Nnedi Okorafor knows that her latest novel is “a lot.” The way Okorafor delivers this pronouncement with a grin makes it clear that the description is anything but apologetic. “I feel like one of the things about this book that’s going to be interesting is this question of ‘What is it?’ Because it’s so much.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Okorafor’s work has defied easy categorization. Though many of her previous books, such as the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Binti, were decidedly science fiction, their setting and perspective lacked a place within science fiction’s numerous subgenres, leading her to coin a new term, Africanfuturist, to describe them.
But with Death of the Author, Okorafor eschews the tidy boundaries of genre entirely. At its core, the book is a literary novel about a woman named Zelu, a disabled Nigerian American author from the suburbs of Chicago whose meteoric rise to literary stardom changes her life. Her story, which begins with being unceremoniously fired from her decidedly unglamorous teaching job, is told through a combination of close third person and interviews with family and friends that show her for the complex—and often flawed—person that she is. Interwoven with Zelu’s story are chapters from Zelu’s breakout novel, Rusted Robots, in which humans have been replaced by robots we created to live alongside us.
“I have a general rule that if I’m scared to write it, I have to write it.”
While those familiar with Okorafor’s science fiction may see a literary novel as a departure, Death of the Author is a book whose heritage mirrors that of its author. Although she’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Okorafor—like Zelu—also has a more traditional background as both an English PhD and as a professor of writing. “I learned a large part of my writing from professors who were very anti science fiction and fantasy,” she says. She credits both her literary and genre instructors for what Death of the Author became, and hopes that the novel can forge a middle ground between the two camps where everyone can “just love storytelling” regardless of genre.
Early in her career, Okorafor had dreamed of writing a literary book about the Nigerian American experience and all of its “complexity, all of its hypocrisy, its strengths, and its specificity.” After the death of her sister a few years ago, Okorafor felt compelled to return to the idea of writing the great Nigerian American novel. For her, that meant talking about food, something that in most Nigerian families is passed down from mother to child. “You develop this whole mythology around the food,” she says. “You love it so much that you bring it for lunch in grade school.” But other kids weren’t familiar with Nigerian food and would question her jollof rice or egusi soup. “You’re forced to explain what it is and either be insecure, or you start defending it, and that strengthens your cultural identity.”
In the book, Zelu’s relationship with food is complicated by the fact that she is the child not of two cultures, but of three: Yoruba, Igbo and American. “Nigerian men expect the wife to cook and be able to cook. . . . So if Zelu’s mom is marrying an Igbo man, then she’s going to have to know how to cook those foods. And then she’s proud of her own culture, so she’s going to cook Yoruba food, too.” Plus, like all children of Nigerian American immigrants, Zelu initially experiences Nigerian food prepared with American substitutions for all the ingredients that you just can’t get in the suburbs of Chicago. Being raised with these foods, in this context, Okorafor explains, connects Zelu to her Nigerian heritage and makes her who she is. “I’m sure it’s this way with other cultures,” she says, when asked about capturing the specificity of this experience, “but I’m speaking as a Nigerian American.”
She’s also speaking as a writer with a disability. Like Zelu, Okorafor became partially paralyzed after an accident. Although she did eventually learn to walk again, the experience profoundly affected her. She says that it felt like she was a “broken, rusting robot.” Instead of moving through the world with the agility of an athlete, “I had to think about every step that I took. I was programming myself instead of intuitively walking as I did when I was a baby.”
“Wanting to box something comes from wanting to feel comfortable, wanting to feel in control.”
And so when it came time for her to write about Zelu experimenting with exoskeleton-like prosthetics that would allow her to walk again, Okorafor drew from personal experience. She’d seen a similar type of prosthetic in the real world and had wondered: If she had the chance to augment the athleticism she’d lost, “would I do that? How would that change who I am?” It’s a fraught question among people with disabilities, she says, whether to see your disability as “something that’s wrong with you that needs to be corrected” or as a part of your identity that you should embrace. “That’s what I’ve had to do with my situation. There is no cure for it. . . . I’ve built my identity around that.” To use this kind of prosthetic “would just shatter so much about what I’ve built. It wouldn’t be as simple as one would think.”
Through playing out part of that debate in the pages of her novel, Okorafor wants to start a conversation, “not necessarily an argument,” about subjects that we might normally shy away from. Where Okorafor sees nuance, however, her main character often doesn’t. Zelu picks fights, and she is sometimes bullheaded, both traits that can be challenging in a main character. But, as Okorafor points out, “It’s not about right or wrong. This is the world, and this is how some people choose to navigate through the world.”
It wasn’t originally Okorafor’s intent to write Rusted Robots as part of Death of the Author. She was interested in writing a literary novel, after all, not more science fiction. But as she began to write about Zelu writing Rusted Robots, Okorafor knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep going if she didn’t at least write a chapter or two of Zelu’s book to understand it a little better. As someone whose science fiction typically depicts the future of humanity, Okorafor initially balked at the idea of writing something with no humans in it—nothing that would interact with the world in the same way that we do. “I was scared of that. But I have a general rule that if I’m scared to write it, I have to write it.” So she did. And within a few chapters, she was hooked. She began to write the two stories in parallel, noticing how what she wrote in Rusted Robots often reflected Zelu’s story, and vice versa. Where Zelu is paralyzed by an accident, the main character of Rusted Robots, Ankara, loses her legs in a brutal attack from a rival robotic faction. Both regain use of their legs in a way others in their lives see as distasteful or outright unnatural (Zelu with her prosthetics, and Ankara with the help of an AI from the faction responsible for the attack). These connections, Okorafor says, were at first unconscious, but later became an intentional way to show how the experiences of an author affect their subjects.
It’s the interplay between these two stories that gives Death of the Author its strength—and which might make it an intimidating read for some. Literary fiction readers may be tempted to skim the science fiction sections, and science fiction readers might “focus on the robots and totally miss out on the whole Nigerian American thing.” But Okorafor stresses that part of the point of the book is to strain against the need for a label. “Wanting to box something comes from wanting to feel comfortable, wanting to feel in control.”
This was a feeling Okorafor, too, has had to fight against. “I remember when I finished writing Death of the Author, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? How are people going to comfortably categorize this?’” But then she did as she hopes her readers will do: She let it go and focused on the joy of storytelling instead.
Read our starred review of Death of the Author.
Nnedi Okorafor author photo by Colleen Durkin.