![]() ![]() A friendship blossoms between the two young girls, and their sweet intimacy grows, leading to the evening when the grammar school teacher they live with discovers the girls making love. When she meets the homeless Amina, she convinces her host family to let her stay and work as well. Her mother, depressed and stunned, sends Ijeoma away to live as a housemaid. Ijeoma’s life is tainted by loss, beginning when her father dies in the dark midst of Nigeria’s civil war. In Under The Udala Trees (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Okparanta’s elegant and serious prose give us the story of Ijeoma, a young Nigerian woman coming of age against a backdrop of civil war, religion’s tenets and the allegory of her father’s folktales. ![]() Against this harrowing truth, Chinelo Okparanta has written a new classic of the lesbian novel, timeless in its risk and heart, immediate in its voice for the persecuted LGBT people of Nigeria. In 2014, Nigeria’s president signed into law a bill criminalizing same sex relations and their supporters. ‘Under The Udala Trees’ by Chinelo Okparanta ![]()
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