We Are What We Create
A Review of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author
“Creation flows both ways” remarks Ankara, the robot and author of the novel embedded within Nnedi Okorafor’s latest speculative masterpiece, Death of the Author. This sentiment, something “humanity could never bring itself to believe,” is a prescient reminder that the act of creation is symbiotic: what we create also creates us.
Creativity abounds as Okorafor plays with genre and narrative expectation, sweeping across genres, tone, and voice without devolving into chaos or incoherence. Multivocal and multi-genred, the novel deftly employs the pathos of a family saga and romance to enhance the complexity and depth of the speculative elements in the text, encouraging the reader to consider androids, AI, and nanotechnology alongside disability, creativity, and intimacy.
Known for her young adult novels such as the Nsibidi Scripts Series (2018) and the Binti Trilogy (2018) as well as her adult fiction including Who Fears Death (2010), The Book of Phoenix (2015), and Lagoon (2015), Okorafor’s culturally specific and wildly expansive world-building has made her one of the most influential writers of contemporary speculative fiction and has earned her Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Much of Okorafor’s work grapples with race and difference and the slippage between storytelling and reality making. Death of the Author demonstrates Okorafor’s ongoing interest in using speculative fiction to explore the connections between storytelling, knowledge production, and representations of reality.
We meet Okorafor’s protagonist, Zelu, as a disgruntled adjunct professor, struggling writer, and the black sheep of her large Nigerian family. After being fired from her job, Zelu writes something unlike anything she’s written before—a science fiction novel titled Rusted Robots, featuring an android named Ankara and an AI named Ijele in a post-human world. Okorafor weaves chapters from Zelu’s novel into her own text allowing readers to draw connections between the creator and her creation. Here, the title Death of the Author becomes a more direct reference to Roland Barthes’ notable essay of the same name in which he argues that we should prioritize individual interpretation over the author’s intentions in our attempts to derive meaning from a text. Okorafor extends this line of thinking by showing how the connections between text and author are often tenuous and insufficient.
Okorafor’s engagement with artificial intelligence is not simply relevant but prescient, as she gracefully avoids the dichotomy of praise and fear that so often dominates discourse on AI. Death of the Author reminds us that AI, like any technology, is a product of our creation—it can only be what we make it, for better or worse. In this sense, Okorafor suggests that our fears of a post-human future are situated by our distrust and dissatisfaction with the current instantiation of humanity. In one particularly memorable scene, after undergoing a highly experimental procedure to obtain AI-powered exoskeletal technology that allows her to walk despite being a paraplegic, Zelu is ambushed at a talk-show by questions about how her disability inspired her to write Rusted Robots. Though Zelu insists that “it’s all a story,” the interviewer continues to prod saying, “authorial intent can’t be ignored, though. There may be some who would interpret this book as you rejecting the identity of a person with disabilities.” Fans of Zelu’s novel are desperate to decipher the text through her identity and experiences, pigeon-holing the author and her writing.
Zelu’s personal narrative reveals a complex relationship to her body and the traumatic accident that caused her disability. Like the talk-show host, readers are baited into reading Rusted Robots through this lens as we are told that the initial response to the novel focused on the relevance of AI as well as how “a novel that focused so much on body or lack of body had been written by a paraplegic.” Okorafor introduces this interpretation before readers are presented with the entirety of Rusted Robots. Zelu’s assertion that this is all just a story prompts us to untether her novel from her life and opens new interpretive possibilities—freeing both Zelu and her novel from the scrutiny and oversimplification that comes from prioritizing authorial intent over the text’s ability to speak for itself.
In this case, the text quite literally speaks for itself as the protagonist of Rusted Robots, Ankara, authors her own novel titled Death of the Author. The protagonist of this novel, Zelu, is based on stories that the last remaining human in Nigeria shared with Ankara about her life and family history. There is a paradoxical tie between these two characters. As Zelu creates the world of Rusted Robots, so too does Ankara create the world of Death of the Author. Their existences are linked through the creative process and reinforced by their relationship to the human past and the post-human future.
In this sense, the themes of creation, authorship, and narrative are not simply reinforced through this novel within a novel within a novel. The text reads like a set of nesting dolls as Okorafor’s use of metafiction generates themes that reverberate throughout and between both Zelu and Ankara’s narrative. The title Death of the Author is not just a reference to the humans who have died off and left androids and AI in their place, but also the destruction of a traceable and linear process of authorship. Zelu’s construction of Ankara ultimately informs Ankara’s construction of Zelu. Okorafor encourages the reader to interpret the text bidirectionally. Zelu’s ambivalence toward her family and their Igbo and Yoruba cultures shapes and is shaped by Ankara’s complicated relationship to the humanity that built her and the artificial intelligence that defines her.
Equally central is the multivocal narrative of Zelu’s family. Though it inspires her creativity, Zelu’s relationship to her family and their expectations are not without complications and pain. At times gut-wrenching, tender, and humorous, Okorafor situates Zelu as an indivisible part of a whole family, culture, and history while also maintaining Zelu’s character as staunchly independent, inventive, and impulsive. The tensions, and the conflicts that come out of them, are represented as something to come to terms with rather than to overcome. These family dynamics and histories are revealed through individual chapters voiced by people close to Zelu, demonstrating how Zelu’s creative process is intertwined with and inspired by the web of people and stories that surround her. In this way, Okorafor grapples with the value of human creativity as an extension of human experiences and relationships. As an android in a post-human world Ankara recognizes that it was humans’ desire to prioritize automation over creativity that precipitated the end of humanity. In the wake of humanity, Ankara realizes that “creativity meant experiencing, processing, understanding human joy and pain.” It is only by connecting to the human remnants in her own programming and body that Ankara can write Death of the Author.
Ankara’s capacity to understand humanity retrospectively frames artificial intelligence as something other than a betrayal of humanity or humanity’s greatest creation. This representation of artificial intelligence goes beyond an evaluation of its utility or its capacity for creativity and instead shifts the conversation back to humanity. Through Ankara’s narrative we learn that human’s greatest error was denying the interdependent relationship between creation and creator, author and text, and self and other. Importantly, bodiless AI in Rusted Robots do not hate humanity because they believe themselves to be superior, but because humans programmed AI to value automation over creativity. The result is the prioritization of efficiency through bodiless, boundaryless networks over anything resembling the human, including creativity, storytelling, embodiment, and experience, leading to a rift between androids like Ankara and their bodiless antagonists, the NoBodies. It’s only through creativity and the reinscription of storytelling as a network of communication and experience that the NoBodies can talk about “humanity outside of the paradigm of hatred.”
In line with much of Okorafor’s past work, Death of the Author is a narrative about narrative, one that understands knowledge about knowledge to be a way to advocate for the importance of both in shaping our realities. Like her first adult novel Who Fears Death (2010), Death of the Author believes wholeheartedly in the transformative power of narrative. This becomes especially clear through the interdependencies forged between Zelu and Ankara’s novels: each text literally builds the other across space, time and humanity. The line between the speculative and the real becomes increasingly blurry as this interdependence is laid bare; what is first presented as a science fiction novel develops into a real future, and what was first presented to us as a realistic novel about a writer becomes a speculative story of humanity written by a post-human author. Death of the Author is thus a deeply compelling and experimental novel about the preciousness and precariousness of creativity as a human endeavor. The novel begs us to take our humanity seriously enough to create, while warning us that our creations will inevitably take on a life of their own.
CHLOE HUNT is Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. She received her Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores speculative fiction as a critical site of theorization where Black queer and women writers rearticulate Blackness in ways that complicate notions of history, identity, and futurity.
