The Death of Vivek Oji First Line

The Death of Vivek Oji First Line

This is one hell of an opening line; the kind of sentence that immediately pulls you in, giving you no choice but to keep reading, and it does a fine job of foreshadowing the grief and mystery that course through Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji.

The book begins with a devastating scene: Vivek Oji’s lifeless, broken body is left at his parent’s doorstep, wrapped in fabric. From there, Emezi takes us on an alternating POV journey through the fragmented lives of those who loved him, piecing together the events that led to his death. But reading this is realizing it’s a story about how Vivek died, quite all right, but more than that, a story about how he lived, who he was, and the quiet rebellion of embracing an identity that doesn’t fit into neat, socially acceptable boxes.

Vivek Oji’s story is raw like a fresh wound, tender, yet powerful. I would also call it striking because, in a way, it felt so familiar, deeply personal, but very strange. The setting is southeastern Nigeria, where Vivek was born to an Indian mother and a Nigerian father. The dynamics are of families with their secrets. The central element in the story is of community; of wives, “Nigerwives”, of Vivek’s circle of friends, all with their unspoken rules. And yet, Vivek’s struggles, and quest for identity and belonging, is a theme that feels universal.

“I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was…The real me was invisible to them…So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?”

Still, this is not an easy read. Emezi writes with a kind of tenderness balanced with brutality, and that’s rare. I like to think of Emezi’s storytelling as that teacher we all liked; the one who doesn’t shout, who doesn’t beat, but pulls you in close, and whispers truths you didn’t even know you were ready to hear. You will always feel like you are being pulled into the lives of these characters with such force; like you’re intruding on something private. It’s one of the endearing aspects of this book; it doesn’t shy away from the complexities of grief or the uncomfortable realities of queerness in a society that demands conformity. It is what I talked about when I finally came out of the book hangover that gripped me for days after reading Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater.

But even in its heaviest moments, Emezi never writes a book that feels bleak. 

All around us, we perceive love as the glossy, perfect kind, but the messy, sometimes painful love is the one that mostly keeps people to one another.

The characters in The Death of Vivek Oji feel like actual people you’ve known your whole life. There’s Kavita, Vivek’s mother, whose grief is as fierce as her love for her son. Then there’s Vivek himself; a character who, even in death, feels so vividly alive. And then, there’s Osita, Vivek’s cousin, whose incestuous relationship with Vivek is complicated, and, honestly speaking, the only thing I found tethering to the absurd. But that’s the beauty of reading fiction. The ability to immerse yourself in someone else’s reality, knowing that yes, this is from an author’s imagination, yet you sense deeply that somewhere, someone might actually be living that experience, but you’re free to do this, often without the weight or responsibility of actually knowing them in real life. 

Why should you read the Death of Vivek Oji? I’d say, it’s an experience. I like to use the word “experience” when I can’t really box a book I read into a certain word, phrase, or description. It’s how human this story feels. It’s how it’s not wrapped up in neat answers or resolutions. It’s how it leaves you with even more questions, and maybe that’s the whole point. It’s a book about seeing someone fully, even if it takes their absence to make it happen. But be warned, it’s going to stay with you.

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