The Brooklyn Rail

The title of Irenosen Okojie’s new novel comes from the Spanish/Latin American word for a female shaman. Loosely defined as a healer who uses herbs, psychoactive plants, and traditional ritual to heal, induce visions, and provide guidance, curanderas are central to the novel. In prose that is at times soaring but also equally obscure and sometimes clunky, the narrative shifts in alternating chapters between seventeenth-century Cape Verde and present-day London. Two curanderas are connected across time through power and their relationship with Oni, a vengeful deity. In Cape Verde, Zulmira is a woman bereft and resisting her “kinship” with Oni’s followers. In modern London, Therese is an expert botanist who gathers her own “Oni kin” to her—identifying them by a shared strange birthmark.

When Zulmira runs from her kin and Oni, she ends up in Gethsemane, a remote mountain village in Cape Verde. One can assume that Okojie names her fictional village in reference to the biblical Gethsemane, where the Gospels describe Jesus undergoing the “Agony in the Garden,” betrayal, and arrest prior to his crucifixion. While this connection could cast Zulmira as a Christ figure, she has a very different trajectory. Grieving for a baby she abandoned when she left her Oni kin, she moves into the home of a fisherman, Domingos, ostensibly to use her healing powers to help his sick wife, Marguerite. In the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of the small home, Zulmira is drawn to the couple’s young daughter, Sueli. Domingos is often away with other women, and Marguerite is clearly dying. In the midst of a collapsing family, Zulmira and Sueli grow close, finding some moments of joy. But soon Sueli shows signs of becoming Oni kin, exhibiting strange powers that turn deadly.

Zulmira is blamed for the death of a man she tried to heal and imprisoned by vengeful villagers. Left to suffer unspeakable violence at the hands of her guards, she waits to be executed. When the day of execution arrives, the villagers fail to kill her—she is Oni kin, and not so easily dealt with: “The executioner … is unable to work the guillotine. His eyes are completely white, his irises gone. He is blinded, falls to his knees screaming. Kin take his irises as an offering to Oni. The smoke key unlocks the guillotine. The crowds are stunned into silence.” Zulmira’s revenge on the village is strange—temporary blindness among the men, unexplained pregnancies among the women. She returns to Domingos’s “battered homestead” but there is no peace for her. Soon Sueli’s powers erupt into extreme violence and Zulmira is blamed for the resultant tragedy.

As Zulmira’s tale unfolds, the novel also builds a parallel story. Therese owns a large house in modern London where she lives with her chosen male “kin” companions: Azacca, a spiritual seeker and musician from Haiti; Emilien who carries dark generational secrets from Peru; and Finn, a reckless adrenaline addict. All four spend time heavily dosing themselves with peyote and creating various rituals—eventually connecting with Oni and Zulmira. Long passages in the novel are devoted to describing these experiences—often in language as hallucinatory as any peyote trip. At one point in their “travels” between dimensions and time, they discover a disembodied, “wild, regenerative” rib cage. Putting the rib cage in an aquarium tank in the basement, they soon begin partaking of the strange fruit blossoming from the bones. This fruit helps them delve deeper into the world of Oni and Zulmira, and Therese describes “their task to finish the new utopia they were building on the other plane for Oni, their bodies as incubators, as hybrid changelings in the warped paradise.” Throughout, there is an assumption by Therese and her companions of a superiority over others in their connection as Oni kin.

But all is not well: Therese discovers that her healing powers, providing relief to suffering men she chooses off the internet, have drawn attention to a dark force that kills anyone she’s healed. Finn suffers from “wounds” caused by his lifelong sacrifices to Oni (which may or may not be human lives). Emilien disappears, and the group’s relationships fall apart—it seems Oni’s utopia is much darker than they’d imagined. Through her hallucinatory journeys, Therese connects with Zulmira, who begins to speak through her: “like a puppet she found herself mouthing the words, possessed by another’s instructions.” These instructions are not directed toward building a utopian, multi-dimensional world, but instead urge Therese and her followers toward violence: “You must feed your thirst for using the bodies of others as husks. Move toward your gifts. Do not look away blindly. This is the order of things hidden from the eyes of others. It is how we honor Oni. Do not fear the spillage of lives as part of it.” In other words, the deaths of the men Therese attempted to heal (and any other collateral damage) are part of the practice of honoring Oni.

When the original identity of the strange ribcage is finally revealed, stories connect, past and present blur, and we are left with an ending as confusing as Therese’s multi-dimensional adventures. Overall this is a fascinating, if difficult to follow, exploration of two powerfully fascinating women, and how their magic connects and ultimately may destroy them.