A Visual Journey: The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi – Chinar Shah

As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for “sentimental” reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.

~ Roland Barthes

I am drawn to review Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji not as a writer but as a photographer. The book begins with the words “If this story was a stack of photographs,” which it indeed turns out to be. The images, in Barthes’s terms “wound” the narrative, they envelop it, lending sight to language and moments that remain veiled, and finally become a photo album, hidden under the mattress, only for the protagonist’s mother’s eyes. This is the story of Vivek Oji, his identity, friendships, love, his life, and his death. The narrative alternates between the time when Vivek is alive and the time after his death, revealing fragments of the past, present, and future in a nonlinear fashion. The narrative is punctuated by an oscillation between image and reality in the same way it oscillates between death and life – these images become an inseparable part of the larger picture, without which there would be gaping holes both in the narrative and in the lives of the characters. Emezi’s writing is a visual account of a struggle that takes us on a tender journey of Vivek’s life and his mother’s desperate attempts to unearth the reasons behind his death.

I am particularly drawn to two moments in the book: one, the initial establishment of the narrative through image inserts and the other, the moment Kavita, Vivek’s mother uncovers more about Vivek’s life and identity from a stack of photographs after his death. The initial image inserts aren’t actual photographs, but an invitation to the reader to visualize what this narrative would have been as a “stack of photographs.” These aren’t meant to have a coherent plot at all but a choppy one, much in the same way that memory activates images. As characters become photographs in the narrative, a tangible object that fixes the characters and moments as memory, Emezi writes, “If this story was a stack of photographs – the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country.”

The photographs interject the text, offering portals to a visual realm. These image inserts allow the reader to visualize moments as slices of memories; temporal and changeable, as opposed to chronological monoliths; solid and immovable, to view the story through a different perspective – a photographic perspective both physically and materially. Vivek’s birth and death are marked as photographs:

Picture: the boy, shirtless, placing necklaces against his chest, draping them over his silver chain, clipping his ears with gold earrings, his hair tumbling over his shoulders. He looks like a bride, half naked, partially undressed.

Picture: a house thrown into waiting the day he left it, restored to the way it was when he entered.

Picture: his body wrapped.

Picture: his father shattered, his mother gone mad. A dead foot with a deflated starfish spilled over its curve, the beginning and end of everything.

These image descriptors form a relationship with actual photographic images that exist of Vivek’s life behind closed doors, in the privacy / seclusion of which he found the chance to express himself both as a man and a woman; as Vivek and as Nnemdi. These photographs bear witness to Vivek’s life as he wore old dresses of his friend’s mother, put on eyeliner, lipstick and swirled. These images are also a testament to a place where he found friendship, love, and support to be himself and be remembered for who he wanted to be. This stack of images is what he left behind for his mother as she looks at the images again and again, “trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to memory the child she’d found.” The descriptive image inserts of Vivek’s birth, death, and of the lives around him, and the stack of physical photographs both intersect and form junctions from which emerge an image and imagery of the central character, Vivek.

One gets to know Vivek through many voices in the novel, and one such voice is that of the images. This getting-to-know is a foraging through layers of silences and secrets that are revealed through the book – one feels let in on a secret sometimes, and often left out at others. Silences in the storyline are at times when Vivek himself grows quiet after his family’s attempts at fixing him – at times through a relentless demand to make sense, or at other times through treatment as if it were a medical ailment that needed to be cured. A particular event where Vivek’s aunt calls for divine intervention through rituals at a church sent him deeper into a shell from which he emerged much later, after finding comfort in the company of girlfriends. Once Osita, Vivek’s cousin and later his lover remarked, “You look homeless,” to which Vivek replied, “I am homeless.” Vivek struggled with feeling invisible and hidden – he struggled with a self that can only exist behind closed doors, under the shelter of friendship and love. Vivek asked, “So: if nobody sees you, are you still there?” This feeling of being invisible haunts the narrative till the very end, till his very end. The photographs seem to have made up for his silence. It is as if Vivek is speaking through the images. The images form a relationship with this invisibility, the unseen and the hidden. One of the images from the stack given to Kavita had an image where Vivek had worn a dress for the first time. A description of a photograph of Vivek in a blue skirt, spinning, causing the garment to splash about like water paints: a crystal-clear image of a moment, momentum and emotion. “He looked happy,” the image reads. It was in this, and similar images that Vivek, exiled from the humdrum of family life into poignant silences, found his home. He belonged in these celluloid markers of memory – the photograph and the camera promising his visibility even after death.

When Kavita desperately looked for answers that would explain his death, she found some in this stack of photographs. These were not the answers that she was looking for, and yet, it opened a door to knowing her son – or at least a part of his life that for her had been in the shadows. The unveiling of the truth of Vivek’s life through a stack of photographs is a significant moment in the novel where the parents are confronted with the invisible life of Vivek through images after his death.

Barthes in Camera Lucida writes, “The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” This intriguing provocation of being in images reverberates across time and location, offering to spectators and subjects a space to belong, make peace with, remember, and be remembered. The image, as Barthes points out several times, has no power to resurrect what has been lost, nor does it make life less heartbreaking if I may fall back on sentiments for a moment here, to be true to my feelings as I reach the end of the book. I see images, especially in the case of their placement in this book, as objects performing many roles both in the service of the characters and the narrative.

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