes from, casual, very casual (see more plot) and while she continues to squirm in pain, he finds romantic or something to say goodbye by lifting her shirt and kissing (tenderly? right…) her nipple. Is it me that found troublesome those details?

Well, that confusing bit is a very subjective perception, but the plot gets disorienting too, like after handling these difficult themes with such mastery, the plot progression became more blurred with each page. Everything went all over the place, important arcs of worlbuilding, like the awesome Red People, implied some great character and plot progression, and it did… in theory, I guess. You know it progressed, but it was so muffled, like someone mumbling important things to your ear. The magic system too, so intriguing and rich, but in the end so vague. A big shortcoming was the ending, so anticlimactic and inconsistent. No spoilers, but how these huge issues humanity faces constantly are solved? There is no quick fix and you can’t expect that, but there was so little to find in the ending. Hope I could read some other people's thoughts about it.

So what then? Both parts, the mastery of setting such difficult themes with a brilliant first half and an underwhelming second half make a great book nonetheless. There is so much to think within, to visit and try to understand, to get confused and back. It is not one of the nurturing aspects of reading?