Death of the Author marks the second time (the first being Who Fears Death) Nnedi Okorafor has led me through a reading experience that felt interesting but not overwhelming only to deliver an ending section that made me wonder how she does it. For that ending delivers a powerful impact that changes my view of the whole book. Zelu is the latest in a long line of wild-spirited women who dominate Okorafor’s fiction, yet this time, the protagonist lives in our world, maybe just a little bit in the future.
That sets limits to what she can do. Instead of mastering some version of magic, Zelu has to come to terms with the real world. That means dealing with pressures of family expectations, her life confined to a wheel chair, and employers who can’t put up with her explosive temper and unpredictable talent. Despite everything that gets in her way, including herself, she follows her own path no matter what the rest of the world thinks. At times, she is able to turn to her inner world and find fulfillment in the art of telling stories. Death of the Author is very much a novel about the richness and impact of story.
Paralyzed from the waist down from the age of 12, she spends years being protected by her large family, treatment that frequently enrages her as she tries to push her limits. Her story opens with her being fired from an adjunct university teaching job when an entitled student files a complaint about her outspoken temper. Her anger is mixed with a lot of shame and guilt, but she soon turns her life around by writing a science fiction novel called Rusted Robots.
In an almost too-good-to-be-true sequence of events, her novel is not only accepted for publication, making her millions in an auction, but also gets a movie deal and dominates the best-seller lists. But sudden fame brings with it the inevitable avalanche of on-line fame that proves fickle after the release of the movie version, which she hates, and after she speaks her mind to a pushy TV interviewer. In the midst of the fame and notoriety, she meets an MIT professor who promises her a set of exoskeletons for her legs that he says will enable her to walk again. Fighting through the resistance of her family, who believe the exos would be unnatural, Zelu accepts the offer and finds new possibilities for her life.
We learn about Zelu and her world and imagination through the three-tiered structure of Death of the Author. There are interviews with family members and others close to her, the third person narrative from Zelu’s point of view and then there are chapters from Rusted Robots. I have to confess I often read impatiently through the rest of the story to get to Zelu’s science fiction novel.
The short novel is set in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by robots and disembodied AIs, known as NoBodies or Ghosts. The robots are known as Humes because they have many characteristics of people, particularly, emotional lives, while the Ghosts are pure logic. The Humes love stories. They “mimed, coveted, and shared” them, but Humes could not, it seemed, write their own. They could only cherish the distinctly human ability to write and tell stories. Ankara, the Hume who is the protagonist of Rusted Robots, is so devoted to collecting human tales that he becomes a Scholar. But, like all Humes, they are on the run from the NoBodies, who think stories are “chaff” and want to extinguish both them and all Humes.
One day, Ankara is attacked by NoBodies who have occupied the bodies of old robots, and he is torn to pieces and left for dead. He is saved by an old woman, Ngozi, who appears to be the last human on earth. While with Ngozi, Ankara is invaded by a NoBody named Ijele, and the two become fast friends, but this is dangerous for both of them. Each knows that they will be destroyed by their fellow Robots or NoBodies if it is ever discovered that they are sharing the same body.
From the interview chapters with Zelu’s friends and family, we get first-person accounts of their turbulent relationships with Zelu that consist of a combination of familiarity, love, frustration and admission they can’t change her. Zelu herself roils over the same resentments and anger she has felt since her youthful accident, while making breakthroughs that enable her to do something amazing. I guess I’ve stopped expecting characters to change dramatically according to the dictates of an arbitrary character arc. Zelu doesn’t really change. She disrupts the world around her while caring not at all and simultaneously a whole lot about what others think of her.
Her peak moments seem to come when she is most at home with herself in a zone of creativity without reference to any outer pressure or expectation. Zelu’s progress as a character isn’t so much an arc as an explosive series of events in which new challenges force her into action she hadn’t thought she was capable of. And we go with her from lows of bitter despair and isolation to real transcendence, and just about everything in between.
Zelu sees a lot of herself in Rusted Robots and only overcomes her hesitancy to send the manuscript to an agent when she is convinced of the truth of the story in relation to her own life.
“The rusted robots in the story were a metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunctions, needed replacements, mistakes. What you were given. The finite. Rusted robots did not die in the way that humans did, but they celebrated mortality. Oh, she loved this story and how true it felt.”
Death of the Author, Kindle edition, Page 64
Zelu reaches levels only she could imagine, but if there is anything detracting from my experience of Death of the Author compared to Okorafor’s other creations, it is that some of the tools that enable her to succeed come from the outside- an MIT professor who can give her exos to let her walk, the publishing world that gives her financial independence, and a tech billionaire who helps her achieve another dream. But like the magical skills in other books set in Okorafor’s version of Africa, these are tools that only she can put to use to help her get to the state of transcendence she occasionally achieves. What she does with these tools is spectacular, and, when I look back over the rest of the novel after experiencing these high points, I could see how the turbulence of her personal life and the clashes with those who love her most are vital parts of everything she becomes. Death of the Author may be considered a cross-over work in some quarters, but for me it just reveals another dimension of Okorafor’s amazing imagination.
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