Ahunna dies the day Vivek is born with a “dark brown patch shaped like a limp starfish” on his foot, just like the one on Ahunna’s foot, making Vivek two spirited-both a man and a woman. His fugue states are a medium of communication between Vivek and his grandmother, Ahunna. The violence perpetrated against him is a symptom of the diseased society that surrounds him it’s not connected with his queerness. Rather, they represent a safe space for him, a manifestation of his spirituality. But as I delved deeper into queer theory and Emezi’s writing and reread the book, I understood that Vivek’s fugues are not a representation nor a symptom of his genderqueerness.
I questioned Emezi’s representation of genderqueer identity as a sickness because I considered Vivek’s fugues a consequence of his genderfluidity, in addition to the physical and mental abuse he suffers at the hands of the seniors at the all-boys boarding school. The first time I read the book, self-isolating during the pandemic, I believed Vivek’s suffering resulted from his queerness. ” As Vivek grows up and goes to college, a lack of community, love, and empathy drives Vivek into depression. He starts diving into fugue states in which he “would become very, very still, just stop moving while the world continued around. When Vivek is 11, he is sent to an all-boys military school where he is frequently assaulted, both physically and sexually. Vivek existed in liminal spaces even before his death, having never fully been part of the living world. Emezi’s genderqueer protagonist, Vivek Nnemdi Oji, dies on the very first page and inhabits the afterlife, speaking to the reader from the beyond, but even as he lives, he is not part of the center, the “real,” the concrete. Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, published in 2020, battles with transphobia and queerphobia in the Nigerian community.
Nigeria is another such country where queerness is criminalized, rejected and feared.
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