Who Fears Death

Who Fears Death (2010) by Nnedi Okorafor is a post-apocalyptic science fantasy novel set in a future version of Sudan. In this future, the light-skinned Nuru have enslaved the dark-skinned Okeke; the novel follows Onyesonwu (Onye), the daughter of an Okeke woman raped by a Nuru man. Onye soon discovers that her biological father is a powerful sorcerer, and that she, too, has inherited great magical powers from both her father and her mother. The novel follows Onye as she discovers her powers and sets off on a journey to defeat her father and rewrite the Great Book, thereby freeing the Okeke and ending the violence between the two tribes. Using the first person, Onye narrates the entire novel (except for the final few chapters), telling her story to an unseen narratee as she awaits future execution.

Quotes

• became a different creature that day, not so human”
  • Page 3
• dearly loved, despite the fact that he’d married [her] mother, a woman with an Ewu daughter”
  • Page 4
• “a two thousand year old tradition held on the first day of rainy season”
  • Page 32
• the only one good enough to learn the Great Mystic Points”
  • Page 62
• You can bring life, and when you get old, that ability becomes something else even greater, more dangerous and unstable”
  • Page 63
• like someone with a highly contagious disease”
  • Page 116
• haunted by someone else’s demise”
  • Page 131
• The clarity I was experiencing made the world so crisp and clear. Every sound outside seemed right against my ear. I could hear a desert fox barking nearby and a hawk screeching. I could almost hear Mwita thinking as he came in”
  • Page 170
• ghosts of the future”
  • Page 187
• makes more sense now”
  • Page 187
• discovered life as free women”
  • Page 223
• People of the sand [ who] travel in a giant dust storm”
  • Page 250
• is of the oldest evil deeper than humans”
  • Page 306-307
• dangerous storm of terrible lightning and thunder and intermittent deluges of rain
  • Page 326
• The Great Book spoke of such places, caves full of computers put here by terrified Okekes trying to escape Ani’s wrath when she turned back to the world and saw the havoc the Okeke had created
  • Page 330
• He so assumed that Luyu would do his bidding that he didn’t notice when Luyu kept right on going”
  • Page 356.
• Something was wrong with everyone here. The Okeke didn’t look too bothered as they worked. And the Nuru weren’t openly cruel to them.It was confusing and strange”
  • Page 358.
• Because of what she’d seen during her initiation. She was like a character locked in a story”
  • Page 379
• a tall bearded [Nuru] man with a partially burned face, what looked like a severely mangled leg, and only one arm”
  • Page379
• Those things are only for those of us who were there, the witnesses”
  • Page 380
• Papa was dearly loved, despite the fact that he’d married my mother, a woman with a daughter like me—an Ewu daughter. That had long been excused as one of those mistakes even the greatest man can make.”
  • (Chapter 1, Page 4)
• The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did [raped the Okeke women] for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence. These Nuru had planted poison. An Okeke woman who gave birth to an Ewu child was bound to the Nuru through her child. The Nuru sought to destroy Okeke families at the very root.”
  • (Chapter 3, Pages 20-21)

External links

• super summary