Who Fears Death (Who Fears Death, #1)

by Nnedi Okorafor

“An Eshu. You can shape-shift, among other things.

“Eshus never believe what they are until they realize it on their own.”

I’m a fighter by nature and simply having tools to fight, no matter how inadequate, was enough to take the crippling edge off my anxiety.

rumors that he liked older married girls in their late teens. Girls who’d completed school and had more to offer intellectually.

When I was six, my uncle had me become the apprentice of a sorcerer named Daib.

I was young but I hated like a middle-aged man at the end of his prime.

“Daib had taught me how to make myself ‘ignorable.’

No matter what I changed into, I could only become the female version of it. This was a rule of my ability that always seemed trivial to me.

My mother taught me to marry a man who could not only provide but also add to my knowledge.

“I don’t care for wealth, but please when you leave, put what you can in here, gold, iron, silver, salt chips, as long as it’s worth more than sand,” she said. “Something for something. Am I heard?” We strongly answered, “Yes,” “Gladly,” “Whatever you need, woman.”

This first story we know from the Great Book. We retell it to ourselves time and time again when the world doesn’t make sense.

Dika the Seer.

Oyo the Ponderer.

“Do you believe it’s your responsibility to leave this world in better shape than when you came into it?” “Yes.”

They flew from the container and landed as if they would never move again. As if they were sure.

I had recently experienced death so it was easy for me to forget to breathe.

“My mother once said that fear is like a man who, once burned, is afraid of a glow worm,”

Their faces grew distant during the part about my mother’s rape.

“If it weren’t for them coming today, you’d have found me in my bed losing my . . . self.” “Okay,” Mwita said, nodding. “Then you all have to understand that you’re connected to her now. Not by some primitive rite, but by something real.”

Almost all who pass through death pass initiation.

I became a man named Aro, who traveled and listened and watched.

She’s reached the wilderness. Congratulate her instead.” “Wilderness?” I said. “After death, the path leads there,”

We’ll never know exactly why we are, what we are, and so on. All you can do is follow your path all the way to the wilderness, and then you continue along because that’s what must be.”

“We call the sorcerer’s toolbox that contains the sorcerer’s tools Bushcraft.”

I’d had enough. Enough of Jwahir, whose people were as bloated and complacent as the Golden Lady herself.

Then the rage that came from his people took him again, filling his body with unnatural strength. I felt it inside me, too. Like a demon buried under my skin since my conception. A gift from my father, from his corrupted genetics. The potential and taste for amazing cruelty. It was in my bones, firm, stable, unmoving.

“Just because we hurt doesn’t mean others should!” Mwita said. “It does!” I shouted. “We’re all hurting whether we know it or not! It has to stop!”

“You think you know the whole story, but you don’t.”

When the Okeke and the Nuru were fighting and I turned myself ignorable to escape, I didn’t know how to stay ignorable for long.

They wait to stone to death the one who turned their small world upside down. Primitive. So much unlike Jwahir’s people, who are so apathetic but so civilized.

Two days later, the pain was at full blast.

world, my mother

“It will be an Ewu woman,” Luyu said. “How did . . .” “I guessed. It makes more sense now.” She chuckled. “I walk with a legend.” I smiled

when it comes to sorcery, you never get without giving.”

I kept singing. The sweet sound and vibration coming from my throat radiated through the rest of my body. It smoothed away my anxieties and sadness.

I was part blue energy and part physical body. Half alive and half something else.

My mother was one of the only people I knew who spoke of oceans as if they’d truly existed.

“But you won’t,” she said at the same time that I said, “But I won’t.”

I was nothing. Then I was something.

It was the kind of pain that death wouldn’t stop.

Had the Okeke really crammed technology away in caves to hide them from an angry goddess?

The book’s title was The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide, written by some group calling themselves The Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure Organization.

Mwita pulled me into a tight hug and I kissed his nose. Then I changed into a vulture and took off.