Review: Identity and grief entwine in Akwaeke Emezi’s wrenching 'The Death of Vivek Oji'
Vivek is a child born into grief, wailing into the world the same day his grandmother winks out of it, his foot marked with the same starfish-shaped scar his grandmother bore. It’s a portentous birth, marked with the same weight of fate and inevitability as the book’s title.
“The Death of Vivek Oji” (Riverhead, 256 pp., ★★★½ out of four) ends as it begins: with Vivek, now a tall, willowy young adult with hair cascading down to his waist, dead on a doorstep, his naked body wrapped in colorful fabric and the back of his broken skull bleeding out on his parents’ welcome mat, the same day the town’s market burns down.
How and why did it come to this for Vivek, the beloved only child of Chika and Kavita, whom they never really knew? Would he remain in death as much a mystery to his parents as he was in life?
A wrenching tale of grief and identity, “The Death of Vivek Oji” builds on the success of author Akwaeke Emezi’s striking 2018 debut, “Freshwater” – also a story about constructing an identity that doesn’t conform to social standards, and how such an identity makes the world bearable even as the world punishes you for it.
The world Vivek is born into is one of rigid patriarchal standards, where women like his mother Kavita, who is Indian, join the “Nigerwives,” a group of foreign-born women who learn together how to be better wives to Nigerian men. In one narrative interlude, we meet a man named Ebenezer, whose marriage fractures when, after many years of trying for a child, his wife suggests he sees a doctor – an affront to his manhood. “Be careful of women like that,” his brother tells him. “They start feeling like they’re men.”
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Gender roles wreak havoc on Vivek’s life even before he enters the world: In Nigeria, the husband’s family pays the bride price, but Kavita has come from India with her own dowry. Pride on both sides threatens to derail the wedding until the couple agree to put Kavita’s dowry aside for their eventual children: a small collection of heavy gold jewelry, passed down through the women in her family – the first of many omens.
By adolescence, Vivek is prone to fits and blackouts. He’s bullied and bruised, coming home with cigarette burns on his ribs. Weight melts off his lean frame as he grows his hair long and luxurious. His cousin Osita, once as close as a brother, reacts at first with revulsion that will prove telling.
Everyone around him wonders: Is Vivek confused? Sick? Sinful? Gay? His father frets. His mother fusses. His aunt, thinking Vivek possessed, takes him to church to have the demon beaten out of him, believing it derives its power from his hair. “You know how things are here,” she says to Vivek’s mother. “If someone misunderstands, if they think he’s a homosexual, what do you think is going to happen to him?”
Emezi has a gift for creating beauty of pain. “Picture: his father shattered, his mother gone mad. A dead foot with a deflated starfish spilled over its curve, the beginning and end of everything.” A story that would otherwise be unbearable with grief is instead as luminous as Vivek dripping in his mother’s dowry gold, hair tumbling past his shoulders.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Death of Vivek Oji,' by Akwaeke Emezi, is wrenching, beautiful
