Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Her inherited convictions represent the postwar Nigerian culture on a micro level, tense and fraught with a sense of impending doom. Adaora attempts to re-appropriate Ijeoma’s sinful ways with an exorcism a miracle worker comes to Ijeoma’s school and tries to heal her heart.Īdaora, vividly portrayed, continually bends under the stress of violent memories, the circumscribing famine and the pressure to provide. Slowly, shyly, their friendship blossoms to passion. Her mother, Adaora, sends her off to live with a grammar schoolteacher. Ijeoma is 11 when her father dies in an air raid.

But whereas Adichie drew an account of the aristocracy, Okparanta accounts the story of Ijeoma, a lower-class girl struggling to reconcile her sexual identity to her faith and her country’s unforgiving precepts. Aside from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun,” it’s an event that hasn’t been written about in much fiction. The first part of the novel takes place from 1967 to 1970, during the Nigerian Civil War, in which the largely Christian Igbo people failed to secede from the rest of the Nigeria. At school, when the social studies teacher tries to explain what a coup is, Ijeoma says, “in my tired, end-of-school-day child’s mind, I heard instead: coop.” In his essay, “Growing Up During the Occupation,” Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe describes his war-addled childhood as watching the adults sit around and cry in front of the radio as the children sat “bathed in strong summer sunlight.” Ijeoma, the narrator of Chinelo Okparanta’s tender debut novel, “Under the Udala Trees,” assumes a similar position.

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta