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The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi review – a painfully invisible existence

<span>Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer</span>
Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

Akwaeke Emezi’s Women’s prize-longlisted debut Freshwater was narrated by the multiple selves inhabiting a young Nigerian woman who was born with “one foot on the other side”. Their new novel occupies a similar spiritual plane. Its protagonist is dead. “They burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died,” it begins, interspersing recollections of Oji from friends and family with snippets of his own testimony from beyond the grave. One minute we’re with Oji in childhood, playing with his mother’s jewellery, “placing one of the necklaces against his sternum, over his silver chain, clipping his ears with the earrings … so beautiful he made the air around him dull”, the next we’re once again in the burned-down market. He is alive, then dead, then alive again, sometimes all in the same paragraph, setting up a framework in which his posthumous narration makes perfect sense.

We learn that Oji was born on the same day as his grandmother’s death, with a scar like a “soft starfish” on his foot that matched hers. This spiritual conjoining will become significant later in the novel, when Oji tells his friends that they can “refer to him as either she or he, that he was both”. At this stage, his father’s fearful insistence on dismissing the mark as mere coincidence seems full of foreboding. After Oji allows his hair to grow past his shoulders and abandons his parents’ dream that he’ll attend university in America, some of his relatives become convinced that he’s “sick”, or possessed by a demon.

Emezi has a gift for prose that is often as visceral, tender and heartbreaking as what it describes. For example, when Oji’s mother Kavita reminisces about caressing her little boy, we are given an image of her palm falling “to the back curve of his boy skull, the soft hair and the warm skin underneath, the formed bone shaping him”. But it’s a description that snags on the corporeal, as when she discovers his corpse: “the length of his body stretched out on their front veranda … the back of his skull […] broken and seeping into their welcome mat”, underscoring the point that even after all of that careful, loving description, Kavita cannot see Oji’s true self as both male and female. Her failure to do so is emblematic of the blindness of many who claim to love him. The portrait that emerges is of someone who is profoundly, painfully misunderstood.

Emezi uncovers the story of a person shielded by the peace of self-acceptance against the pain of the world

This novel shares Freshwater’s thematic concerns, in particular in investigating ideas of selfhood that transcend the boundaries of the body. Both could be said to be “about embodiment” (which is how Emezi described Freshwater) in the sense that both interrogate the meaning and meaninglessness of bodies, and draw our attention to storytelling as a form of textual embodiment. Both also explore the trauma of invisibility: “[I]f nobody sees you, are you still there?” Oji asks.

Death is only the most recent way he has been rendered invisible. Before that there was the erasure of “walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong … the real me was invisible to them”. Which is why the novel’s best moments come when Oji’s voice cuts through cleanly. “I’m not what anyone thinks I am,” he says. He opens up to his friends. There’s a change of register, melancholy shifting to triumph as he insists on living openly, as both he (Oji) and she (Nnemdi), and becomes “bright and brilliant and alive”. (Throughout most of the novel, Oji is referred to as “he”). Emezi has cited Toni Morrison’s Love as an influence; in the striking passages documenting the freedom Oji finds with his friends I was reminded of my favourite line from Morrison’s Beloved, about how we can be restored by other people: “She is a friend of my mind … The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in the right order.”

Kavita’s grief drives her to get to the bottom of how Oji died, seeking answers from his friends. For reasons of his own, Osita, Oji’s cousin and best friend, doesn’t want her to find what she’s looking for. There are bad omens: Oji’s “fugues”, his “temper like gunpowder packed into a pipe”, the fact that he returns home from boarding school scarred by cigarette burns. We’re told that during his lifetime Kavita worried constantly that Oji would be lynched. The answer, when it comes, feels both surprising and preordained. But while the novel sets out to solve the mystery of Oji’s death, what gives it power is how it uncovers the story of a person shielded by the peace of self-acceptance against the pain of the world. Here is proof of what good fiction does best: it is an antidote to invisibility.

• The Death of Vivek Oji is published by Faber (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.