Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor Review by Deborah Williams

Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor 

Review by Deborah Williams

Pub date: 18 Jan 2022

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

ISBN: 0451480589

416 pages 

An iridescent Möbius-strip ghazal—written by Udide, a giant spider—is the enchanted object at the center of Nnedi Okorafor’s new young adult novel, Akata Woman. The book is the third in Okorafor’s “Nsibidi Scripts” trilogy, about a young girl named Sunny Nwazue who moves with her family from New York to Aba, Nigeria, and discovers that she belongs to a magical secret community known as the Leopard People. I know what you’re thinking—it sounds like Harry Potter. And indeed when Akata Witch, the first book in the series, was published in 2011, it was marketed as “the Nigerian Harry Potter.”

But Sunny Nwazue’s story resembles Harry’s only in the vaguest outlines and is a compelling read, even for those readers who have steadfastly resisted the adults-reading-YA trend. Published by Penguin Random House, the book nevertheless has an indie sensibility that challenges the shibboleths of mainstream publishing. 

Okorafor’s trilogy—and this third book in particular—wants to teach us how to read: how to read outside of an Anglo European context, outside the context of “serious” literature, outside our own daily constraints and concerns. In Akata Woman, these reading lessons carry life-or-death consequences. If Sunny and her three Leopard friends don’t find the ghazal that was stolen from Udide, the spider will destroy the world. 

On this quest to find a world-saving poem, Sunny must rely on her abilities not only as a Nimm warrior, which gives her almost superhuman strength, but also as a reader of Nsibidi script. Nsibidi script is an ancient Nigerian pictograph system, to which Okorafor adds a dollop of magic: the symbols shape-shift, in a dramatic illustration of how interpretations can change, depending on context. The book that Sunny reads to practice her Nsibidi skills is sometimes a memoir, sometimes a cookbook, sometimes a political satire, sometimes a history of the African continent. No matter what form the book takes, Sunny knows it will be “an intoxicating read.” 

Learning to read Nsibidi script is a version of what happens when we read a ghazal (pronounced “ghuzzle”), a complex poetic form that began in seventh-century Arabia and developed by poets like Hafiz and Rumi in twelfth-century Persia. Ghazals are written in couplets, each of which ends with the same word or phrase. Depending on the context of the specific couplet, the repeating phrase shifts in meaning—we must learn to hold all these meanings in mind, simultaneously, as we read. 

The novel draws its key elements—Nsibidi script, the ghazal, Udide herself (a figure from Igbo legend)—from non-Western inspirations. Like many speculative and fantastical YA novels over the past twenty years, such as Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series, or Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, Akata Woman doesn’t so much challenge Western tropes as ignore them. 

The focus in Akata Woman is on Nigeria and Nigerian history, with one powerful exception: Sunny’s American-born friend Sasha, also a Leopard, makes a ceremonial offering at the spot where his ancestors were captured into slavery. Okorafor drives home the point about legacy of slavery when she has the four friends “take a knee” at the spot Sasha indicates.

This moment of commemoration and grief resounds through the novel in a different and more specifically Nigerian context: the legacy of the Biafra-Nigeria Civil War, which started in 1967, when Biafra seceded from Nigeria in response to Nigerian violence against the Igbo. As the Republic of Biafra, the country struggled to maintain its independence for almost three years but surrendered in 1970 because Nigeria’s blockade of the country led to millions of people dying of starvation. More than fifty years later, the tensions remain: early in the novel, a pro-Biafra demonstration ends with the uncle of Sunny’s friend getting killed. The Biafra question extends even into the magical world, where Sunny and her friends meet a man who lost everyone he loved in the war: magic cannot necessarily ward off heartbreak. 

As an Igbo who didn’t arrive in Nigeria until she was twelve, Sunny had to teach herself Nigerian history; she tells her friend Orlu that she wants to know “the context of stuff.” She’s an outsider, whose presence confuses people, as she tells us in the first book. She’s American-born Igbo, a Leopard in a Lamb family, a powerful girl in a patriarchal society, and an albino. Over the course of the trilogy, we watch as she tries to find her bearings in both worlds, navigating magical dangers and familial pressure. The teachings of the Leopard world help her find compassion for her father, despite his overbearing attitudes, and her skills as a soccer player (evident in both worlds) become important in fighting magical monsters. By the end of Akata Woman, Sunny delights in her physical body; her albinism is no longer a source of shame, and on the soccer field she uses her strength to tackle (more or less legally) boys who make leering comments about her looks.

Because it’s a fantasy novel with a sixteen-year old heroine, Akata Woman might strike some adult readers as not worth their time, but that would be a mistake. Long before Chimamanda Adichie’s now-famous Ted talk about the dangers of a single story, speculative YA fiction has been teaching its readers to resist facile narratives and to find pleasure in multiplicity and ambiguity. Using the scrim of speculative fiction and fantasy, YA books offer their readers ways to think about how patriarchy, capitalism, and xenophobia have combined to bring the world to this moment of Anthropocene crisis. 

At one point in Akata Woman, for example, Sunny encounters a devouring spirit called The Bone Collector, who shows her visions of refugees being swallowed by smoke and burning asphalt. The refugees are Biafrans, fleeing Nigerian bombs—but they could just as easily be Syrians, Afghans, Kurds, or any of the millions of people who have been forcibly displaced by war or climate disasters. Okorafor’s trilogy makes clear that both war and climate crisis stem from the legacy of colonialism and unfettered capitalism, which sees the world solely in terms of resources to be exploited. The evil spirit that Sunny battles in Akata Warrior (2017), for example, manifests itself through the ways that oil companies have destroyed the ecology of the Nigerian delta—often with help from Nigerians themselves. And one of Sunny’s Leopard teachers says that “human beings are notorious for ignoring the fact that Earth’s other creatures are workers of the finest jujus. . . people don’t take animals as seriously as [they] should.” 

At a time when the US seems intent on flaunting its intolerance, as school boards ban books and librarians are told to yank books from their shelves lest the delicate sensibilities of young readers be disturbed—actions that of course actually demonstrate the fear that (predominantly white) adults have about disruptions to their world view, it seems more important than ever for us to pay attention to YA fiction and its representations of worlds and social structures that challenge outdated hierarchies. As Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in The New York Times, “banning is an act of fear — the fear of dangerous and contagious ideas. The best, and perhaps most dangerous, books deliver these ideas in something just as troubling and infectious: a good story.” Akata Woman tells a really good story. We should be listening. 

Nnedi Okorafor’s works include WHO FEARS DEATH (in development at HBO into a TV series), the BINTI novella trilogy (optioned and in development with Media Res), THE BOOK OF PHOENIX, the NSIBIDI SCRIPTS SERIES and LAGOON. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel ZAHRAH THE WINDSEEKER won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Learn more about Nnedi at Nnedi.com

Deborah Williams is a writer and literature professor. The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023; her essays have appeared in various publications, including The Rumpus, Inside Higher Ed, The New York Times, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and Brevity. She is on IG and twitter as @mannahattamamma 

6 July 2022