Thrilling story: Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta , a review of Love and Conflict during the Nigerian Civil war

‘Midway between Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school … ” Under the Udala Trees begins in the same way that many of the short stories in Chinelo Okparanta’s debut Happiness, Like Water did: with a clear, attentive setting-down of the parameters of place – streets and street names, houses and bushes, trees and walls – and how they make sense of each other, protect each other. “Ours was a gated compound, guarded at the front by thickets of rose and hibiscus bushes.” The descriptions are cool, exact; yet what grows out of these carefully laid beginnings is a story with the highest of stakes.

First comes the war: the little compound is in Biafra, and within a year the area is being bombed. The fences are no protection; and narrator Ijeoma, now 11, finds herself watching the father who told her the bombs would not come – “Papa was certain of this and so I was certain with him” – crumble, too. When he dies, Ijeoma’s mother sends her away, to a couple for whom she becomes kitchen help, tumbling from upper middle class to working class. As time goes by, in this new place Ijeoma befriends Amina, a Muslim Hausa, who becomes more than a friend. The lovers are discovered and her mother sent for; months of prayer and Bible-study follow.

 Nigeria, Okparanta says in an endnote, is one of the most religious countries in the world, and in her novel prayer and the Bible are used for succour, for self-defence, for attack, for control. “Are you listening?” asks her mother. “Are you understanding?” as she picks out stories – Sodom and Gomorrah, parts of Leviticus – in which virgin daughters are offered to rampaging enemies in order to protect male guests. To Ijeoma such “hospitality” is cowardice. “What kind of men offer up their daughters and wives to be raped in place of themselves?” “Ijeoma,” replies her mother, “you are missing the point.”

Okparanta’s fiction is full of such sophistry, generally used to manoeuvre daughters into marital duties they do not choose, and which invariably result in daily pain and self-alienation. But she is also very good on the ways in which daughters collude in these arrangements, overruling their own hearts out of duty, or expectation, or complex, self-betraying kindness, hardly knowing, until much later, that this is what they have done.

For Ijeoma, God’s opinion of her, as a woman who loves other women, is something that just has to be squared, forgiveness and understanding sought among the verses of the Bible even as others look in the same place for the opposite. One night, she and other lesbian women are forced to run from a speakeasy where they have attempted to meet freely (in a building that is by day – what else? — a church). When, some hours later, they come out of hiding, they find that one of them has been burned to death.

Okparanta has great structural confidence. She is unafraid of bald foreshadowing, and generally pulls it off, priming the narrative with dread. She makes huge leaps –Ijeoma’s mother sends her away, for instance, then five pages and two years later is picking her up again. The method works on two levels: first, it keeps the reader reading; second, it gets the basic narrative out of the way, clearing space for Okparanta’s real strength, which is tracking emotional logic, how relationships between people shift and tick.

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.

Less successful are some unnecessary lurches in register. After the first page or two describing a childhood that carries a faint edging of fable – those rose and hibiscus bushes, tall irokos, whistling pines – “the war barged in and established itself all over the place”. There are lapses of telling rather than showing: “the whole situation was very stressful for me” – no kidding. And there is the occasional moment when a simile is taken from so far out of the experience of the novel that it shocks the reader out of its world: “It was as if she had become a secondary-school-aged, Nigerian version of Margaret Thatcher, iron lady through and through.”

Okparanta is clearly motivated by a belief that fiction can make changes in the world; in the endnote she says she hopes her novel can give Nigeria’s gay citizens “a more powerful voice”. This is not a book one can easily imagine her being able to write if she still lived in Nigeria (she left at 10, and now lives in the US). For when it comes to same-sex relationships it seems little has changed since the time she describes, and the image she evokes, of a woman tied upright among logs, burning.



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