Ozoemena
Some things a family cannot name, it will name wrongly. And then it will pay.
Oko Anala, Ogbaru, Onitsha, 1965. Oseloka Odili is twenty years old, keeps the truest ledger in the motor-spares row, and cannot name a single thing in the world he is missing. A shop that has begun to prosper. A father whose judgement is never wrong. A brother who swears a drunken oath beneath the orange tree at a wedding, and means it. And a wife he has loved since they were children in the same compound.
Two years later the war comes up a goat track, and takes the two of them it wants.
What follows is the long account of a good man's slow ruin.
Oseloka rebuilds his name and his fortune, and marries again, honestly, to a woman who sets him three conditions before she will have him. Then his children begin to die. One, and another, and another. Each of them thriving. Each of them taken. Always at the same hour, and never in any order that anyone can read.
The hospital cannot see it. The dibia (traditional healer) can, and gives it the only name his inheritance has supplied him with. And because a family in agony will always believe the explanation that arrives with something to do, the Odili compound closes a door it should have kept open, performs a rite that cannot work, and at last casts out a blameless woman for the crime of her own faithfulness.
It takes his daughter, a tired teacher and a single word on a provincial blackboard to undo all of it, forty years too late for seven small graves and one marriage.
OZOEMENA spans four decades of one Igbo family, moving from the market at Onitsha through the pogroms, the flag, the checkpoints and the famine of the Nigerian Civil War, and on into the quieter and more terrible catastrophe that comes after it, a household destroyed not by wickedness but by not knowing, and set free in the end by the plainest kind of truth.
For readers of literary family sagas, of West African historical fiction, and of novels about tradition, science and the long cost of certainty.
Includes an author's note on the history behind the novel and on the inheritance at its centre, a glossary of Igbo terms, a pronunciation guide, and questions for reading groups.
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