When Ijeoma’s relationship is discovered, her mother reclaims her and pressures her to lead a normal life. In a country with some of the strictest laws against homosexuality, there is virtually no acceptance of such a relationship. There she befriends and eventually falls in love with a girl from a different ethnic tribe. Wow! Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees is amazing! Amid the political upheaval of Nigeria’s civil war and after her father’s death, 11-year old Ijeoma is sent to live with family friends. Though it is true, too, that sometimes it is hard to know to whom the tragedy really belongs.” Always finding it easier to make ourselves the victim in someone else's tragedy. “I suppose it's the way we are, humans that we are.
This story offers a glimmer of hope - a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.Īs Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. They are from different ethnic communities. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.
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