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Summary
Summary
Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.
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. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie. As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope -- a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love. Acclaimed by Vogue, the Financial Times, and many others, Chinelo Okparanta continues to distill "experience into something crystalline, stark but lustrous" ( New York Times Book Review ). Under the Udala Trees marks the further rise of a star whose "tales will break your heart open" ( New York Daily News ).
Author Notes
Chinelo Okparanta was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She was ten years old when her family moved to the United States. She is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University (Bachelors of Science), Rutgers University (Master of Arts), and the Iowa Writers' Workshop (Masters of Fine Arts).
Her short stories have been published in Granta, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, Subtropics and The Coffin Factory. Her first short story collection, Happiness, Like Water, won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named one of The Guardian's Best African Fiction of 2013. Her essays have appeared in Granta AGNI, The Story Prize blog, and the University of Iowa International Writing Program blog.
Her first novel, Under the Udala Trees, was published in 2015 and won the 2016 Lambda Literary Award in the General Lesbian Fiction category.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Okparanta's excellent debut novel is a heartbreaker. Ijeoma is a young girl in civil war-torn Ojoto, Nigeria. When the war takes her father, and her mother can no longer care for her, she is sent away to family friends in the city of Aba. While with them, Ijeoma, part of the Igbo tribe, meets Amina, an orphan from the Hausa tribe. Despite the heavy cultural and religious taboos, the girls fall in love and begin to explore their sexuality. This behavior comes to an abrupt halt when they are caught and Ijeoma returns to her mother, who inundates her in religious instruction. Ijeoma and Amina attend the same school and wrestle the conflict between their attraction and the pressures upon them. After Amina marries a man, Ijeoma is devastated, but soon meets another woman, Ndidi. Eventually, caving to pressure, Ijeoma marries her childhood friend Chibundu and tries to be a happy wife but as time passes, Ijeoma must contend with her feelings for Ndidi, which she must keep secret, and finally make a fateful decision. Okparanta's characters are just as compelling as teenagers as they are as adults and readers will be swept up in this tale of the power of love. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
After 13-year-old Ijeoma is uprooted during the waning days of the Nigerian Civil War, she becomes a housemaid for a grammar school teacher and his wife who are friends of her late father. Joining this makeshift Igbo family is Amina, a Hausa orphan who becomes Ijeoma's confidant. Okparanta's novel, after her story collection Happiness, Like Water, tells of regret and remorse and of using prayer to dominate and douse thoughts and desires, as both girls are sent to a religious academy to "reform" their "immoral" behavior. In several brief chapters, a now-senior Ijeoma takes readers on a wistful journey, with each section offering just enough suspense to make readers want to turn the page. There are the frequent Bible sessions with Mama, who reiterates Adam and Eve, while Ijeoma questions her ability to love and be loved. There is also the burgeoning relationship with local teacher Ndini and the hasty marriage to childhood friend Chibundu in an attempt to save Ijeoma from violence (or even death) if her relationship with Ndini is exposed. VERDICT This absorbing story parallels the ongoing struggle for equality in Nigeria and is a powerful contribution to LGBT and African literature. Readers will finish the book hoping that every however-flawed character will find his or her own version of happiness. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Midway between Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto. It was a yellow-painted two-story cement construction built along the dusty brown trails just south of River John, where Papa's mother almost drowned when she was a girl, back when people still washed their clothes on the rocky edges of the river. Ours was a gated compound, guarded at the front by a thicket of rose and hibiscus bushes. Leading up to the bushes, a pair of parallel green hedges grew, dotted heavily in pink by tiny, star-like ixora flowers. Vendors lined the road adjacent to the hedges, as did trees thick with fruit: orange, guava, cashew, and mango trees. In the recesses of the roadsides, where the bushes rose high like a forest, even more trees stood: tall irokos, whistling pines, and a scattering of oil and coconut palms. We had to turn our eyes up toward the sky to see the tops of these trees. So high were the bushes and so tall were the trees. In the harmattan, the Sahara winds arrived and stirred up the dust, and clouded the air, and rendered the trees and bushes wobbly like a mirage, and made the sun a blurry ball in the sky. In the rainy season, the rains wheedled the wildness out of the dust, and everything took back its clarity and its shape. This was the normal cycle of things: the rainy season followed by the dry season, and the harmattan folding itself within the dry. All the while, goats bleated. Dogs barked. Hens and roosters scuttled up and down the roads, staying close to the compounds to which they belonged. Striped swordtails and monarchs, grass yellows and redtops ?-- ?all the butterflies ?-- ?flitted leisurely from one flower to the next. As for us, we moved about in that unhurried way of the butterflies, as if the breeze was sweet, as if the sun on our skin was a caress. As if slow paces allowed for the savoring of both. This was the way things were before the war: our lives, tamely moving forward. But in 1967, the war barged in and installed itself all over the place. By 1968, the whole of Ojoto had begun pulsing with the ruckus of armored cars and shelling machines, bomber planes and their loud engines sending shock waves through our ears. By 1968, our men had begun slinging guns across their shoulders and carrying axes and machetes, blades glistening in the sun; and out on the streets, every hour or two in the afternoons and evenings, their chanting could be heard, loud voices pouring out like libations from their mouths: "Biafra, win the war!" It was that same year, 1968 ?-- ?the second year of the war ?-- ?that Mama sent me off. By this time, talk of all the festivities that would take place when Biafra defeated Nigeria had already begun to dwindle, supplanted, rather, by a collective fretting over what would become of us when Nigeria prevailed: Would we be stripped of our homes, and of our lands? Would we be forced into menial servitude? Would we be reduced to living on rationed food? How long into the future would we have to bear the burden of our loss? Would we recover? All these questions, because by 1968, Nigeria was already winning, and everything had already changed. But there were to be more changes. 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. If I had not met Amina, who knows, there might be no story at all to tell. So, the story begins even before the story, on June 23, 1968. Ubosi chi ji ehihe jie: the day night fell in the afternoon, as the saying goes. Or as Mama sometimes puts it, the day that night overtook day: the day that Papa took his leave from us. It was a Sunday, but we had not gone to church that morning on account of the coming raid. The night before, the radios had announced that enemy planes would once more be on the offensive, for the next couple of days at least. It was best for anyone with any sort of common sense to stay home, Papa said. Mama agreed. Not far from me in the parlor, Papa sat at his desk, hunched over, his elbows on his thighs, his head resting on his fisted hands. The scent of Mama's fried akara, all the way from the kitchen, was bursting into the parlor air. Papa sat with his forehead furrowed and his nose pinched, as if the sweet and spicy scent of the akara had somehow become a foul odor in the air. Next to him, his radio-gramophone. In front of him, a pile of newspapers. Early that morning, he had listened to the radio with its volume turned up high, as if he were hard of hearing. He had listened intently as all the voices spilled out from Radio Biafra. Even when Mama had come and asked him to turn it down, that the thing was disturbing her peace, that not everybody wanted to be reminded at every moment of the day that the country was falling apart, still he had listened to it as loudly as it would sound. But now the radio sat with its volume so low that all that could be heard from it was a thin static sound, a little like the scratching of skin. Until the war came, Papa looked only lovingly at the radio-gramophone. He cherished it the way things that matter to us are cherished: Bibles and old photos, water and air. It was, after all, the same radio-gramophone passed down to him from his father, who had died the year I was born. All the grandparents had then followed Papa's father's lead ?-- ?the next year, Papa's mother passed; and the year after, and the one after that, Mama lost both her parents. Papa and Mama were only children, no siblings, which they liked to say was one of the reasons they cherished each other: that they were, aside from me, the only family they had left. But gone were the days of his looking lovingly at the radio-gramophone. That particular afternoon, he sat glaring at the bulky box of a thing. He turned to the stack of newspapers that sat above his drawing paper: about a month's worth of the Daily Times, their pages wrinkled at the corners and the sides. He picked one up and began flipping through the pages, still with that worried look on his face. I went up to him at his desk, stood so close to him that I could not help but take in the smell of his Morgan's hair pomade, the one in the yellow and red tin-capped container, which always reminded me of medicine. If only the war were some sort of illness, if only all that was needed was a little medicine. He replaced the newspaper he was reading on the pile. On that topmost front page were the words SAVE US. Underneath the words, a photograph of a child with an inflated belly held up by limbs as thin as rails: a kwashiorkor child, a girl who looked as if she could have been my age. She was just another Igbo girl, but she could easily have been me. Papa was wearing one of his old, loose-fitting sets of buba and sokoto, the color a dull green, faded from a lifetime of washes. He looked up and smiled slightly at me, a smile that was a little like a lie, lacking any emotion, but he smiled it still. " Kedu? " he asked. He drew me close, and I leaned into him, but I remained silent, unsure of how to respond. How was I? I could have given him the usual response to that question, just answered that I was fine, but how could anyone have been fine during those days? Only a person who was simultaneously blind and deaf and dumb, and generally senseless and unfeeling, could possibly have been fine given the situation with the war and the always-looming raids. Or if the person was already dead. Excerpted from Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.