Death of the Author

by Nnedi Okorafor

You all spin everything that is not familiar to you as either terrible or less than you.

“I don’t want it to be over.”

“What am I without my father?”

“You are of him,” Msizi whispered softly into her hair. “You literally can’t be without him.”

“We are mortal beings. We die. But we live first.

“Zelu, listen to me. Today is a dark day. A dark, dark day.” He pulled her face closer to his. “When you write your stories, you look into yourself and see into things. Be the writer today. Use that ability. You are the observer and the observed. You are the documentarian and the subject. You are the author and the reader. This is how you create. This is something you know how to do. Now let it be here for you. Do you understand?” She digested his words. After a moment, she felt relief. “Bear witness,” he said.

Auntie Constance seemed to be pushing her to host. “Try and smile,” Zelu heard her auntie tell her mother during a lull. “Be here for these people. You are the wife.”

Zelu noticed that people were talking about her father. People who didn’t know each other shared the experience of knowing her father. She left the line of well-wishers for a bit just to walk around and listen. To witness. She took it all in, and it nourished her.

“You’re just expected to keep going. Watching people you love drop off, one by one. Then you keep going until it’s your turn to drop off and be gone and then people weep over you. Sometimes I feel like I’d rather be a fucking robot. No pain. No death. No finality. And no need to fear life. Yeah.”

iNdonsa always says the best thing about being human is that we die. She’s one of the only people I know who is not afraid of death. You should talk to her.”

She was always excluded somehow, be it because she couldn’t walk or because she was too famous or whatever.

If I had no authority, I’d never be heard.

“Of course they were,” her uncle said, standing up. “You’ve been shrugging off the house they built around you since you wrote that book, and this was the last straw. They don’t know what to do now. You rewrote your narrative.”

This land held so many memories. She could see all her younger selves running and later wheeling around this place, laughing, eating, frowning, dancing, smoking, talking shit, noticing, taking it all in, letting it all out. But at the same time . . . nothing was here. For the first time in her life, Zelu felt old. She moved on.

Now she realized this was not her parents’ house anymore, and her father’s grave was not her father. He was gone, and this part of her life was over.

What good was love if she could only see it through a window?

true power was in the harnessing of it, not the possessing of it. And when you were aware of the moment you harnessed power, that was when it was most difficult to navigate.

They never said “I love you” because they didn’t need to. Their love existed in the space between words, in the moments when they were apart, before they came back together. Zelu would just have to believe that when she left, he’d keep loving her.

Earth was still Earth. Saved by humanity’s genius long after humanity had failed to save itself.

“What will I be now?” “Whatever you want to be. You are creating yourself at this point.” “I’m afraid.” “Of what?” “Creating myself. Getting it wrong.”

I have come to understand that author, art, and audience all adore one another.