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Akwaeke Emezi’s Favorite Part of Their New Novel Is the Sex Scenes
‘The Death of Vivek Oji’ author on their writing process
“I kept the book for its title, for how it was spelled,” muses Vivek Oji, the protagonist of Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, The Death of Vivek Oji. The title that bewitches Vivek is Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and it secures his devotion through a single word: beautyful. The adjective with the eccentric spelling describes Emezi’s book as well.
A work of elegant musicality and ingenuity, The Death of Vivek Oji is beautyful. It is Emezi’s third book, following their critically acclaimed Pet, a young adult novel, and Freshwater, a semiautobiographical novel. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s Love and Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the saga of Vivek’s life and death is told by a chorus of Nigerian and migrant voices. These narrators defy a constellation of constraints, from the gender binary to linear time, their nostalgia drawing the reader into a world of memories, talismans, photographs, spirits, and intimacies. Though the book begins with Vivek’s death, it reads less like a mystery and more like a novel of suspicion. Emezi spoke to ZORA about sensual prose, the power of names, and the challenge of killing one’s protagonist on the first page.
ZORA: Your prose elevates and celebrates the visual and the tactile. How did this sensual concern develop for you?
Akwaeke Emezi: I started as a poet, not a fiction writer. I started writing at five, with children’s books, and then in my teens I switched to poetry — but let’s ignore those terrible teenage poems. The first writing workshops that I attended were Cave Canem. Back then, I didn’t think I’d be able to write something as long as a novel, but I think poetry influenced the sound of my sentences. I can hear their rhythm and I follow it so that they don’t become off-beat.
Your name game is also very strong. I love naming characters. The act makes me feel parental and sometimes god-like. What process do you use for naming characters?
I love naming. It’s something I pay a lot of attention to and it shows up especially strongly in Pet. I got to play around with names a lot and give names like Redemption and…
