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. “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.” To Ijeoma such “hospitality” is cowardice. “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.

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. The lovers are discovered and her mother sent for months of prayer and Bible-study follow. As time goes by, in this new place Ijeoma befriends Amina, a Muslim Hausa, who becomes more than a friend. 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. 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. “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.įirst comes the war: the little compound is in Biafra, and within a year the area is being bombed.

‘M idway 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.

Chinelo okparanta books