At the Crossroads of Life and Death: The Body in Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020)

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. Given the above, 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.