Deliberate distancing in the opening of Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author is science fiction, with one strand set in a distant future and another set in a seemingly near future. The author herself has called it Africanfuturism, and both story strands draw on Nigerian traditions and folklore. The novel also lands more on the literary side of the genre spectrum than the commercial side. Okorafor’s opening is a gate rather than a hook; readers have to choose to proceed, and not all will. The gate operates by creating narrative distance between the reader and the novel’s characters, rather than pulling them close.

I’m going to show you how Okorafor uses her first three chapters to challenge readers, then reassure them, then raise new questions, but first let’s analyze the work her title is doing: Death of the Author. Some readers will immediately think of Roland Barthes’s influential 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” which argues that authorial identity or intention does not determine the meaning of a work; rather, readers have the power to make their own meanings. Okorafor’s novel is certainly in conversation with that essay—there’s an explicit reference to it in chapter two that I’ll discuss in a moment.

But I want to start with a much more literal interpretation. The two novels we’ve studied so far—The God of the Woods and King of Ashes—both have titles that focus on theme. And Death of the Author does too, but notice that this title also opens story questions in ways the others do not: Who is the author? How will they die? They are big, alluring questions that will, perhaps, draw us through the gate of the opening pages. As we’ll see, one of Okorafor’s games throughout the novel is to keep us guessing about the answers to both.

Those games start right away in chapter one, which is titled “Interview: Chinyere” and opens with the challenging question: “What’s the story you want?” As a reader, I already have so many more questions after these first words: Who is Chinyere? Why is she being interviewed? Who is doing the interview? Why is she hostile to the interviewer? Most importantly, who is the you of that first sentence?

In a broader sense, of course, that you is also we—the readers confronting this question. What is the story we want? If we stop to answer it before hurrying on to the next sentences to look for the answers, we might pause to wonder, Do I want to read a story about the death of an author? Do I want to read a story about death right now at all? Death is a potent plot component—the highest of high stakes, with the power to generate correspondingly high tension and suspense. There are also many different kinds of death: a peaceful death after a long and happy life hits us much differently than an early death or a tragic death or a senseless death. Notice the different plots implied by each of those adjectives! We almost can’t help but make every death a story. So the confrontational tone of the first sentence, paired with the title, might immediately stop us in our tracks, especially in these chaotic, dismaying times. The question is a challenge rather than an invitation or a hook.

The next lines keep us in that distanced space:

Both Chinyere and the nameless, invisible interviewer already know the story contained in that “everything.” We readers do not, but we do now have a name to latch onto: Zelu. Is Zelu the author? Is she famous?

This last question, at least, is soon answered, as are a few others. We learn that Zelu is Chinyere’s younger sister, she happens to be disabled, and she is indeed famous: “She’s the one everyone is always talking about now. Whose fault is that? You all should be ashamed of yourselves.” That you again, addressed to the invisible interviewer, once again also deflects onto us, making us wonder if we should be reading this story. Are we being cast as true crime obsessives or reality TV voyeurs, taking a prurient interest in stories that are none of our business?

Chinyere goes on to tell a story about a time when Zelu, stoned out of her mind and trying to avoid a persistent date she wanted to get rid of, asked her sister to pick her up at a diner. Chinyere ends up pepper spraying the date; moments later, Zelu is laughing about the whole situation. The chapter ends with Chinyere telling us what she thinks this story means:

We’re told rather than shown that Zelu is loved—by the masses and by her family, whom she also clearly perplexes. But that telling has the effect of distancing us from Zelu. And, again, we wonder, do we dare come closer to this character and risk being kicked out of our own sense of normalcy? Some readers will put down the book and turn to something more familiar, a book with an opening that shows a recognizable story beat, an inciting incident, the hero’s call to adventure.

Why choose a prickly, challenging opening like this one? This is the gate at work: Okorafor is pressure-testing her readers, making sure they are willing to follow her down the less familiar path she is going to blaze in this novel. She’s also leading with theme, which can be the right choice for novels like this one that slant more literary. Throughout the novel, Okorafor circles around big questions: How truly can we ever know another being? Who is allowed to tell which stories? What is the meaning of authorship or authority? Versions of all of those big questions are present here in the very first chapter.

Readers who get past chapter one will find themselves on more familiar terrain in chapter two. The first line—“Zelu was thinking about water”—tells us that we have left the interviewer behind, and we’re in Zelu’s point of view, in the third-person, past-tense style we are accustomed to. Now that we’re through the gate, Okorafor seems to be finally letting us get close to the character we think is our protagonist.

Zelu is in Tobago with her mother and sisters as they prepare for her sister Amarachi’s wedding. We get some backstory about Zelu’s disability (she is paraplegic and uses a wheelchair), her feelings about marriage (uninterested in it for herself), and her family background (her mother is Yoruba royalty; her father is Igbo, a people who despise the very concept of royalty). A phone call introduces a bit of plot and an accompanying flashback. Zelu, a creative writing teacher, is being fired for calling a student’s work “self-indulgent drivel.”

Here’s where we get the Barthes reference, as she remembers the scene, four days prior. The student, “an entitled white boy who had been questioning her authority since the beginning of the semester,” turns in a story “in which none of the sentences related to one another.” The other students in the class praise the story, then Zelu asks the boy what the story means. His response, accompanied by what Zelu describes as a smug smile: “Why don’t you tell me? What I think of my own work doesn’t matter. The reader decides what it’s about, right? Isn’t that what you said ‘death of the author’ meant?” After calling the story drivel, Zelu advises, “When you’re ready to stop fucking around and actually tell a story, start over and have some confidence in the power of storytelling.”

The title and first chapter prepare readers to pause for a moment and consider this declaration. Both Chinyere and Zelu seem like confident storytellers so far, though their two portraits of Zelu don’t quite match up. Chinyere’s challenging question—“what’s the story you want?”—is still ringing in our ears. The title also still echoes: Is there something important we don’t yet know about how Zelu’s story ends? Something that the Chinyere of chapter one knows and the Zelu narrating chapter two does not?

If readers pause to ask these questions, Okorafor seems to offer reassuring answers in the rest of the chapter, using familiar tropes and plot moves. Zelu is shaken by the firing; minutes later, she receives an email from her agent with news of yet another rejection of her novel. This is a trope we are familiar with—our protagonist is at rock bottom. We know from the first chapter that she is ultimately famous and beloved. By the end of chapter two we think we know how to fit these pieces together. Alone that night, with the day’s losses finally catching up to her, Zelu gets high and allows herself to fall apart. At the moment when “her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in,” she begins writing a novel about rusted robots. As readers, our story intuition tells us that this manuscript is going to lead to her fame.

Chapter three gives us the beginning of the rusted robots story itself, which is told in first person, present tense by a narrator who introduces herself as “Ankara,” a Hume robot living on a future Earth where humans have died out. “Humanity hung on for as long as it could,” Ankara tells us. “They created us, sent us all over the planet. But they left us behind. Our creators, our masters, our parents, our authors . . . gone.”

Now we have two competing answers to the questions raised by the title: Zelu is the author, and we are going to read about her death. Or perhaps humans, collectively, are the author and the death is both metaphorical and literal, and has already happened. If this possibility feels challenging to readers, we can reassure ourselves that this is just a story—and not even our story but rather Zelu’s story. It’s a story within a story and can’t threaten us.

The end of chapter three introduces a third possibility. Ankara has told us she is sure the Earth has “great things ahead of it, even still,” but there is a problem. She’s learned that “trouble” is on its way to Earth. “My scholarly search led me to this terrible information, and now I had to bring it to the robots who could figure out what to do.” Is Ankara, then, the author of the title and are we going to see her death along with that of Earth? Or is this the beginning of a story we know and trust: the hero’s call to adventure?

Of course, as you likely suspected, all of these answers can simultaneously be the “correct” one. These three separate openings invite us to be open to multiple interpretations and to be prepared that our many restless reading questions (what happens next? what does it mean? WHY?) are not going to be met with straightforward or immediate answers. Okorafor is not going to hand them to us; instead we readers will have to decide on our own interpretations, which takes us right back to that Barthes essay. We’ve seen Zelu call bullshit on the concept when a student deploys it cynically, but as Zelu’s author, Okorafor is embracing it. Forcing us to make our own meaning is the gate: The readers who’ve chosen to come through it are the ones Okorafor is now teaching to read the way this novel asks.

A complex, distanced opening like the one we see in Death of the Author can be a smart strategy for writers with complex or challenging material, but the overall principle holds for any novel: your opening chapters should show readers, teach them, exactly what to expect from your novel.

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