At the Crossroads of Life and Death: The Body in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020)
Karolina Kmita
University of Silesia in Katowice, PolandKarolina Kmita is a PhD student at the University of Silesia in Katowice. As of January 2025, she is also the recipient of a Preludium research grant from the National Science Centre in Poland for the project “Beyond the Flesh: Representations of Corporeality in Anglophone Nigerian Novels of the 21st Century.” Her research interests include postcolonial literature, queer studies, and gender discourses.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1556-0612
Abstract
This article aims to analyze the representation of embodiment in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). Exploring the novel’s narrative, this paper argues that Emezi employs Igbo spiritual beliefs to dismantle gender taxonomy rooted in the Western episteme. Furthermore, because the novel presents Vivek’s existence as deviating from the linear trajectory of human life, the main character’s embodied form transcends the notion of materiality. In this light, the main protagonist’s departure from life emerges as a form of emancipation from the rigid boundaries of liberal humanist conceptualizations of the body. Following the footsteps of their Nigerian literary predecessors, Emezi portrays life on Earth as a cyclical process, interweaving both the living and the dead. In this light, Vivek’s corporeal death is not presented as a demise, but rather as a step towards imagining a world in which the existence of African queer bodies is not tainted with precariousness.
Keywords:
corporeality, Nigerian literature, postcolonial literature, spirituality, queer African body, The Death of Vivek OjiReferences
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University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland
Karolina Kmita is a PhD student at the University of Silesia in Katowice. As of January 2025, she is also the recipient of a Preludium research grant from the National Science Centre in Poland for the project “Beyond the Flesh: Representations of Corporeality in Anglophone Nigerian Novels of the 21st Century.” Her research interests include postcolonial literature, queer studies, and gender discourses.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1556-0612
