Like an animal casting off old hair or skin.” When Ijeoma at last returned to her mother, she is the “warden”. “To shed, if she could have, all memories of the war. “In a warped, war-induced sort of way, it made sense that she should find ways to shed us all: the soldiers, me, and the house,” Okparanta writes. When Ijeoma and her mother Adaora emerge from a nearby bunker, they discover his blood-soaked body.Īdaora survives the aftermath physically, but not psychologically. Her father, “a man who liked to wallow in his thoughts”, becomes so consumed by sorrow for his massacred people that he refuses to seek refuge during an air raid over their town of Ojoto. The novel is set in 1968, one year into the Biafran conflict, and Ijeoma’s world is beset by “the ruckus of armored cars and shelling machines, bomber planes and their loud engines sending shock waves through our ears”. Ijeoma’s secure, stable childhood has already unravelled by then.
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