Keeping You in The Pictures

Emezi, Akwaeke. The Death of Vivek Oji. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.

I came out of nowhere, or perhaps I jumped into the book. Headfirst. I knocked against the floor. Hardened by the pain that the characters constantly felt. I got myself back on my feet, understanding suddenly why the protagonist, Vivek, was absent in a way that his mother Kavita and his cousin Osita talked to me more than anyone else. The complexity of family and love relationships – stories told beautifully. The violence of gender assignation – resisting old norms.

Vivek was dead. He left, she came, they got killed. I couldn’t turn to Akwaeke, who was in the real. Now I was in South Nigeria, standing in a cloud of affects – fear, shame, love, happiness. I needed to see Ahunna, Vivek’s grandmother. Would she tell me with no voice, with my words? I cleaned the dust from my clothes, walked toward what I thought was the entrance. Confusingly framed. Like a picture.

You could see the house had been repainted not so long ago. The white was intriguing. That meant you had to repaint more often, “as dust from the untarred road coated the walls a dull, gritty red” (Emezi 2020, 196). Ahunna was getting used to this color. Sitting on a plastic chair on the left, right after the main entrance, she was facing the house and looking at it in silence. “She had fine wrinkles around her eyes, hair plaited into tight cornrows” (4). The wrinkles were telling way more than what she accepted to tell me. Like a spider web they were leading and misleading at the same time. They mirrored perfectly the scar in the form of a starfish on her foot. “[T]he beginning and end of everything” (14).

You could see the house had been repainted not so long ago. The white was intriguing. That meant you had to repaint more often, “as dust from the untarred road coated the walls a dull, gritty red” (Emezi 2020, 196). Ahunna was getting used to this color. Sitting on a plastic chair on the left, right after the main entrance, she was facing the house and looking at it in silence. “She had fine wrinkles around her eyes, hair plaited into tight cornrows” (4). The wrinkles were telling way more than what she accepted to tell me. Like a spider web they were leading and misleading at the same time. They mirrored perfectly the scar in the form of a starfish on her foot. “[T]he beginning and end of everything” (14).

I sat on the floor next to her and followed her gaze. The walls. On the walls of the house appeared something like an image, blurred, at first not distinct, and a distant voice explained: “We fit easily in the frame, all of us together” (52). Ahunna let a smile spread on her face, Osita was talking, but she was waiting for Vivek. And so we watched the pictures passing by our eyes.

A picture of Vivek

“He had De Chika’s eyes and lips and hooked nose, even that reddish tinge under the dark gold of his skin, but his hair was as black as his mother’s. Now it was below his shoulder blades, tangled, a little matted against the blue cotton of his shirt. He had lost weight and his neck seemed longer, his face balanced on top of it” (57).

Osita was describing Vivek, his cousin. I felt warm at the sight of Vivek’s inheritance of family traits. I thought Ahunna would have felt the same. Instead, her face was scrunched up in pain – she knew Vivek was suffering and sinking in deep waters of sorrow. This body was hollow.

His body was fusing with the white walls of the house. Contours blurring, colors fading. Fading away. Despite the fact of being here, on the wall, Vivek was invisible. Only his hair, dark and long, was outstanding, in contrast with the white walls. The picture might have been disappearing, but it was as though the disappearance itself was telling us that Vivek was “not what anyone th[ought] [he] [was]” (38). Choosing words to explain the cage of binarism, Vivek had still not overcome the prison of gender assignation. Brilliantly writing, the photographer had taken pictures from different angles, and this one illustrated Vivek’s transition – a metamorphosis that he had no chance to accomplish, as much as he wanted to become the real Vivek.

A picture of Kavita

“Kavita [was sinking] to the floor and [was leaning] her back against the wall, the linoleum cool under her feet. She [was pressing] her forehead into her palms and [was crying]” (79).

The walls were weeping with her tears, the translucent color covering the white walls. The voice of Mary, the wife of Chika’s brother, was resonating in the compound: “Kavita, you’re not hearing me. That was not your son” (77; emphasis in the original). I didn’t need to see Ahunna to know that we both were remembering Mary’s attempt to exorcise Vivek. Her words, targeting a demon that societies still want us to associate with transgendering, were telling a truth though. It wasn’t Kavita’s son the way she’d pictured him. Sometime later, she would be trying to destroy the headstone of Vivek’s grave, so as to give her and her husband the chance to acknowledge Vivek as they were. Not a demon, but a beloved child that Kavita wished she had protected and helped.

After all, the silver chain was a charm “in the image of Ganesh” (45). She was desperately looking for it, as it wasn’t on Vivek’s body when Kavita and Chika found it at their front door. Because “[i]t was part of him […] and now it’s gone and he’s gone” (48), Kavita was feeling through this picture the emptiness that would fill her up with Vivek’s death, the grief and the guilt. I sensed Ahunna wanted to take her in her arms, receive her tears and wipe them away.

A picture of Chika

“Chika repainted Ahunna’s house for Vivek’s burial, a bone white everywhere, drops of it splattering on the soil around the walls. Ekene had since built his own house just down the road, but Chika remained attached to their mother’s house, renovating and expanding it, like a parasite customizing its host’s body. In the years since her death, he had planted hedges and trees in the compound, build a fence and topped it with rolling barbed wire” (196).

Ahunna had a gentle look toward her son, who was tall enough to reach the top of the walls. The fury that he was putting into this repainting was hiding the grief that would overcome him. White covering white, his red skin mirroring the red of the road: he was wrapping his pain, he was burying his son.

Feeling distant from his wife, losing himself in depression, Chika wasn’t ready to accept that Vivek was sick – just sick of being what the others thought he was. Having pushed away his grief after Ahunna’s death, now on Vivek’s birthday, he couldn’t ignore the pain. Ahunna’s soul spread out and wrapped its wings around Chika: “[i]t was [not] a coincidence, the marks on [her and Vivek’s] feet” (13).

A picture of Osita

“In the picture, Vivek was wearing the dress, a wraparound tied on the left of his waist. The neckline fell into a V, showing the bone of his sternum. His hair was down and falling around his face. […] He was sitting in my lap with his legs crossed, the dress riding high on his thighs, his torso leaning forward as he laughed into the camera. One arm was around my neck and I was looking at his face” (232).

The dress in which Vivek died. Its colors were appearing on the wall with Osita’s portrait in the background, as if the dress were floating around him. It seemed to me that Ahunna liked the red of the flowers and nodded, approving the choice of the dress – it suited Vivek so well – and embracing the lovers – they were so in love. Tears came to her eyes. I remained silent, respecting her grief.

The love that came out of this picture was overwhelming. A bubble that Osita was trying to contain. His face showed traces of his being torn apart by shame over his feelings for Vivek and about his own sexual orientation. Ignoring his love for so long, Osita was now hiding more secrets. Lies and guilt. Lost and bereft, he was holding in his hand the silver chain, “the Ganesh pendant [for always] warm against [his] palms” (239).

A picture of Nnemdi

“The girls dragged me out. I don’t think they meant to. […] I was drowning. Not quickly, not enough for panic, but a slow and inexorable sinking, when you know where you’re going to end up, so you stop fighting and you wait for it to all be over. […] So I was giving up; I had decided to give up” (110).

Ahunna hadn’t known the girls – she died before that could happen – but still, she was grateful her Nnemdi could find such friends that accepted her. The sisters Somto and Olunne, and her best friend Juju with her lover Elizabeth, were forming a group that enabled Nnemdi to blossom like a flower turning to light and life. I had the impression that this red flower was literally blossoming on the white walls – alone but somehow surrounded by many others, invisible to the naked eye.

Nnemdi had chosen her name without apparently knowing it would have been the second name of Vivek if their parents had followed Ekene’s advice to give them an Igbo name to remember Ahunna by, “[b]ecause they had that same scar on their feet” (222). I saw that starfish on Ahunna and I could picture it on Nnemdi. A star: she was radiant, she was beautiful. A fish: she was “either she or he” (217), she was “[b]eautyful” (49; emphasis in the original).

I turned to Ahunna. She was smiling now, still sitting calmly, her fingers interlaced, elbows on her thighs, her hands drooping, holding herself in the happiness that was submerging her. For a moment, I was dazzled by a light. A silver light. On the white walls a small elephant was being drawn by invisible hands. It wasn’t a photograph. I like to think that Nnemdi did it, painting over the pain, but letting show that the elephant had existed. She was letting the dust settle. Peace surrounded us all.

I went to sit next to the graves. I could feel that Ahunna was so proud of her granddaughter, “reaching out from her grave next to his, through her casket, through the soil, splintering the wood of his to take his hand” (224-225).

In the grey of their silver chain, the red of their lips, the colors of their dress, the red-white of their name, they were swimming in a river, whose current would have brought you to spaces still unknown to societies which vehemently refuse to disclose. They know that “[a]ll freshwater comes out of [their] mouth” (Emezi 2018, 226; my emphasis) and that, one day, they “will come back” (Emezi 2020, 245), free spirits of life.