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Summary
Summary
Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.
Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie. As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope -- a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love. Acclaimed by Vogue, the Financial Times, and many others, Chinelo Okparanta continues to distill "experience into something crystalline, stark but lustrous" ( New York Times Book Review ). Under the Udala Trees marks the further rise of a star whose "tales will break your heart open" ( New York Daily News ).
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Okparanta's excellent debut novel is a heartbreaker. Ijeoma is a young girl in civil war-torn Ojoto, Nigeria. When the war takes her father, and her mother can no longer care for her, she is sent away to family friends in the city of Aba. While with them, Ijeoma, part of the Igbo tribe, meets Amina, an orphan from the Hausa tribe. Despite the heavy cultural and religious taboos, the girls fall in love and begin to explore their sexuality. This behavior comes to an abrupt halt when they are caught and Ijeoma returns to her mother, who inundates her in religious instruction. Ijeoma and Amina attend the same school and wrestle the conflict between their attraction and the pressures upon them. After Amina marries a man, Ijeoma is devastated, but soon meets another woman, Ndidi. Eventually, caving to pressure, Ijeoma marries her childhood friend Chibundu and tries to be a happy wife but as time passes, Ijeoma must contend with her feelings for Ndidi, which she must keep secret, and finally make a fateful decision. Okparanta's characters are just as compelling as teenagers as they are as adults and readers will be swept up in this tale of the power of love. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Nigeria's repressive attitude against same-sex relationships forms the scaffolding for Okparanta's (Happiness, Like Water, 2013) deeply affecting debut novel about a young woman's coming to terms with her sexuality and the choices it forces her to make. Ijeoma is only 11 when her idyllic childhood in the small Nigerian town of Ojoto is violently interrupted by the civil war. Unmoored and displaced by the violence, Ijeoma meets another refugee, Amina, discovers her sexuality, and must wrestle with its repercussions. Even if Ijeoma's character is too often defined only by her orientation, this is a remarkable portrait of a young woman's coming-of-age in a society where rigid interpretations of the Bible label same-sex relationships as an abomination, and where violence is all too often part of the solution. The fact that Nigeria criminalized same-sex marriages in 2014 makes Okparanta's tale that much more sobering and urgent. It is especially gratifying that one of the defining tag lines of the feminist movement, a woman without a man, just might be co-opted here in another time and place.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE GIFT OF FAILURE: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, by Jessica Lahey. (Harper, $15.99.) Overinvolved, hypercompetitive parenting has stunted the competence and resilience of an entire generation of children, Lahey argues. As an educator and a mother, she is well situated to assess the damage: In her view, an intense fear of failure hampers the development of many young people. I MUST BE LIVING TWICE: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2014, by Eileen Myles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Myles's poems in this collection thrum with energy, whether focused on attraction, appetites - for food or otherwise - or bygone selves. In her writing, "the birth of the cool often manifests itself with a kind of willful amateurism," our reviewer, Jeff Gordinier, wrote. THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf. (Vintage, $17.) As a pre-eminent scientist who influenced Darwin and many others, Humboldt, a German naturalist, geographer and explorer, proposed that Earth is a single organism. Modern thought is suffused with his ideas, but the man himself has largely receded from view. Wulf revisits his stunning discoveries in her account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2015. COUP DE FOUDRE: A Novella and Stories, by Ken Kalfus. (Bloomsbury, $17.) This collection's namesake novella centers on the fictional president of an international financial organization accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. The masterly story, which closely resembles the real-life case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "enters the mind of a megalomaniac who conflates his own ruin with that of the European economy," Andrew Sean Greer said here. FARTHEST FIELD: An Indian Story of the Second World War, by Raghu Karnad. (Norton, $16.95.) India's contributions to World War II - more than two million men and women served - have been all but scrubbed from prevailing accounts, even on the subcontinent. After unearthing his family's history, Karnad delves into the country's role in the conflict and the peculiarities of fighting in service of the British Empire even as India struggled for independence from it. UNDER THE UDALA TREES, by Chinelo Okparanta. (Mariner, $14.95.) Amid the chaos of the Biafran war, Ijeoma, a child in Nigeria, is sent away to work as a servant in another village. She soon falls in love - with another girl. After the pair are discovered, Ijeoma returns home and learns to reconcile her desires with a society intent on suppressing them. THE TWO-STATE DELUSION: Israel and Palestine - A Tale of Two Narratives, by Padraig O'Malley. (Penguin, $18.) O'Malley, who also researched seemingly intractable disputes in Ireland and South Africa, levels evenhanded criticism at both Palestinians and Israelis, and grimly assesses the feasibility - political and economic - of the two-state proposal, favored by leaders across the globe.
Guardian Review
A young gay woman looks for forgiveness from God in a brave novel seeking to challenge prejudice 'Midway 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. "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. First comes the war: the little compound is in Biafra, and within a year the area is being bombed. 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. 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. As time goes by, in this new place Ijeoma befriends Amina, a Muslim Hausa, who becomes more than a friend. The lovers are discovered and her mother sent for; months of prayer and Bible-study follow. 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. "Are you listening?" asks her mother. "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. To Ijeoma such "hospitality" is cowardice. "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." 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. But she is also very good on the ways in which daughters collude in these arrangements, overruling their own hearts out of duty, or expectation, or complex, self-betraying kindness, hardly knowing, until much later, that this is what they have done. For Ijeoma, God's opinion of her, as a woman who loves other women, is something that just has to be squared, forgiveness and understanding sought among the verses of the Bible even as others look in the same place for the opposite. One night, she and other lesbian women are forced to run from a speakeasy where they have attempted to meet freely (in a building that is by day -- what else? -- a church). When, some hours later, they come out of hiding, they find that one of them has been burned to death. Okparanta has great structural confidence. She is unafraid of bald foreshadowing, and generally pulls it off, priming the narrative with dread. She makes huge leaps --Ijeoma's mother sends her away, for instance, then five pages and two years later is picking her up again. The method works on two levels: first, it keeps the reader reading; second, it gets the basic narrative out of the way, clearing space for Okparanta's real strength, which is tracking emotional logic, how relationships between people shift and tick. She is clearly not entirely comfortable with the broader canvas of politics or war; once it has served its contextual duty -- severing families, bringing unlikely people together, underlining more intimate wars -- it drops away. Then the directness of her prose comes into its own, describing with clarity and seeming simplicity states that are not simple at all. So the 11-year-old Ijeoma watches as her mother lies to herself that abandoning her child is right, while all the time understanding that she is allowing her mother to do so. There are moments of lovely description, of places and of things, but Okparanta's best writing is the result of emotional insight. A daughter wishes her father would remarry "because that would make him seem less lonely to her" -- not, pointedly, because it would actually make him less lonely. Less successful are some unnecessary lurches in register. After the first page or two describing a childhood that carries a faint edging of fable -- those rose and hibiscus bushes, tall irokos, whistling pines -- "the war barged in and established itself all over the place". There are lapses of telling rather than showing: "the whole situation was very stressful for me" -- no kidding. And there is the occasional moment when a simile is taken from so far out of the experience of the novel that it shocks the reader out of its world: "It was as if she had become a secondary-school-aged, Nigerian version of Margaret Thatcher, iron lady through and through." Okparanta is clearly motivated by a belief that fiction can make changes in the world; in the endnote she says she hopes her novel can give Nigeria's gay citizens "a more powerful voice". This is not a book one can easily imagine her being able to write if she still lived in Nigeria (she left at 10, and now lives in the US). For when it comes to same-sex relationships it seems little has changed since the time she describes, and the image she evokes, of a woman tied upright among logs, burning. * To order Under the Udala Trees for [pound]10.39 (RRP [pound]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Aida Edemariam.
Kirkus Review
In 1968, during the second year of the war between Biafra and Nigeria, 11-year-old Ijeoma is sent away from her home in Ojoto for safety by her mother, Adaora. Ijeoma's father, Uzo, is dead, destroyed in a bombing raid that nearly decimated their village, and her mother is quickly unraveling, unable to cope with the ongoing war and famine. But Adaora's love for her daughter is limitless; when Ijeoma was born early, for example, Adaora gave herself headaches learning about nutrition to make sure her baby grew healthy. Okparanta is masterful at articulating the pressures living through endless violence has on each of her characters' psyches; Adaora crumbles under the harshness of the ongoing war. Her plan is to go to her parents' house in Aba and see if things are better there while Ijeoma stays with friends in Nnewi; she'll send for the girl to join her when it's safe. But Ijeoma feels this separation is prompted less by necessity than by the fact that Adaora now finds her daughter an impossible burden. Alone in Nnewi, Ijeoma falls in love with another displaced girl, Amina. But when their relationship is discovered, Ijeoma is sent back to her mother, who is determined to teach Ijeoma that two girls can't be romantically involved. In the years following, Ijeoma must reconcile her feelings toward women with the pressure to marry a man and be accepted in a country that makes being gay punishable by death. In language both sparse and lyrical, Okparanta manages to articulate a child's wide-eyed understanding of the breakdown of the world around her. We see, too, a detailed rebuilding of that world along with Ijeoma's maturity into womanhood. Here is writing rich in the beautiful intimacies of people who love each otherand wise about the importance of holding onto those precious connections in a world that is, more often than not, dangerous and cold. Written with courage and compassion, this debut novel by Okparanta (Happiness, Like Water, 2013) stunningly captures a young girl's coming of age against the backdrop of a nation at war. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
After 13-year-old Ijeoma is uprooted during the waning days of the Nigerian Civil War, she becomes a housemaid for a grammar school teacher and his wife who are friends of her late father. Joining this makeshift Igbo family is Amina, a Hausa orphan who becomes Ijeoma's confidant. Okparanta's novel, after her story collection Happiness, Like Water, tells of regret and remorse and of using prayer to dominate and douse thoughts and desires, as both girls are sent to a religious academy to "reform" their "immoral" behavior. In several brief chapters, a now-senior Ijeoma takes readers on a wistful journey, with each section offering just enough suspense to make readers want to turn the page. There are the frequent Bible sessions with Mama, who reiterates Adam and Eve, while Ijeoma questions her ability to love and be loved. There is also the burgeoning relationship with local teacher Ndini and the hasty marriage to childhood friend Chibundu in an attempt to save Ijeoma from violence (or even death) if her relationship with Ndini is exposed. VERDICT This absorbing story parallels the ongoing struggle for equality in Nigeria and is a powerful contribution to LGBT and African literature. Readers will finish the book hoping that every however-flawed character will find his or her own version of happiness. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.