SHE WHO KNOWS

A young woman named Najeeba grapples with her place in the world.

Readers of Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010) will be familiar with Najeeba, who becomes the powerful mother of the titular protagonist, Onyesonwu. But this prequel begins when she’s just an impulsive girl and she feels called to accompany her father and brothers on their annual journey on the salt road—a trip customarily unavailable to girls. Despite the threat of becoming a social outcast, even to her closest friends, stubborn Najeeba goes along to help collect the salt left in the dead lake and sell it at the large desert market several days’ travel from their village. While on her first trip, Najeeba has a strange encounter with a witch in the desert, and the contact changes her—what she sees, what she dreams, and who she becomes. Her spirit begins to move outside herself. Transformative experiences on the road and reading done at the village’s Paper House lead to more questions than answers. As Najeeba delves deeper into the mysteries surrounding the salt road and her family history, she must confront not only external forces but also the transcendent power within herself. The villagers may grow to accept Najeeba’s journeys on the salt road, but they won’t accept her as a vendor of salt, and there is no guarantee other villages will endorse her participation at all. As always with Okorafor’s work, the prose is sharp and immersive, the characters provide insight into family drama and healing, and the narrative seamlessly blends elements of fantasy, folklore, and speculative fiction. The sandy, salty, dusty landscape is vivid, and the reader will learn alongside Najeeba that, just as there are ancestors in life and in stories, there are fruitions and consequences and descendants, too. This is the first in a trilogy of novellas—only the beginning of Najeeba’s story.

While this book may be short, its impact is anything but small.