Under the Udala Trees

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The novel is told in a first person narrative from the protagonist's viewpoint, namely Ijeoma, and as such, the story is told with her voice and perspective. So, even after the war, Ijeoma is confronted with a different challenge: living as an igbo lesbian in post-civil war Nigeria. As an adult, Ijeoma contends with the ever-present threat of being discovered, of being outed and subject to beatings — or murder. The suppression of identity Ijeoma faces is so strong that “lesbian” is not a term she uses herself. Ijeoma doesn’t have the space to create and refine linguistic authority. Much of her mental energies are spent deconditioning herself.

Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. She is clearly not entirely comfortable with the broader canvas of politics or war; once it has served its contextual duty – severing families, bringing unlikely people together, underlining more intimate wars – it drops away. Then the directness of her prose comes into its own, describing with clarity and seeming simplicity states that are not simple at all. So the 11-year-old Ijeoma watches as her mother lies to herself that abandoning her child is right, while all the time understanding that she is allowing her mother to do so. There are moments of lovely description, of places and of things, but Okparanta’s best writing is the result of emotional insight. A daughter wishes her father would remarry “because that would make him seem less lonely to her” – not, pointedly, because it would actually make him less lonely. There is no way to tell the story of what happened with Amina without first telling the story of Mama’s sending me off. Likewise, there is no way to tell the story of Mama’s sending me off without also telling of Papa’s refusal to go to the bunker. Without his refusal, the sending away might never have occurred, and if the sending away had not occurred, then I might never have met Amina. Homosexuality & the Postcolonial Idea: Notes from Kabelo Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of DreamsA beautifully crafted tale of forbidden love, mostly set during and immediately after the Biafran war, but inspired by Nigeria's recent decision to outlaw homosexual acts. Boehmer, Elleke. Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014.

My dad use to tell me story of the war and how much suffering it brought and well, this book came very close to meeting the description. Okparanta deftly negotiates a balance between a love story and a war story, each of which threatens to eclipse the other. Though it has to work on many levels at once, Udala Trees delivers a delicate study of the competing forces that pull at Ijeoma: her gay identity, the defeat of independent Biafra, the taboo of Igbo and Hausa relationships, and Ijeoma’s demotion from upper-middle class student to poor house-girl. Chinelo Okparanta released her debut novel, Under the Udala Trees – a celebration of the revolutionary nature of queer love – in 2015. Since then it has created electric buzz among reading circles owing to the nature of its content: a book that covers the normalcy of homosexuality in Nigeria, a country that is well know for its virulent homophobia and punitive anti-gay laws. In this review, I examine through a series of short bursts of thoughts, the aspects of the novel that stood out to me and make it wholly deserving of the celebration it has received. Religion vs sexuality According to Marxist critic Fredric Jameson in his article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the post-colonial text has to be read allegorically: applied to the Bildungsroman, this theory points to the parallel evolution of the hero/heroine and the nation. This generalization is problematic and cannot be applied to all “third-world” texts but Under the Udala Trees lends itself to such a reading. Okparanta is major new voice not only because of her mesmerizing storytelling, but for her bravery and originality. She is a truth teller and soothsayer... Under the Udala Trees is breathtaking, rich with history and heart

Summary

also compares Amina to a water goddess, expressing here some form of same‑sex desire: “Her hair hung in long clumps around her face, like those images of Mami Wata, hair writhing like serpents” (105). The alliteration in /h/ could point to the sounds of pleasure, the moaning sounds, that will be produced during the sexual intercourse between the two teenagers; the mere sight of Amina makes Ijeoma feel short of breath. Homoerotic passages pervade the text and climax in a shared moment of daily life, particularly when the two teenagers prepare dinner: “That evening, Amina and I peeled the yams together, rinsed them together, our fingers brushing against each other’s in the bowl” (106). Peeling yams carries here an extremely sensual and/or sexual connotation, and the idea of a lesbian couple is undoubtedly conveyed. I suppose it's the way we are, humans that we are. Always finding it easier to make ourselves the victim in someone else's tragedy. Though it is true, too, that sometimes it is hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs.” We follow Ijeoma as she enters a rather uneventful marriage and finds true love outside her marriage in the person of Ndidi. This doesn't last as well as Ijeoma is forced to marry someone else. She has kids but she isn't happy. She isn't herself at all. Should she choose love or endure the unhappiness of her arranged marriage to Chibundu? Zabus, Chantal. “Out in Africa: Queer Desire in Some Anthropological and Literary Texts.” Comparative Critical Studies 6.2 (2009): 251-70. Some of those nights when we are together in bed, Ndidi wraps her arms around me. She molds her body around mine and whispers in my ear about a town where love is allowed to be love, between men and women, and men and men, and women and women, just as between Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa and Fulani. Ndidi describes the town, all its trees and all the colors of its sand. She tells me in great detail about the roads, the directions in which they run, from where and to where they lead.