6/25/2023 0 Comments Under the udala trees sparknotes![]() ![]() When he dies, Ijeoma’s mother sends her away, to a couple for whom she becomes kitchen help, tumbling from upper middle class to working class. The fences are no protection and narrator Ijeoma, now 11, finds herself watching the father who told her the bombs would not come – “Papa was certain of this and so I was certain with him” – crumble, too. “Ours was a gated compound, guarded at the front by thickets of rose and hibiscus bushes.” The descriptions are cool, exact yet what grows out of these carefully laid beginnings is a story with the highest of stakes.įirst comes the war: the little compound is in Biafra, and within a year the area is being bombed. ‘M idway between Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that general area bound by the village church and the primary school … ” Under the Udala Trees begins in the same way that many of the short stories in Chinelo Okparanta’s debut Happiness, Like Water did: with a clear, attentive setting-down of the parameters of place – streets and street names, houses and bushes, trees and walls – and how they make sense of each other, protect each other. ![]()
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