Book reviews: Before We Hit The Ground by Selali Fiamanya | Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor

These two very different novels both take a similar approach to food, writes Stuart Kelly

The books referred to within a book are always an indication of the kind of company the author wishes to keep; they are the texts that served as inspirations and the canon to which the writer aspires. Nnedi Okorafor gives practically a pantheon: “She was reading all these books by authors she’d discovered in her classes; she’d even written some of their names on her chair – Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Ijeoma Oluo, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ta-Nehisi Coates”. Slyly, one of Okorafor’s characters has read a book with a character called Udide – which might well be her own Lagoon. Selali Fiamanya, meanwhile, drops in a quiet reference to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and, perhaps more tellingly, refers to Mariama Bâ, the Senagalese semi-autobiographical author of So Long A Letter and feminist thinker.

These are very different novels: one is partly a bildungsroman, the other partly a science-fiction novel. They have an odd overlap. “One thing”, a character says in Death Of The Author, “that Naijamericans love to talk about is food … the Naijamerican version of the proverb is ‘The way to Nigeria is through the stomach’” – and out it duly rolls: “egusi soup, efo riro, moi moi, okra soup, amala, pounded yam, rice and stew, fried plantain, pepper soup and, of course, jollof rice”. In Fiamanya, we have “jollof, grilled fish, boiled yam, shito, boiled eggs, waakye. The reds were redder and the browns browner than he had ever seen in Glasgow”. Food is a good cultural specifier, but it can also be a lazy one, and one that risks capitulating to exoticism. Is the reader expected to find it familiar or strange, and if familiar, why is it worth commenting on? In a similar fashion, both books have characters code-switching into Twi or Igbo or Ewe – Fiamanya also uses indigenous glyphs (“ondidi wɔ”, “mepaakyɛw”) that foreground linguistic difference. It is a precarious balancing act.

Nnedi Okorafor | Getty Images

Before We Hit The Ground presents a chronologically fragmented narrative, from 1986 to 2019, and opens with Abena, her husband Kodzo and their daughter Dzifa mourning the death of her brother Elom. Why he died is therefore a tug to draw the reader through the story of immigration from Ghana to Scotland; but their varying experiences crystallise around whether they should stay or return. Abena’s opinion is that she “didn’t come to this soil to set down my roots, I came to plant seeds”, to which Kodzo retorts “that coffin is our root in this soil”.

Although this is promising, the actual story is soap-operatic. The most moving part is Kodzo clinging to but adapting his evangelical background. There are, however, too many clumsinesses. Some are poor descriptions. Dfiza getting ones in her exams is seen thus: “the numbers fell down the right-hand side of the page like a line of Morse Code”. Except a “1” isn’t like a horizontal dash and the code has dots as well. Others are snags in the suspension of disbelief. Abena is a chef and Kodzo a nurse, but he can’t diagnose Elom’s ear infection. Dfiza has a “competitive streak” so studies medicine in Oxford rather than Edinburgh. Edinburgh would be a far better choice, and we don’t even learn which Oxford college, which would have a material relevance to how much snobbery she would encounter.

Elom works for the New Statesman, edited by “Mark”, not Jason Cowley. Why not just invent a magazine? It jars, especially since Laura Mvula, Yotam Ottolenghi and Still Game all feature. Nobody discusses the fall of Thatcher, the rise of New Labour, or the independence referendum, but there are mentions of Dragonball Z and Grindr. The latter is there because Elom is gay, and what might have been the book’s core just seems another “thing”. Elom has “good sex, bad sex, intimate and wild sex” although it tells us “he stressed out about uni, and money, and getting enough sleep, and sex: normal things”.

Okorafor is a fascinating writer, and I wish Death of the Author had just been the science fiction novel the character writes, not that plus a triumphant girl-boss pseudo-realist plot. The idea of a civil war between embodied and wireless artificial intelligences is fantastic, especially with a protagonist who is effectively an archaeologist of extinct humanity. But the fictitious author, Zelu Onyenezi-Onyedele is, frankly, insufferable. A “black disabled adjunct professor” (her words) “on a “f***ing intellectual plantation”, she decides to “f*** the power. F*** everything” and writes a bestseller. Her fans are awful, the film version is dreadful, she hasn’t done the sequel (George RR Martin says of Okorafor “this one has it all”. A wry eyebrow is not out of place).

The interesting material about transhumanist “curing” of disability, the heterogeneity of Africa, sexualisation, the lack of social media off switches – all of this is subsumed by her rampant ego. The various interviews with her family almost admit it: she’s “so wrapped up in herself she doesn’t know when she’s kicked people out of their sense of normalcy”. As I said, I prefer the robots.

Before We Hit The Ground, by Selali Fiamanya, The Borough Press, £16.99

Death Of The Author, by Nnedi Okorafor, Gollancz, £20