Who Fears Death

Mwita tells Onye when he first begins teaching her minor juju that for an Eshu, one’s first animal is important. Onye believes that vultures are ugly scavengers, but Mwita argues that they are in fact noble birds. Noble here can mean both distinguished and a person of distinguished rank or title, and of course, within the novel, Onye is both—the daughter of the general Daib and the sorcerer meant to free the Okeke. Throughout the novel, Onye returns to the form of the vulture when she needs to escape and recollect herself, flying for hours at a time and returning once she can refocus. It is interesting, however, that as her first, it was manufactured—she realizes later that Aro had come to her in the form of the vulture, and it was from that creature that she first turned into one.

Myth and storytelling play important roles in the novel. Of course, society in the Kingdom is driven by their holy text, the Great Book, to the point that the Okeke are often willing to accept their own subservience (if not their enslavement) because the Great Book says so; however, as Sola points out later in the novel, the Great Book is just a story, one designed to reinforce the binaries that drive their society, and Onye ultimately overcomes ethnic tension by literally rewriting the Book. Beyond that, though, storytelling resurfaces at numerous points. The story of her own birth helps Onye understand where she came from and why things are different for her, but even this story is constantly reshaped and reused—she gets one version from her mother and a fuller version from the video recorder Daib used, and she creates yet another version in order to shame the people of Jwahir (and it should be noted that all three employ different media). Jwahir is also visited by two more storytellers prior to that point—first, the photographer, then later, the oral storyteller. Further, the novel ends with a literal rewriting of the story—not only the story in the Great Book, but also Onye’s own story when she rewrites her prophecy and chooses to live, rather than die, at the hands of the mob. Finally, the novel itself is a story, not only in the literal sense that it is a novel, but in that its form is actually that of Onye recounting her life story to someone else, and it is this story that we are reading (up until the final few chapters, anyway).

Sexuality is a key motif in the story as it is used in many different ways for different ends. The most obvious is also the most horrific: Daib uses weaponized rape to tear apart Okeke society, and Onye’s existence is a product of this form of sex as a weapon and a means of control (and one which Najeeba rejects). Later, sexuality is read through the lens of control through the Eleventh Rite, as well—female sexuality is demonized and appropriated by a systemic patriarchy, culminating in a practice that places the responsibility of purity solely on the woman, doing so likewise through means of unbearable pain. The novel counters these versions of sexuality, however, with versions that show sex as a means of liberation or as a means of reasserting one’s own control. For example, Onye and Mwita’s sexual relationship reasserts their control over their own lives, particularly as they are not supposed to be having sex for an entirely different reason (though it is worth noting that they circumvent the institution of marriage, as well, to an extent). Other characters use sex similarly—Luyu is unapologetically a sexual being, and the Vah remove sex from the idea of a relationship entirely. Sex is not one thing, but many different things, and the novel works to treat sex as a complex spectrum (although still admittedly with an emphasis on heteronormative sexuality).

Onye’s headaches recur as a symbol of fate and destiny. Her migraines are a result of experiencing her own death—in her initiation, she experiences her own stoning, but because she has “lived” through it, the echoes of the stones hitting her head recur and cause her to experience massive pain. The recurrence of her headaches, the ghosts of the future, are a constant reminder both to her and to the reader of her fate, and it’s no coincidence that she experiences one of the worst periods of migraines not long after they depart Jwahir. Of course, they also function as something of a red herring, since she rewrites her original ending and chooses to live, instead.