Review: Death of the Author

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It somehow escaped my notice all these years that Nnedi Okorafor is disabled, in a similar way to Zelu, the protagonist of her latest novel. With that in mind, however, it makes this book feel like not only a reflection of Okorafor herself, but also an exercise in how to make a protagonist who is in so many ways not her creator.

The book presents itself as a novel within a novel with a similar structure to Scott Westerfeld's Afterworlds, with a hefty dose of meta-humorous satire about publishing. And also about creative writing, and the professorship thereof. Anyone who's been in a university creative writing program knows exactly the sort of student who's the bane of Zelu's existence, writing all sorts of meaningless crap and trying to chalk it up to "death of the author" that it means nothing to them, but it will mean something to someone else, and that's what matters, right? Not in Zelu's class, and unfortunately the fragile little creeps she's forced to teach run crying to the school's administration and get her fired after one rant too many from her. (The whole setup of this is essentially white students and admins, unintentionally or not, targeting Zelu because of anti-Blackness.)

Luckily, Zelu then makes a surprising and huge deal to publish an Africanfuturist (as Okorafor would put it; and in fact The Africanfuturist was the working title for this novel) sci-fi story called Rusted Robots, and while the book becomes a massive hit, that same hit status also opens up Zelu to the horrors of social media and its capricious hit tweets. They try to cancel her, in part because of how she wrote the book to express her frustration with her disability, and so they try to paint her as an evil ableist. Coming as she does from a Naijamerican family with some retrograde views about disability, it's no surprise that Zelu doesn't take well to this kind of treatment.

This book defied expectations in some ways for me - the blurb made it seem like the real-world base of the story would be of grander scope than it really was, but instead it's much more heavily focused on family drama. A lot of times, when I read stories about immigrant families and diasporic experiences outside of my own, I still nevertheless find a lot of commonalities across cultures. By design, however, Okorafor emphasizes here the more unique aspects of the Naijamerican experience, which I may not necessarily relate to as well. But that doesn't stop me from understanding and empathizing as best I can.

I'd say the greatest genius of this book - as other reviewers have pointed out - is that it's a great and effective poke in the eye to the very concept in its title. A story may take on meanings beyond the author's original intention, but they cannot necessarily undo the author's intended meaning. Go on and try to divorce this book of its multilayered and intersectional cultural contexts, I dare you. It won't work.

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