55 pages • 1 hour read
Chinelo OkparantaUnder the Udala Trees
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Influence of Dreams
Several characters, including our narrator, decide on courses of action based on dreams: “dreams were the way in which we resolved our problems” (26).
Ijeoma and her first girlfriend, Amina, bond over sharing their dreams and discussing the ways their mothers used to interpret them: “Maybe that was a trait shared by all mothers, we decided” (121). During Adaora’s anti-homosexual Bible lessons, Ijeoma dreams of Amina: “dreams so vivid that when I woke it seemed that the waking was the dream, and the dream, my reality” (85). After the teens reconnect at the Girls’ Academy, a dream about Revelations—“hailstones,” “fire, pouring down and forming craters where they landed,” and a “carriage in the sky” (155)—causes Amina to break up with Ijeoma and marry a man.
A dream also causes Ijeoma to question her relationship with Ndidi. Ijeoma’s happiness falls after a “panicked dream, as if to mockingly ask me how I could even presume to think happiness was a thing within my reach” (195). This dream causes Ijeoma to consent to marrying Chibundu. However, dreams of Ndidi return after the wedding: “Ndidi appeared to me, more vividly than ever, in a dream” (251). This inspires Ijeoma to write letters that Chibundu finds.
The most significant dreams during Ijeoma’s marriage are about Chidinma “under one of the udala trees” (310) choking and her infant choking; these inspire her to leave Chibundu the very next day.
Intersections of Christianity with Gay and Lesbian Lives
Strict Nigerian Christianity sees gay and lesbian lives as an evil abomination. Aba is a typical Nigerian city in this mindset. In the novel, the community believes that the arson of the church-turned-gay-club “was aided by God, that an example needed to be set in order to cleanse Aba of such sinful ways” (210). In her “Author’s Note,” Okparanta writes that Nigeria only created laws criminalizing gay and lesbian lives as late as 2014 (325).
Adaora believes Ijeoma is controlled by “demons” and “the devil” (72) when she sleeps with Amina at the grammar school teacher’s house. She forces Bible lessons on Ijeoma until Ijeoma imagines Adaora saying, “The devil has returned again to cast his net on you” (150) whenever she has sexual thoughts about Amina or other women. After Ijeoma sleeps with Ndidi, Ijeoma’s dreams conflate her mother’s voice with God’s, shaming her for flouting societal norms: “the voice of God, scolding also like Mama, reprimanding, condemning me for my sins” (201).
However, there are links between tolerance of gay and lesbian lives and Christianity, specifically in the New Testament. Ijeoma uses John 3:16 as defense of sexual “abomination” (159) in an argument with Amina after her dream about Revelations. John 8 is also quoted after Ijeoma seeks solace in a church after disturbing dreams about God condemning her for her relationship with Ndidi (201). At the end of the novel, Adaora internalizes Jesus’s tolerance rather than the Old Testament’s condemnation. Ijeoma reconciles her feelings about God through change: “change is in fact a major part of HIs aesthetic, a major part of His vision for the world” (321).
Male Violence
The novel explicitly links the violence of the Nigerian Civil War to the violence visited on the LGBT+ community in the country. Under the Udala Trees begins with the “typical sights and sounds of a nation at war” (49). There are corpses lining the streets of Ojoto. Ijeoma’s father Uzo commits a kind of passive suicide, refusing to shelter in the family bunker with Adaora and Ijeoma when Hausa soldiers bomb Igbo citizens.
The burning of the church-turned-gay-club mirrors this out-of-the-bunker death. Ijeoma, Ndidi, and most of the other women hide from assailants in bunkers that “were very well concealed, palm covering and grass [...] Harder to detect than those of our war days. As if one or more of the girls had known to plan ahead. As if they had known that a raid like this would be inevitable” (207). During the raid, Adanna can’t get into the bunker in time, so the attacking men burn her alive.
Violent men appear in positions of authority, their power affirmed by stories from the Bible. Adaora uses Biblical stories of men sacrificing women’s sexual agency as part of her homemade gay conversion therapy for her daughter. When Ijeoma learns the story of Lot and the Levite “offering up” (79) women, she questions: “What about all the violence and all the rape?” (80). The Old Testament condones violence towards women, as long as the aggressors are men with authority over them.
In Ijeoma’s personal life, men abuse their power often. When she is young, the grammar school teacher slaps Amina and Ijeoma after discovering them making love. He has both the power to physically chastise them and to send them away to boarding school. Later, the police brag about harming homosexuals. On finding Ndidi’s gay male friends dead, officers joke, “If they were not dead already, we would beat them some more” (205), and refuse to investigate the murders. After marriage, Chibundu threatens Ijeoma with his machete, “pushing heavily on the skin of [her] leg” (273). Ijeoma fears that Chibundu will “slap [her] again and again” (276) when she leaves him for Ndidi.
