Readers familiar with Nnedi Okorafor’s brilliant postapocalyptic fantasy Who Fears Death will already know Najeeba: how she survived a brutal rape at the hands of the sorcerer Daib; raised her daughter, Onyesonwu, to endure the desert; and used her powerful magics to prepare the soil for the even more formidable Onyesonwu’s revolution to take root. But Najeeba has her own history, her own tale of heartbreak and resolve. Her steel did not come from nothing, and neither did her daughter’s. A prequel to Who Fears Death, She Who Knows continues Okorafor’s exploration of why humans discriminate against one another.
Okorafor’s vision of a postapocalyptic future is much like our present, but with all its pretenses and niceties stripped away. Once again, she tackles sexism and sexual violence head-on, and her writing is as direct and uncompromising as ever. You won’t find a delicate array of euphemisms and allegorical treatments; Okorafor’s writing makes no apologies or concessions.
While Who Fears Death analyzed the rot of internalized misogyny, such as female genital mutilation that was encouraged and practiced by women, in She Who Knows, Najeeba contends with a bigotry that is, in some ways, less complicated. There are things women do not do, simply because the men decided there should be things that are theirs alone. Women can garden, but they cannot mine salt. Women can purchase salt, but they cannot sell it. But when she is 13, Najeeba announces that she has heard The Call, the drive that supposedly only men in her village experience to journey the Salt Roads and mine salt. Najeeba’s existence within a community, a community that does not have to face the brutal necessities of survival that marked Who Fears Death, makes the discrimination she faces more insidious. Her family and her hometown perpetuate senseless, unthinking sexism because their lives and livelihoods depend on it. And when Najeeba takes a machete to the orderly weave of this social compact, it has severe consequences for her and her family.
This is Okorafor’s central premise, the theme she returns to over and over, and what makes her approach to Africanfuturism so vital: Injustice persists because it is safe, and her heroes must have enough courage to change what must be changed, despite the dangers that will result. Najeeba’s story may be familiar to Okorafor’s fans, but it is no less inspiring, even for readers who already know how it ends.
