The book of Phoenix - Summary PDF

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The book of Phoenix – Summary Summary The Book of Phoenix is a unique work of magical futurism. It is a prequel to the highly acclaimed, World Fantasy Award-winning novel, Who Fears Death, and features the rise of another of Nnedi Okarafor’s powerful, memorable, superhuman women. Phoenix was grown and raised among other genetic experiments in New York’s Tower 7. She is an “accelerated women” – she is only two years old but with the body and mind of an adult, her abilities far exceed those of average humans. Still innocent and inexperienced in the way of the world, she is content living in her room speed reading e-books, running on her treadmill, and basking in the love of Saeed, another biologically altered human of Tower 7. One evening, Saeed witnesses something horrible so he takes his own life. Phoenix is devasted by his death and Tower 7’s refusal to answer her questions, that she begins to realize that her home is essentially a prison, and she becomes desperate to escape. Phoenix’s escape, and her destruction of Tower 7, is just the beginning of her story. Before her story ends, she will travel from the United States to Africa and back, changing the entire course of humanity’s future. Review It opens in the far future with a discovery; a man walks into a cave and finds treasures from a different era, computers and long-lost information. Amongst the findings is The Book of Phoenix, with a tale of a girl that might explain how the world became what it has. The narrator of the books starts: My name is Phoenix. I was mixed and grown in a lab on the 13th floor. One of my doctors thinks my name came from the birthplace of my

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egg’s donor. I’ve looked it up. Phoenix, Arizona is the full name of the place. However, from what I’ve read about my floor, even the scientists who forced my existence don’t know the names of donors. So, I doubt this. I think they named me Phoenix because of what I was, an “accelerated organism.” I was born two years ago but I looked, behaved and felt like a forty-year-old woman. My doctors said the acceleration would stop now that I was “matured”. To them, I was like a plant they grew for the sake of harvesting information. What is the book about? It features a multi-layered scope of themes and concerns; it is a book about religion, about the future, and consequences. It is about racism and sexism. It is a story that delves deeply into myth-making and history. It is a story about super-powered people doing amazing revenge-stuff, like blowing up cities and rebelling, only to reclaim their lives from the one’s who artificially created them. It ends in the far future with an interpretation: a man gets the answers to the initial questions asked in the beginning of the book only the way he can. “The old African man took the bones, blood, and quivering flesh of Phoenix’s book, digested its marrow and defecated a tale of his own. Then he and his oracle of a wife spread this shit far and wide. (232) The ending is sharp and unyielding in a heart-breaking, realistic tone, and circles back to one of the most powerful central ideas of the novel: “We’re so colonized that we build our own shackles.” Background – Nnedi Okorafor: -

Born in 1974 by Nigerian parents in USA

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In school she was an athlete and a nerd

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Started writing stores while in recovery from surgery

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Discovered author Octavia Butler (Black woman writer)

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Afrofuturism and Africanjujuism

Her writings: -

Books and comics for children and adults

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Won many awards

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The Binti trilogy – winner of both Nebula and Hugo award

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Who Fears Death – the sequel to the book of Phoenix – winner of World Fantasy awards

Themes: -

Identity: reads books for knowledge, learns a lot but can never utilize the knowledge she has because she is locked away in a lab in Tower 7 o “I knew so little about the world and so much.” (111)

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Rage: When the Big I attacks her instead of helping her, she is furious and aims to destroy tower 7 and escape. She is also mad because she gets to know her story but cannot do much about her situation.

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Colonial era of Africa: Wukundu – the ‘Big Eye’ and America exploit these areas for their personal self-interest

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“And for specimen, knowledge wasn’t power” (8)

Close reading: -

Orkorafor creates new, black superheroes which whom she can identify with – same goes for N.K. Jemisin

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A superhero comic book fiction

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Central question: “What is Africa to me?” o Voices: County Cullen, James Baldwin

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Africa is very much a part of the world in the book

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The role and function of the past is essential; not just the glorification of the future o “All stores must be told”: Passage from Phoenix; the stories from black people have power and should also be heard

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o Natives and slaves have rarely been able to tell their versions of a two-sided story of the world...