Under the Udala Trees

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Under the Udala Trees

By: Chinelo Okparanta

Narrated by: Robin Miles

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About this listen

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is 11 when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child, and the star-crossed pair fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.

As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. But this story offers a glimmer of hope - a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.

Coming of Age

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Romance

Women's Fiction

World Literature

War

Africa

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St the b honing I was almost put off by the fact that the reader/ narrator was “killing” my precious igbo language but I finally looked pass the linguistic aspect of it rather I focused on the main substance which is one of the issues ravaging our society in a whole .

Very well articulated and presented . Though I do not understand the issue of lesbianism , I kind of felt sorry for Ijeoma because sometimes the first sexual activity experiences by people affects them . However I believer that chikwendu was not well treated here . Ijeoma should not have married a man to break his heart and render him lonely . What if he had exposed Ijeoma to the homophobic world of Nigeria 🇳🇬? She would have been deaf by now