The Death of Vivek Oji

“There was nothing boiling in him, just a loud and clear exhale, a weight of peace wrapping around his heart.”

While Chika characterizes his feelings about Mary as a burning or a boiling, with Kavita he feels peaceful. This early contrast foreshadows the great divide between the two women that occurs in the wake of Mary’s congregation assaulting Vivek. It outlines their different approaches to life, as symbolized by how they ultimately respond to Vivek’s sexuality and gender. This quote also carries the theme of the true meaning of love, showing that people can love meaningfully in diverse ways.

“Osita wished, much later, that he’d told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull, made Osita hard with desire. ‘Take it off,’ he snapped instead, his throat rough. ‘Put it back before they catch us.’”

This early quote expresses Osita’s sense of guilt after Vivek’s death. While the remembered scene illustrates Osita’s self-hatred and projection as he wrestles with the reality of his sexual desires, it is also foreground to his later sense of possibility for embracing his true self after Vivek’s death, as symbolized by his plans to proudly wear Vivek’s silver Ganesh charm. This pride and acceptance, Osita realizes in the wake of Vivek’s death, is the true meaning of love.

“This is how Vivek was born, after death and into grief. It marked him, you see, it cut him down like a tree.”

This quote refers to Vivek’s birth corresponding with his grandmother Ahunna’s death. This idea of reincarnation provides the mythology with which Vivek’s structures his gender identity and his embrace of his feminine self, Nnemdi. The connection between Vivek and Ahunna remains a thread throughout the novel until Vivek’s death.

“Instead, she held on to faith with a stubborn kind of bitterness, as if it were all she had left—a trapped and resentful love. Who could stay bright and bubbly after losing baby after baby? What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry with God?”

The narrative here gives a rare empathic context for Mary before she orchestrates her congregation’s assault on Vivek. The narration supplies a cause and effect for Mary’s religious fanaticism: She embraced religion to cope with grief over her miscarriages. This detail connects trauma to religious fervor, suggesting that religion can provide a false sense of security. The author uses Mary’s narrative to trouble the connection between religious love and personal love; the narrative implies a discrepancy between how Mary believes she loves Vivek and how she shows it, namely through her dangerous religious efforts that lead to Vivek’s assault. In other words, Mary’s religious “love” begets violence, however she may frame it.

“We were men together and we liked to show it off, so I agreed.”

When Vivek asks to watch Osita and Elizabeth having sex, Osita eventually agrees. He does so in part because of the toxic implicit agreement between men that exploitative gender practices, such as allowing Vivek to watch Elizabeth without her consent, validate their masculinity. The line underscores the theme of toxic gender roles.

“If nobody sees you, are you still there?”

Vivek refers to the sense of isolation, loneliness, and invisibility he feels in navigating a world that does not “see” him as he truly is. Part of this question’s intention is to scrutinize whether Vivek needs social validation and recognition to be who he truly is. On another level, it succinctly expresses the nearly existential power of interpersonal love; Vivek feels that if cannot truly exist (or be “seen”) within relationships, it threatens a kind of oblivion. The quandary indirectly highlights the theme of the true meaning (and power) of love.

“I wanted to be as whole as that word.”

Vivek explains why he owns a copy of The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. He maintains that he likes the way that the word “beauty” is left intact, alluding to Vivek’s journey to embracing his gender identity and becoming whole. However, the entirety of the title—The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born—holds more significance upon further inspection. It is no coincidence that “beauty” is traditionally a feminine virtue, and Vivek’s own femininity, Nnemdi, is “not yet born.” Moreover, the motif of birth highlights the theme of reincarnation.

“The convergence had made his birthdays difficult—the way everyone kept trying to smile past the grief clotting inside them. They didn’t want to tell Vivek because they didn’t want him to think it was his fault they were always sad on his birthday, as if his arrival had caused her death. Kavita had thought the pain would fade over the years, but it had multiplied instead, like a load getting heavier and heavier on your head the longer you walked with it.”

The theme of the true meaning of love arises amidst the family’s mixed emotions around Vivek’s birthday and Ahunna’s death anniversary. Though Kavita tries to curb her strong feelings of sadness about Ahunna’s passing, her true feelings of love and grief make themselves known in her body; she feels a physical weight from the emotional burden. This quote also showcases Kavita’s characteristic resilience in the face of her grief. 

“Bittersweet: that was the word for his birthday, though he was too young to know it then. Sweet on the tip of the tongue, sour and bitter notes scraping through the rest of the mouth.”

Every year when Vivek’s family celebrated his life they also celebrated his grandmother Ahunna’s death. Connecting back to the early quote about Vivek’s birth into grief (28), this quote foreshadows the tragically short (but also full) life that Vivek will lead. It also reinforces the mythology around Vivek and Ahunna’s cosmic connection, implying that a part of Ahunna lived on in Vivek.

“[Chika] walked out of the room. Kavita watched him leave, then listened to his raised voice a few minutes later as he and his brother broke things further. It was how he always did nowadays, pushing her aside gently, not listening to her. Sometimes it felt like he had stopped listening to her years ago, and she just hadn’t noticed. Like they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping.”

Kavita reflects on her marital due to a lack of communication and respect. The relational decay highlights the toll of upholding traditional gender roles: Chika does not believe that his wife is an equal partner in their marriage and family decisions, and the sense of disconnection between them grows. They are married, but there is no true relationship.

“I know what Aunty Kavita wants to know. I want to tell her that she is not prepared for the answer, the same way I was not prepared. That it will hit her like a lorry, spilling its load over her chest and crushing her.”

Osita again alludes to his inadvertent involvement in Vivek’s death—but the vivid metaphor is unrelated to the death itself; it describes the shock of discovering Vivek’s life as Nnemdi. The “lorry” for Kavita will initially have mostly to do with her outrage over her child’s real identity. For Osita, however, the crushing weight entails his own sexuality within his relationship with Vivek.

“I felt heavy my whole life. I always thought that death would be the heaviest thing of all, but it wasn’t, it really wasn’t. Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body.”

From beyond the grave, Vivek reveals the extent of his unhappiness in life. He implies that due to his entrapment by compulsory gender norms, he increasingly felt like he fit in neither his own body nor society’s shared reality in general.

“The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open for days.”

Though Vivek’s fugues had previously been characterized by Osita as an illness, Vivek feels the fugues offer him relief from a reality in which his true self is either ignored or punished. Conversely, Vivek sees the fugues as an opportunity to escape the oppressive gender roles of his family and greater society.

“I hid [the fugues] from my parents and grew out my hair, thinking that the weight dropping from my head would lighten the one inside of me.”

Vivek reveals one of his motivations for growing out his hair. In addition to more fully expressing himself and exploring his femininity, Vivek’s long hair was also an attempt to protect himself from feeling so out of place in his gender identity. The effort did not make him feel “lighter,” but more “balanced.” Vivek has never been given language for his experience of gender, and his narration often has a distinctly metaphorical quality as he searches for accurate expression.

“Everyone knew that death entered with the upcoming elections.”

The Death of Vivek Oji uses the 1998 death of Sani Abacha, Nigerian military general and former head of state, and the subsequent political turnover to scaffold and draw out the growing tension around Vivek’s death. The narrative provides clues about the circumstances of Vivek’s death whenever political unrest, such as the riots at the market, are mentioned.

“Perhaps he was right and it was a birth of sorts, but Chika had forgotten that births come with blood, and in the case of his son, they came with loss as well, birthdays and deathdays all tangled up in each other.”

The novel touches upon the motif of political unrest, which underscores and builds tension around Vivek’s impending death. Though Chika sees the change in political leadership as a site of possibility, the third person narrator implies that there will be certain sacrifices that come with this opportunity.

“She’s only saying that because she’s jealous, she thought. Because her husband is ruining her life. Because she doesn’t have a son.”

Kavita bristles when her friend Maja casually comments on being sometimes unable to distinguish between Vivek and the rest of the girls in his friend group. Kavita responds with internalized misogyny, dismissing Maja’s comment as Maja’s jealousy from not having a son. Kavita’s appraisal reveals her own gendered values; she thinks that men are more important, or valuable, than women. It is this same internalized misogyny that causes her to deny Vivek’s femininity, as much as she loves her child.

“About how he tried to talk to me about it the next day, bright-faced and eager, how panicked I felt because I didn’t know what he thought I could give him, what world he thought we lived in where it was safe to do something like that. About how I lied when he brought it up, claiming I couldn’t remember what happened, blaming it on whatever we’d been drinking. About the way his face collapsed in hurt and a fresh aloneness.”

Osita describes to Vivek the aftermath of his kiss with a male university student. He acknowledges the impact that his denial has on others, in this case, a man he kissed. This moment is also a turning point for Osita and Vivek’s relationship, and the precursor to their first shared sexual encounter. In admitting to Vivek that he desires other men, Osita is able to face and consummate his attraction to Vivek.

“I kissed him like I wanted to seduce uncertainty away, slow and gentle, filling my mouth with a plea and pouring it into his.”

Chika initiates a sexual encounter with Vivek. In doing so, Osita reveals what he wants from Vivek. Osita’s approach is not just due to physical desire, but it represents a search for an answer to his queerness, an endpoint; He wants Vivek to be some kind of solution to his sexuality.

“And he had ended up a girl anyway, with the name they had denied him—ended up beaten to death and thrown in front of his own front door, and she, his own mother, had known nothing about it because he didn’t trust her.”

After Juju, Somto, Olunne, and Osita present the photos of Nnemdi to Kavita, Kavita reaches a turning point. She realizes that all of the family’s attempts to curb Vivek’s femininity were futile and that their failing was not in their inability to control Vivek; it was in their refusal to embrace Vivek as his true self. 

“But he spun around to show it off, and for once he looked happy and not tired, not like he was dying or suffering. I couldn’t help but be happy for him. I had surrendered, by then, you see, and we were in Juju’s house, in our bubble where everything was okay and the outside world didn’t exist.”

This quote emphasizes the protective bubble of Vivek’s extended community, and also the fantasy of it. It shows the contrast between Osita and Vivek—that for Osita, his true self was a fantasy, but for Vivek, it was a reality so vivid that he was willing to die for it.

“Then I walked away, knowing that I would be leaving, going far away, to somewhere I could put his charm around my neck and wear it every day, and maybe then it would feel like he hadn’t left me after all.”

After visiting Vivek’s grave on his birthday at dawn, Osita extracts Vivek’s silver Ganesh chain, which Kavita had been looking for. This quote implies the possibility for a hopeful future for Osita as a result of Vivek’s death. In the aftermath of losing Vivek, Osita is more open to living an authentic life where he can be candid about his queer desire.

“I often wonder if I died in the best possible way—in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true.”

While the loved ones Vivek left behind grieved him, Vivek shows no regret for the way he died. He sees the beauty in dying as the person he wanted to be. His affirmation implies that his journey to be a more authentic self—or “whole,” as Vivek implied in the beginning of the novel—is complete. The death of Vivek Oji is thus also a rebirth, revealing some of the paradoxical quality of the novel’s title.