37 pages • 1 hour read
Akwaeke EmeziThe Death of Vivek Oji
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Joys and Dangers of Queer Desire
The Death of Vivek Oji presents queer desire—that is, any desire beyond cis-heterosexist prescription—as both dangerous and life giving. In Chapter 13, Osita articulates both the thrill and fear of the kiss he shares with a male university student. When the university student approaches Osita the day after their kiss, Osita is amazed by his enthusiasm, mystified that this man isn’t afraid to be open about their connection. This reveals that it is not just internalized anti-gay bias at work behind Osita’s denial of his sexuality, but also his understanding of the violence with which queer desire is met in the world at large. Osita fears not only the social ramifications of accepting his full sexuality but also the physical harm that might befall him. This is the same physical risk that Vivek accepts each time he ventures into the world as Nnemdi.
The novel accentuates Osita’s avoidance, his inability to fully embrace his desire for men: “I deliberately kept my mind empty, except for him, because I knew as soon as I started to think again, I might go mad from what I had just done” (149). However, Osita also describes the kiss with the university student as life-giving: “I didn’t know how to explain it,” Osita narrates, “the thing that the kiss had exhumed in me, the way it was loud, the way it wouldn’t be quiet” (146). Thus, Osita describes the unfolding of his queerness as a kind of release and a reaching towards a more whole and authentic self.
This sense of release is mirrored by Vivek’s experience embracing his queer desire and later his identity as Nnemdi. After Vivek allows Osita to penetrate him, he rejects traditional gender norms to fully embody his love for Osita. He maintains,
I know what they say about men who allow other men to penetrate them […] I’d heard it since secondary school, and I knew what that night was supposed to make me. Less than a man—something disgusting, something weak and shameful. But if that pleasure was supposed to stop me from being a man, then fine. They could have it (154).
When Vivek begins wearing dresses and make-up, he tells his friends that they can refer to him as either “he” or “she.” However, when Osita finds Vivek the day that the market burns down, Vivek refuses to be acknowledged by anything but his adopted name Nnemdi. When Vivek dies as Nnemdi, she concludes that she died in the best way, “wearing a skin that was true” (274). Vivek is sure of himself and what he wants to be, whereas Osita continually denies his own desires.
The Toxicity of Rigid and Enforced Gender Roles
The Death of Vivek Oji highlights both the dangers and futility of rigidly assigned gender roles. The couples who live in subordination to such rigidity—Kavita and Chika, Mary and Ekene, and, briefly, Ebenezer and Chisom—end up unsatisfied in their relationships. While Osita’s shame over loving a person born into a male body consumes Osita at the beginning of the novel, he becomes briefly happy once he accepts his desire and love for Vivek.
The reception of Vivek’s growing femininity points to the forms of misogyny in Vivek’s community. After sexual penetration by Osita, Vivek reflects upon how society stigmatizes and punishes such an act, emasculating a man for sexual activity with another man and assuming that he has relinquished his male power. Vivek’s family cannot recognize Vivek outside of traditional gender roles, seeing the nuanced nonconformity of Vivek’s gender as a threat or an illness. On Page 135, Vivek notes how this confusion over the boundaries and possibilities of gender incites outside aggression.
Kavita and Chika’s relationship suffers when Chika refuses to acknowledge his wife as separate from him; his willful ignorance keeps him from realizing or meeting her needs. He neither respects nor validates Kavita’s growing anxiety over their son’s safety, and he grows jealous that Kavita gives more attention to Vivek than to him: “He was the only thing she wanted to take about” (124), the third-person narrator describes Chika’s perspective. As a result, Chika has an affair with Eloise, a woman he neither cares for nor respects. Chika justifies this affair by alleging Kavita’s negligence. This dichotomy—having an affair with a woman he dislikes in order to make up for the assumed lack of love from the woman he married—shows how Chika objectifies both Kavita and Eloise, using them as tools for his own personal sexual needs, comfort, validation.
Even minor characters such as Kavita’s friend and Juju’s mother, Maja, question the validity of traditional gender roles. When Maja’s husband, Charles, announces that he has a second family and refuses to allow Maja to leave with Juju, he grows possessive of Juju. The section reads, “Maja didn’t quite understand why Juju meant so little, yet so much to him. Like property” (123). Charles’s simultaneous neglect and possessiveness of his daughter and first wife highlight how women are treated as objects by men in this society, valuable only for the pleasure they provide to men. Even female characters at times exhibit internalized sexism. When Maja makes an off-hand comment about sometimes forgetting that Vivek isn’t one of the girls, Kavita resentfully comments to herself that Maja is just jealous that she doesn’t have a son, exposing her belief that sons are more valuable than daughters.
The True Meaning of Love
Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that each character loves Vivek for their own reasons. Osita in many ways loves Vivek against his own will, and he spends the majority of the book either hiding or denying his love for Vivek due to what it might reveal about his sexuality.
Juju, Somto, and Olunne express their love by hiding Vivek’s trips to the market as Nnemdi, helping Vivek be who he really is. Juju seems to love Vivek purely as a close friend until the pair kiss. Juju and Vivek instantly connect after not seeing each other during their teens. Juju accepts Vivek for who he is and encourages Vivek to be his authentic self by lending him dresses and covering for him when he went to the market as Nnemdi. However, after Vivek has sex with Osita, Juju kisses him, in part, she admits, to try to re-possess him in the wake of her jealousy.
Chika, Mary, and Ekene love Vivek under the condition of his masculinity. However, they display their misguided love for him through expressing their worry over Vivek’s safety as Vivek continues to explore and embrace his femininity.
Though Kavita tries hard to be a good, protective mother, she ultimately realizes that her true failing was to deny who Vivek really was. She attempts to rectify this by commissioning a new headstone that acknowledges Vivek’s identity as Nnemdi. Love is contrasted by Chika’s loveless affair with Eloise, which arises from annoyance bordering on hatred, and what Chika claims is Kavita’s lack of love and attention for him.
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By Akwaeke Emezi
