Under the Udala Trees

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However, she sometimes realises that this resistance is utopian: “That night, I saw the foolishness (...) Uzo: Ijeoma's father. Killed in an airstrike at the start of the novel, an event which has mental health consequences for Adaora and pushes her to resort to the Bible for solace, a move which affects how she treats Ijeoma for the rest of the novel. Uzo's critical thinking skills displayed at the start of the novel, which Ijeoma herself inherits, and are vital for her to be able to critically reinterpret the bible herself and use this to eventually shut down the bible's oppressive power. Maybe love was some combination of friendship and infatuation. A deeply felt affection accompanied by a certain sort of awe. And by gratitude. And by a desire for a lifetime of togetherness.” Amina eventually succumbs to religious guilt, which brings with it a slew of gruesome nightmares, while Ijeoma resists the pull of guilt for as long as possible, before bending to her mother’s will. A loss for both, it would appear. Teenage romance and the naturalness of lesbian love

t]he female protagonists who did grow as selves were generally halted and defeated before they reached transcendent selfhood. They committed suicide or died; they compromised by marrying and devoting themselves to sympathetic men; they went mad or into some kind of retreat and seclusion from the world. (184, emphasis added) Courtois, Cedric (2018). " "Thou Shalt not Lie with Mankind as with Womankind: It is Abomination!": Lesbian (Body-) 'Bildung' in Chinelo Okparanta's 'Under the Udala Trees' (2015)". Commonwealth Essays and Studies. 40 (2): 119–133. doi: 10.4000/ces.302– via Informit. I 🌴was sad about how gays were being hunted and beaten to death or burnt. That is no way to treat anyone. 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. 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.The School Teacher: An elementary School teacher who takes in Ijeoma after Adaora sends her away to Nwewi. He eventually also takes in Amina after persuasion from Ijeoma. Ijeoma is just a normal girl, trying to find herself in a place where her existence is deemed a crime. Due to the war and loss of her dad, her mom sells her off to serve as a maid and 11 year old Ijeoma goes to live a life of servitude. When she falls in love with Amina, its the greatest feeling she's ever had but it is short lived as her mom finds out.

A searing, yet delicately nuanced, story of an age of innocence first shattered by the vulgarity of war and its aftermath, and then by forbidden desire and religious intolerance. Under the Udala Trees is narrated in lyrical and lucid prose, in a wise and compassionate voice. It bowled me over Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 10-59. Felski, Rita. “The Novel of Self-Discovery: A Necessary Fiction?” Southern Review 19.2 (1986): 131-48. The novel draws on several themes relating to war, family, mother-daughter relationships, homosexuality, religion and Bildungsroman. Popescu, Lucy (2016). " 'Under the Udala Trees', by Chinelo Okparanta". The Financial Times. ProQuest 1768493509.

This story starts as a bildungsroman and then expands with plot. Even the child's voice morphs into the woman's as the second half of the book spans a few years. A young girl experiences loss and abandonment during the civil war in Nigeria. She comes of age during a terrible time in her country when people who look like her are being killed in an ethnic war. Soon, she realizes that who she loves could also get her killed. 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. The characters and the plot are utterly convincing... Okparanta's language choices are also impressive, moving between poetic and prosaic, depending on the requirements of the story... It's almost impossible to believe that Under the Udala Trees is a debut novel. It's beautifully crafted, gripping and heart-breaking with moments of brightness piercing the dark, hostile environment of Christian, patriarchal, heterosexual Nigeria. I'll be astonished if this doesn't make the shortlist of every prize it's eligible for. Chinelo Okparanta is a major new voice in fiction' novel is a first-person narrative where the narrator is the teller of her own story; she constructs her story. Internal narration helps the reader identify and sympathize with the heroine as explained by Kathryn Simpson, who offers a reading of Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: 8 “[the use of internal narrators] is crucial in disarming any hostility or negative response to [the] lesbian identity” (63). This aspect is crucial as we will see further down. Through the character of Ijeoma, Okparanta ventriloquizes a message which targets Nigerian readers, and she gives a voice to those who have always been ostracized, relegated to the margins, in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, and in Nigeria in particular: a voice is therefore given to the LGTBQ community as mentioned in the “Author’s Note”: “This novel attempts to give Nigeria’s marginalized LGBTQ citizens a more powerful voice, and a place in our nation’s history” (325). Ijeoma’s voice represents “the small voice of history” (Guha 2010) during the civil war.