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.
