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

I’ve written elsewhere about titles and covers and how they shape our experience as readers, even before we’ve read the first sentence of a novel, and that is very much true of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author. The cover is stunning (and the deluxe edition actually has a secret second cover for the novel-within-a-novel; you can see it here on the author’s Instagram), but it’s the title I want to focus on today.

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. Readers have the power to make their own meanings. And 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 title opens two story questions: Who is the author? How will they die? 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: Who is Chinyere? Why is she being interviewed? Who is doing the interview? In other words, who is the you of that first sentence? 

In a broader sense, of course, that you is also me—the reader confronting this question. If I stop to answer it before hurrying on to the next sentences to look for the answers I want, I 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? 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 embedded in each of those adjectives! We almost can’t help but make every death a story. So the challenge of that first sentence might immediately stop us in our tracks, especially in these chaotic, dismaying early weeks of 2025; certainly it’s not inviting us into the story. 

The next lines keep us in that distanced space: “Honestly, I don’t see it. Even after everything, Zelu will always just be Zelu to me. What you think she is—it’s all made up. Life is short. Fortune is fleeting. Fame is just swirling dust. It’s people dreaming and perceiving while they say your name like it’s some tangible object, but it’s not. A name is just a name. A sound.” Both Chinyere and the 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 is 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 man; 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, who 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?

We get a chance to find out in chapter two, which takes a more familiar form. 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. 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 him what the story meant. 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.”

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 plot 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. After putting on a brave face during the ceremony and reception, where she hooks up with a man named Msizi, Zelu’s defenses finally crumble and the weight of all the bad news descends on her. She returns to her hotel room, gets high, and has a cry. But then, at the moment when “her mind cracked so wide open that all her demons had flown in,” Zelu 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, which is told in first-person, present-tense by a narrator who introduces themselves 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. The end of chapter three introduces a third possibility. Ankara has told us that they are sure the Earth has “great things ahead of it, even still,” but there is a problem. They’ve 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 their death along with that of Earth?

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.

In the Patreon member chats, many readers have noted that it took them a long time to get invested in the novel, and I think these opening chapters show us why. We are warned by Barthes, and by the novel itself, not to focus too much on authorial intention, but the purpose of Novel Study is to look at craft choices, and I think this is a deliberate craft choice on Okorafor’s part. In a choice that is perhaps more characteristic of literary fiction, she’s prioritizing concept over plot. That said, the plot does kick in later in the novel and is all the more surprising when it does.