Under the Udala Trees

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My dad use to tell me story of the war and how much suffering it brought and well, this book came very close to meeting the description. light of these preliminary ideas, I would like to offer a reading of Nigerian‑American writer Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel, published in 2015, and entitled Under the Udala Trees. The plot revolves around the coming-of-age/coming-out of the Igbo heroine, Ijeoma, who is eleven years old at the beginning of the novel which spans a period beginning in 1968, during the Nigerian civil war (1967-70), 2 and ending with an epilogue dated 13 January 2014. 3 Ijeoma’s father passes away during a raid launched by the Nigerian army against Biafran rebels. She therefore grows up in a period of intense political turmoil and discovers sexuality and love with a Hausa girl, Amina, who is her age, but also, once she is an adult, with Ndidi, an Igbo woman. The novel is therefore a Nigerian lesbian Bildungsroman, connected to one of the most, if not the most traumatic events in Nigerian history: the civil war. 4 In his essay entitled “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman” (1819), Karl Morgenstern defines the genre whose name he coined: Felski, Rita. “The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction?” Southern Review 19.2 (1986): 131-48. Habila, Helon. The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria. London: Penguin, 2017. This type of marriage might point to what British anthropologist Sylvia Leith-Ross observed, that i (...)

Queer Temporalities & Epistemologies: Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows & Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees life is not linear. gayness is not its own story. gayness happens in context. a dead father. an abandoning then punishing mother. servitude. schooling. Homosexuality & the Postcolonial Idea: Notes from Kabelo Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of DreamsMiles, David H. “The Picaro’s Journey to the Confessional: The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman.” PMLA 89.5 (Oct. 1974): 980-92. The novel’s other characters fulfill several fixed functions. […] [L]overs provide the opportunity for the education of sentiment. (In the novel of formation these figures are subordinated to the protagonist in contrast to the social novel where a number of characters provide equal centers of interest.) (298)

In Nigeria, both Christianity and Islam establish strict, largely patriarchal, systems of government that centralize power. This is because the systems that establish the authority of these religions in Nigeria were developed concurrently with colonization. In the South, South-West and Eastern parts of Nigeria, Christianity was used to establish and expand European colonial authority. While Islam in the North and North-West Nigeria predates European colonisation, the establishment of Islam in West-Africa was also an attempt to centralize and expand power by pre-colonial Hausa Kingdoms. This worked so well that even after the fall of the Hausa Kingdoms to the Sokoto Caliphate in the 1800s, European colonizers were able to use established religious governing structures to consolidate their power. Returning to her mother's village, Ijeoma meets another woman Ndidi, but is soon forced to marry her childhood friend Chibundu. The rest of the book follows the story of her unhappy marriage, with a brief postscript set in the present day. if you are gay in a gay-hating place you will internalize the hatred and feel abominable. your mom, who loves you so much, will turn against you and try to de-gaify you. you will marry a man, have his children, and be raped night after night by someone you don't desire. you will feel like sex is owed to him. you will feel like your desires must be eradicated. you will despair. you will pray. you will cry. you will become numb to your own child. Ijeoma in America during the 1960's, as Ijeoma was in Nigeria. I was sooo removed from thoughts of having sex with anyone...male or female, at age 11, 12. or 13. Ok... so, maybe, I'm just naïveté as I say. - but I kept thinking .., " so young?"

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The novel opens in 1960's Nigeria, following the tale of Ijeoma, a young girl who lives in a small town called Ojoto with her mother, Adaora, and father, Uzo, in the middle of the Nigerian Civil War. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.” Genre 12.3 (Fall 1979): 293-311. novel has to be read in light of the current political evolution of anti-gay rhetoric in Nigeria but also sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, an anti-gay rhetoric that is at the heart of the politicians’ concerns. Indeed, on 7 January 2014, the Same‑Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was implemented in Nigeria, expanding on deeply‑rooted colonial era sodomy laws, and whereby same-sex couples who live together can be sentenced to 14 years in prison. Okparanta’s use of a lesbian character can be perceived as a militant act judging from the overwhelming pressures that this community undergoes especially on the part of religious zealots. 16 After the grammar school teacher discovers the two teenagers in the scene we mentioned before, the narrator writes: Mark Mathuray, among others, has sought to bring out the complexities of Soyinka’s novel and this p (...) These other forms of marginalization form nucleuses of power that, by the end of the book, show a larger, sinister web of oppression than what is directly facing queer Nigerians. Sinister, because it’s impossible to reinforce oppression on one end without subjecting your own freedoms to oppressive conditions. Yet, different groups of people are being eagerly offered up by governments seeking to expand power and control by any means.

Ijeoma is an Igbo girl from a middle class family whose world is shaken when her father is killed by a bomb, and her mother is forced to send her out to be a servant girl while she finds a place to survive. Here she meets Amina, a Hausa orphan, and persuades her employers to take her in. They start a lesbian relationship, but when this is discovered, Ijeoma is sent home. Her mother attempts to reeducate her using Biblical quotations, but is unable to prevent the two girls ending up at the same school, where they drift apart. to this definition of the genre are the focus on the masculine identity of the prototypical protagonist of the Bildungsroman, the emphasis on the progress made by him toward a “ certain stage of completion,” 5 and the importance of the development of the reader while reading the novel. In light of this definition, Under the Udala Trees can be read as a Bildungsroman despite having a female protagonist; the androcentric view of the genre has been debunked since Morgenstern defined the genre, notably by feminist critics among whom Susan Fraiman in Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993). The “National Question” arises from the extreme diversity that Nigeria represents as regards ethnic (...) Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees launches at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe on Wednesday, September 23, and will featuring readings by the author along with Taiye Selasi and Natalie Diaz, and musical appearance Reiko and Nani Fueting.Man and wife, the Bible said. It was a nice thought, but only in the limited way that theoretical things often are.”

There's the whole idea of the udala trees, which — the udala fruits represent female fertility. So I wanted to paint the journey of a young girl who is told to be a certain way, thinks about them, and still winds up making a more informed decision for herself. If you’ve ever wondered if love can conquer all, read [this] stunning coming-of-age debut.” — Marie Claire Morgenstern, Karl. “On the Nature of the Bildungsroman.” Trans. Tobias Boes. PMLA 124.2 (2009): 647-59. Trans. of “Über das Wesen des Bildungsromans.” 1819.

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The characters and the plot are utterly convincing... Okparanta's language choices are also impressive, moving between poetic and prosaic, depending on the requirements of the story... It's almost impossible to believe that Under the Udala Trees is a debut novel. It's beautifully crafted, gripping and heart-breaking with moments of brightness piercing the dark, hostile environment of Christian, patriarchal, heterosexual Nigeria. I'll be astonished if this doesn't make the shortlist of every prize it's eligible for. Chinelo Okparanta is a major new voice in fiction'