Still, he reacts with anger and disgust when Vivek implies that his cousin might have a boyfriend at university. Years on, shame is still a powerful force: When the cousins see one another for the first time in a couple of years, Osita is shocked by Vivek’s long hair, yet drawn to its softness. Instead, Osita snapped at his cousin to remove the jewelry before they were caught. Memoirs by Kiese Laymon and John Edgar Wideman essays by Darryl Pinckney and Mikki Kendall masterpieces from Michelle Alexander and Claudia Rankine.

“He looks like a bride, half naked, partially undressed… Osita wished, much later, that he’d told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull.”īooks 13 great books about the Black experience in America “Picture: the boy, shirtless, placing necklaces against his chest, draping them over his silver chain, clipping his ears with gold earrings, his hair tumbling over his shoulders ,” Osita narrates. Discerning readers, however, might recognize some signs early on. Vivek’s gender variance seems related to Ahunna’s reincarnated spirit, but it takes many years for him to begin to verbally express things he knows instinctively. “Did ogbanje even have a gender to begin with? Gender is, after all, such a human thing,” Emezi wrote in a 2018 essay for the Cut. In “Vivek Oji,” they delve again into the duality of body and spirit, but with a new focus on gender. In their autobiographical novel, “ Freshwater,” Emezi explores the relationship between the physical and spiritual realms, between the Western concept of mental illness and the Igbo idea of the ogbanje, a human-possessing trickster spirit. Chika, Vivek’s father and Ahunna’s son, noticed a scar on the newborn baby’s foot that resembled one on Ahunna’s in Igbo spirituality, wherein the dead are reborn back into the family, this is a potential sign of reincarnation: “How else could that scar have entered the world on flesh if it had not left in the first place? A thing cannot be in two places at once.” Only after Vivek’s death does Chika allow himself to take this sign seriously. Though the book opens with the ominous news of his death and is framed as a kind of mystery around it, the truth we spiral toward has far more to do with Vivek’s life, its secrets and its moments of unfettered joy.Įarly in the novel, set in southeastern Nigeria during the 1980s and ’90s, we learn that Vivek was born on the same day that his grandmother Ahunna died. “If nobody sees you, are you still there?” Vivek Oji asks from beyond the grave in Akwaeke Emezi’s powerful new novel, “ The Death of Vivek Oji.” It’s a question that ripples outward into the rest of the book, drawing readers and characters into a search for Vivek’s true self. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

The death of vivek