Coming of Age Amidst Political Instability and Western Influence

Narrated in the first person, the novel deftly navigates the tension between what informs desire and the instinct to shirk it. Andy loves white girls, ‘I’ll marry a white girl, a blonde,’ he says in the opening paragraph, but is adamant for the reader to not see his preference as self-loathing. ‘A fifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out,’ he declares. ‘I don’t hate myself. But you get the idea,’ Andy continues. But burgeoning teenage sexual desire is haphazard and messy, if I recall correctly, so it makes sense that during the course of the story, Andy doesn’t really question this shame he feels for his supposedly innate yearning for white girls. There is also the conundrum of Andy’s narrow definition of beauty informed by the overwhelming influence of Western media. Buoro also litters the novel with clues which suggest Andy’s desire is at least partly informed by his desperate need to escape the violence plaguing his immediate surroundings.

Andy’s obsession with white, blonde girls is sustained through social media, Hollywood films, and pornographic sites and like many Africans far removed from corporeal whiteness but still inundated with its ideals, it begins before he ever meets one. When Andy hears there’s a blonde—Eileen, the British teenage niece of one of the town’s priests—in his town, he is more enthralled by her lack of experience with the suffering peculiar to Africans than anything else: ‘A Marilyn Monroe who has never had mosquitoes sing in her ears and suck her blood…A Taylor Swift who has never experienced a blackout.’ Time stands still the first time he sees Eileen in his shabby town; a person he believes doesn’t deserve to exist in the midst of rampant violence, suffering, and hunger that exists in Africa.

Buoro elegantly laces his knowledge of mathematics into fabrics of the story in interesting ways—Andy frequently references the ‘HXVX’ (equationally represented as ‘Sauron + Thano’), a concept from one of his poems which is shorthand for ‘The Curse of Africa’. From Andy’s point of view, HXVX is the invincible monster with innumerable tentacles who is to blame for the suffering in Africa, a being more powerful than God, and so his singular focus is to escape the continent. Other computations serve mostly to illustrate the absurdity in the infinitude of knowledge. Case in point, Zahrah, a 30-something witchy ‘hotep-esque’ teacher of Andy’s, who peddles a concept called ‘Anifuturism’ (a fusion of animism and Afrofuturism) to her students, scribbles formulas like eiπ + 1 = 0 on her living room floor and says things like ‘We wouldn’t have climate change today if we were all animists.’

Fatima, a gifted Hausa-Fulani peer and potential paramour for Andy, is set up as an analog to Andy’s desire for the blonde Eileen. Fatima suffers sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her parents, but Buoro is careful not to let her suffering overshadow her personhood; Fatima retaliates her mother’s abuse. She also has thoughts on Star Wars, reads Shakespeare, and wins trophies for her school in state competitions, all of which Andy seems to like about her. Eileen, on other hand, is also book-smart and loves poetry, but she functions mostly as an antithesis to blackness, a symbol of what Andy wants to be—white, non-African. Eileen is also condescending; ‘I didn’t expect to find poetry here,’ she says of Andy’s poem. Also, she touches Andy’s hair without his consent but that doesn’t quell his affection for her. Andy seemingly connects with Fatima on a deeper level than Eileen and the novel signals he has the self-awareness to admit the obvious reasons for this inability to follow through but that desire is, naturally, uninterrogated.