Rahul Gherola

And what I mean by that is,

Although the narrative is told in the first person, and of course, the first person voice allows readers to put themselves in the shoes of the narrator and imagine themselves and empathize in certain ways.

I mean, that's the beauty of fiction.

But what I find really interesting about the structure of the narrative is it also has an epistolary element in it.

And by that, what I mean is,

there are, throughout this entire novel, very sweet and innocent and honest diary entries that are addressed to God.

And they really intersperse between these windows into the past and into the present, and they give us these beautiful moments

self-written notes to the Lord up ahead, above us all, into the personal writings of someone who is grappling between the past and the present in a way where readers can really empathize and think that this is a really, it's a very intense mechanism for teasing out the characterization of the main protagonist, Gifty.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I think I might do that when I teach this unit next year.

And the reason is, for example, I was very taken by how so many of these themes that she's exploring, they actually exist not just in a frame for cosmopolitan literature, but for example, the theme of death of a sibling or the reunion and separation with parents and family exists.

These are not only themes that resonate beautifully with Camilla Shamsie's Home Fire and Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines, which are more contemporary literatures, but also the Oedipus Rex trilogy, the play Antigone that Sophocles wrote.

When we think about sexual awakenings, you know, and this idea of

kissing a same-sex person and what exactly was that but you know we're just experimenting but who cares you're undergrads and you don't need to put some sort of identity of homosexual or lesbian on top of it these are the kinds of themes that come up in my year of meets

the notion of migration or homeland and memory again that comes up in shadow lines and of course racism xenophobia and exoticism are the kinds of things that my students and I looked at earlier in the semester looking at the work of the black American writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes

And I think just overall, since we're thinking about this, and you were mentioning Gifty's conscription to the Pentecostal church and the ways that God and religion come in.

And what I thought was really interesting about this novel is I think that this idea of subscription to a rejection of God or spirituality, if we want to put it that way, it really goes back to themes that we in literary studies have been thinking about that go back to Enlightenment thought and the meaning of the Enlightenment.

I would be delighted to.

So the book that I would choose, if we want to stay with the theme of the death of a sibling and the way that that impacts family and how that's bound up with histories of migration and colonialism and also gender, I would give a 10 stars to Sitsi Demgaremga's novel, Nervous Conditions.

It is a Zimbabwean novel.

It is absolutely brilliant.