The Light May Die, But the Shadows Never Lie: Nnedi Okorafor’s ‘The Shadow Speaker’
Some earth is worth shattering…
I can’t believe this is my very first sojourn into the scintillating realms of World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula Award-winning SFF Queen Nnedi Okorafor, but I emerged from under my rock to devour it in a couple of days. One of the most magical stories I’ve ever read, The Shadow Speaker is a bewitching and whimsical jewel of a book that sweeps across the Sahara Desert and through shimmering portals into four other worlds that are colliding with Earth after an eco-terrorist nuclear-magic-mash-up apocalypse. A sort of Children of Blood and Bone meets Shades of Magic, the final page left me with that same je ne sais quoi you feel by the end of a Studio Ghibli film.
At its core it’s an empowering Bildungsroman that follows one girl’s quest for power and identity in a world compelled to quell her. The year is 2070. Ejimafor Ugabe grew up under the yoke of her tyrant father in the town of Kwàmfà, Niger, where she was ostracised by the cat-like golden eyes that mark her out as a shadow speaker, one who can commune with living shadows, which whisper of things that have been, are now, and could come to be. Everything changed 5 years ago when she watched Sarauniya Jaa, the Red Queen of Niger, behead her misogynistic father and bring peace and prosperity to Kwàmfà. But Jaa is about to leave and Ejii must decide whether or not to defy her mother’s orders and follow her into the desert to meet with the leaders of the five worlds that are now merging into one.
On her journey she befriends the mysterious rainmaker Dikéogu who is fleeing from slave masters in the north by saving him from a vast living storm, and together they seek out Jaa and attempt to stop her assassination of the corrupt ruler of the most prosperous and magical world of Ginen.
It’s all about the perennial struggle between militant and peaceful protest, the lure of violence in the face of abuse and suffering, and the monstrous and mercurial nature of power fuelled by prejudice. It has a fearsome warrior queen who is both Ejii’s hero and the woman who cut off her father’s head. It has bewitching marriages of Marquezian magic realism and quirky science from the digital ghosts that haunt computers to the sparkling lightning lizards that can power an entire home. And it has a post-apocalyptic struggle for peace as colliding worlds quiver on the brink of war. The rich and refreshing exploration of Nigerian culture, Islam, Yoruba spirituality, and West Africa is intensely fantastical and absurdist and mesmerising.
Shout-out to the fact that literally the only white person in the entire book is the gun-crazy American man with the unripe pink skin who kills Ejii’s camel (a real Artax-swamp moment) before she kicks the crap out of him as he lies cowering in the sand, while Ejii’s evil father is explicitly light-skinned and our protagonist is so dark she’s “almost blue”.
Other magical things I loved: the otherworldly green sword that drinks blood and grows into a many-rooted plant, the meta-abilities that range from the flying windseekers to the powerful firemolders, the portentous blue scarab beetles, how the eyes of shadow speakers do not rot when they die while the rest of their bodies do, the roses that fall from the sky whenever Jaa speaks, the buildings made of plants and flowers in Ginen that can literally grow new rooms, the way a shadow speaker can fall into death if they get too near a corpse, how both Ejii and Dikéogu carry around a copy of their favourite book ‘My Cyborg Manifesto’, Dikéogu’s sass, the scrumptious descriptions of food, and the e-legba tablets named after the intermediary between spirits and humanity in various African and Caribbean religions.
I was playing around with ideas of how I would pitch this book and to what kind of audience, as you do, and I settled on MG fantasy. Disney Hyperion put it in YA but the vibes I got were more Thirrin in Cry of the Icemark than Katniss or Clary. I envision it with a cover comparable to Children of Blood and Bone or Natasha Ngan’s stunning Girls of Paper and Fire with a base image of a golden matte desert, which would have spot gloss where the definition of the dunes would be. Dominating most of this swathe of gold would be Ejii, swaddled in a deep indigo cloak/niqab that sweeps over her head to partially shield her face against the sand, which is what she wears on her journey across the Sahara. Visible between the material would be her distinctive shadow speaker eyes – the same glossy gold as the dunes with pupils of black slits like those of a cat, kind of similar to Cindy Pon’s Serpentine – gazing out at the reader with defiance. The title could then be scrawled above her head in a sci-fi font, the same rich purple-blue colour as her cloak.
Some favourite quotes
“I just stood there looking at the strange blue eyes of her camel and the smear of my father’s blood on her sword.”
“There is a static in my ears as the shadows try to tell me something that’s probably earth-shattering, as if the earth could endure more shattering.”
“I want peace but deep down I wonder if I am peaceful. I wonder if I am more like Jaa. I think I want to be more like her.”
“Magic was no longer something that loomed underneath things. It flooded everything.”
“You must go to places that move your blood.”
“Sweet sinewy flesh and succulent cords of entrails. All packed in. This one I will chew on slowly. I’ll sip her blood like warm milk.”
“‘Some things have to happen, I think,’ he said. ‘For the sake of other things.'”
“‘I’ll be where I’ll be, when I go where I go,’ the magician replied.”
“She spread over the lush world of trees, root, stems, flowers, leaves, soil. A land that breathed through its skin. Where there were soily worlds underneath the soil. Moisture, trapped heat, rot, friction, life, death.”
“Every leaf that the wind blew. Every stone that was tumbled down a hill. Every movement, every lack of movement. It was all one great dance to a music she would never understand.”
