Who Fears Death

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010

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Part 3, Chapters 57-60Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 57 Summary

They enter Durfa just past the cornfields. Luyu is nervous and worries about what will happen if she’s asked to work for a Nuru; Mwita points out that she’ll simply have to do it until she has a chance to get away. Mwita reminds Onye that he can only hold himself ignorable for about an hour, so they tell Luyu to make sure to find a place they can hide every 45 minutes; then they turn ignorable and enter Durfa.

As soon as they enter the town, a man orders Luyu to cook breakfast for his family; “He so assumed that Luyu would do his bidding that he didn’t notice when Luyu kept right on going” (356). Immediately after, though, another woman orders Luyu to carry her textiles for her, which at least gets them safely into Durfa. All morning, the orders continue; Luyu doesn’t get a break until midday. It looks strange to Onye, though: “Something was wrong … with everyone here. The Okeke didn’t look too bothered as they worked. And the Nuru weren’t openly cruel to them. […] It was confusing and strange” (358).

Onye changes into a vulture and flies up to find the Conversation Space, near where the rebels had told them Daib would be. Onye finds the building and begins to head back to Mwita and Luyu; however, a glint of gold catches her eye, and she spies a large crowd of soldiers preparing to depart. She remembers Sola’s warning that once the soldiers depart, it will be too late; she suspects they have a matter of hours and hurries back to Mwita and Luyu.

They’re gone, though, and Onye panics, but she remembers that she can find Mwita using the Mystic Points through his sperm inside her from that morning. She locates Mwita, but when someone shouts Ewu, she realizes she became so focused inside her that she became visible. The crowd descends on her; she escapes, and again wonders “about these people who seemed so content and peaceful but changed into monsters when their sterile Nuru environment was even slightly compromised” (360).

Onye finds Luyu and Mwita with another Okeke woman, watching Nuru children. Luyu is worried that she won’t be able to sneak off, but she asks the woman if she has ever heard of Onyesonwu. When she replies sympathetically, Onye speaks to her; the woman is surprised, but says nothing as they slip away.

Chapter 58 Summary

When they reach the General’s Headquarters, Luyu goes in first, as she’ll be seen as a slave. She returns and tells them that the building is empty, and that if Daib is there, he’ll be on the second floor. Mwita and Onye enter the building while Luyu waits on the first floor.

Daib is waiting for them at his desk when they walk upstairs. Mwita walks up to him and begins yelling at him, shaking the basket of disks on the desk at Daib and yelling at him for saving those when everything else of his was destroyed—the disks contain videos that he takes of himself while he brutalizes people. Daib laughs off Mwita, then picks one disk out and throws it at Onye’s feet. He then tells them to get out, as he has a prophecy to fulfill: “a tall bearded Nuru sorcerer will come and force the Great Book’s rewriting” (364). Onye questions her journey to herself, wondering if the prophecy had in fact indicated a male sorcerer: “Maybe ‘peace’ meant the death of all Okekes” (365).

Suddenly, Daib is at Mwita’s throat; Onye tries to rescue him, but she is unable to move. She realizes a wilderness tree constricts her: “The more I struggled, the tighter it constricted” (365). Daib throws Mwita aside and Onye feels the tree release her as he walks toward her. With his back turned to Mwita, however, Mwita screams something in Vah and slaps something onto the back of Daib’s neck; Daib screams, shocked, and when he regains himself, he launches himself at Mwita. Daib changes into a tiger, shredding his clothes and tearing Mwita apart; as Mwita lays dying, Daib collapses to the floor.

Onye tells Mwita she’ll heal him, but he tells her to finish it; when he passes, Onye searches for his spirit, but it is already gone. As Daib writhes on the floor, Onye realizes that Mwita’s semen is still inside her. Onye forces herself to ovulate and pushes his sperm toward her egg, making her pregnant. “All I could do was make it possible. Something else chose the rest. Something wholly outside of and unconcerned with humanity. At the moment of conception a giant shock wave blasted from me, a shock wave like the one so long ago during my father’s burial ceremony” (368).

Onye hears only female voices outside in the chaos. Luyu runs upstairs, and Onye tells her they must find Rana the Seer, that she knows what to do. They depart, and as they leave, Onye sets Daib’s building ablaze in order not to leave Mwita’s body there; however, as it goes up in flames, she sees a bat fly away and realizes that her father has escaped.

Chapter 59 Summary

Onye’s actions kill every man in the town capable of impregnating a woman. Onye compares herself to her father: “He is my father and I am his child, I thought. We both leave bodies in our wake. Fields of bodies” (370). Luyu feels sick, and she’s confused why; Onye tells her she’s pregnant: she didn’t only kill the men, but every woman in the town became pregnant. However, she doesn’t explain what happened to Luyu.

Onye asks to see Luyu’s portable and pops the disk in. It’s the video of her mother’s rape, but she can now understand the Nuru words: “I’ve found you. You’re the one. Sorceress,” Daib sings (372). He continues to sing that she’ll bear him a son who will rule the world. They destroy the portable and move on.

They make it to the lake; Onye knows somewhere on the lake is an island. As people chase them, they run for a boat operated by a young Nuru man: “I could see why she chose him,” Onye says, “he looked a little different from the other boat operators. He looked shocked, whereas all the others were staring at me with horror” (373). Still shocked, he lets them on the boat, and they take off just in time. Others chase after their boat, but Onye convinces him to continue. They ask why he’s helping them; he tells them that many people don’t believe in Daib, and that he had also seen the Okeke woman that no one could touch—Onye realizes that her mother had been speaking to Nuru, as well.

As they near the island, the boat runs out of fuel. Desperate, they begin paddling; as soon as they are close enough, they jump ashore. They reach the house and see Rana dead on the floor; Onye can never be sure if she killed him, as well. Luyu holds off the oncoming men and dies in the process. Onye finds the book, which is warm to her touch; she finds the page that feels hotter than the rest and begins singing. The symbols on her hands split and run into the page: “I could feel the book sucking from me, as a child does from its mother’s breast. Taking and taking” (377). The book dims and hides in the corner as the men burst in to take her.

Chapter 60 Summary

Though she completed her task, change takes time, and so she was still dragged out of the house: “They were too blind to see what had begun to happen” (378). In the present, Onye waits in her prison cell to be executed.

Chapters 57-60 Analysis

Luyu’s journey is particularly interesting. When we first meet Luyu at the Eleventh Rite, she is presented as something of a selfish brat who does what she wants, even smarting off to the elders. However, she grows deeply attached to Onye and remains the most loyal to her of the three friends throughout the journey. In the process, although she has her fun, she also learns to take things as they come and do what is necessary, finally here experiencing life as an Okeke slave, if even just for a day. She lays her life down for Onye, fending off the attackers just long enough to allow her to complete her task and rewrite the Book.

Durfa society is intriguing in its relative complexity, in a way that confuses Onye. Here, again, things are not overtly evil, but banal; the woman who has Luyu carry her textiles, for example, is not unkind to Luyu and even buys her some jewelry. The suggestion is that these conventions, for most people, are incredibly normalized—the first man to give Luyu an order doesn’t even wait to be sure she completes it. This is not designed to undermine its nature, though: as Onye notes, as soon as their world is upended even slightly—for instance, by the sudden appearance of an Ewu woman—the people descend into chaos. This seems to imply both that most people simply go along with the status quo without absolving them of their responsibility for it; they may not treat Luyu poorly, but that does not make them even neutral people because they still expect her to be a slave, and would not stand for things to be otherwise.

These final moments likewise suggest a turn of events. In Onye’s mind, for so long, her purpose was to destroy her father—she was honing her knowledge of the Points to take him down. In the end, though, she isn’t even the one to do so: Mwita, with help from Ting, is the one who incapacitates Daib, preventing him from ever practicing magic again (or, at least, not without experiencing unbearable pain). Onye’s destiny, in fact, was not to take down Daib but to rewrite the Great Book.