use of the present tense inscribes this moment in the immediate environment of the reader. The couple Ndidi and Ijeoma embody attests to the possibility of a coexistence and to the greatness that all sorts of couples could represent. The repetition of the conjunction “and” makes all kinds of possibilities intermingle, whether they be sexual possibilities, or ethnic ones. Desiring a better future, daydreaming as Ernst Bloch identifies in The Principle of Hope, function as utopian forerunners and anticipations of a future society where oppression will have disappeared and happiness will have become prevalent. This iconoclastic Utopian impulse is also a militant act. Add to the challenge that Ijeoma has a lesbian experience and gets caught. She had no acceptance with her country or her mother. It can be dangerously threatening to be a homosexual in the 60's and 70's in Nigeria. By July of the same year, there was a counter-coup that replaced the head of state once again. The initiators of the first coup claimed the government was corrupt and acting against the interests of the people, and their coup was an attempt to reset a corrupt government and return power to the people. Yet, from the outside, most of the people who took part in the coup were from one tribe (Igbo), while most of the people being deposed were from another (Hausa). Furthermore, the person that took command after the January coup, General Ironsi, was Igbo. A common narrative — and fear — was that the coup was an attempt by Igbos (Easterners) to usurp power from Hausas (Northerners). Ijeoma in America during the 1960's, as Ijeoma was in Nigeria. I was sooo removed from thoughts of having sex with anyone...male or female, at age 11, 12. or 13. Ok... so, maybe, I'm just naïveté as I say. - but I kept thinking .., " so young?"

The novel’s other characters fulfill several fixed functions. […] [L]overs provide the opportunity for the education of sentiment. (In the novel of formation these figures are subordinated to the protagonist in contrast to the social novel where a number of characters provide equal centers of interest.) (298) Hirsch, Marianne. “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.” Genre 12.3 (Fall 1979): 293-311. Her mother frustrated me but I understand that she’s a mother in a time that made her think she needed to exorcise her daughter of an evil spirit because she loved a girl. novel is a first-person narrative where the narrator is the teller of her own story; she constructs her story. Internal narration helps the reader identify and sympathize with the heroine as explained by Kathryn Simpson, who offers a reading of Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: 8 “[the use of internal narrators] is crucial in disarming any hostility or negative response to [the] lesbian identity” (63). This aspect is crucial as we will see further down. Through the character of Ijeoma, Okparanta ventriloquizes a message which targets Nigerian readers, and she gives a voice to those who have always been ostracized, relegated to the margins, in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, and in Nigeria in particular: a voice is therefore given to the LGTBQ community as mentioned in the “Author’s Note”: “This novel attempts to give Nigeria’s marginalized LGBTQ citizens a more powerful voice, and a place in our nation’s history” (325). Ijeoma’s voice represents “the small voice of history” (Guha 2010) during the civil war.

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She is clearly not entirely comfortable with the broader canvas of politics or war; once it has served its contextual duty – severing families, bringing unlikely people together, underlining more intimate wars – it drops away. Then the directness of her prose comes into its own, describing with clarity and seeming simplicity states that are not simple at all. So the 11-year-old Ijeoma watches as her mother lies to herself that abandoning her child is right, while all the time understanding that she is allowing her mother to do so. There are moments of lovely description, of places and of things, but Okparanta’s best writing is the result of emotional insight. A daughter wishes her father would remarry “because that would make him seem less lonely to her” – not, pointedly, because it would actually make him less lonely. A beautiful and tender coming of age story that opens during the Biafran Civil War and sees our heroine through first love, marriage and motherhood as she struggles with the demands of love and faith

In Under the Udala Trees, Ms. Okparanta states that her novel is attempting to “give Nigeria’s marginalized LGBTQ citizens a more powerful voice, and a place in our nation’s history.” The book is, at its core, a coming-of-age story in which the narrator --Ijeoma – is sent to live with friends of the family during wartime. Her sexual and emotional awakening at the hands of another displaced girl, Amina, sets in motion a long struggle for self-acceptance.

Okparanta's mother had watched her father die in the same way during the Nigerian Civil War that the novel's protagonist sees her father die, [1] linking with how Okparanta's own real life experience has informed her in the context of writing the novel. The novel opens in 1960's Nigeria, following the tale of Ijeoma, a young girl who lives in a small town called Ojoto with her mother, Adaora, and father, Uzo, in the middle of the Nigerian Civil War.

In light of current conditions for queer Nigerians — and global conditions facing queer people — a book like Under the Udala Trees is ever-timely. Okparanta succeeds in creating a character that lives, despite survival being tenuous. By the end of the novel, Ijeoma is rooted in her love of herself and has gone past surviving to manifesting a life beyond the boxes she was forced to construct herself in.Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.

Religion has also been seen to be an important theme in the novel in regards to the bible specifically being a catalyst behind the Nigerian gay community's plight, with another critic noting "A narrow reading of the Bible, she [Okparanta] suggests, is partly to blame for Nigeria's vicious treatment of the gay community." [5]

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This story starts as a bildungsroman and then expands with plot. Even the child's voice morphs into the woman's as the second half of the book spans a few years. A young girl experiences loss and abandonment during the civil war in Nigeria. She comes of age during a terrible time in her country when people who look like her are being killed in an ethnic war. Soon, she realizes that who she loves could also get her killed. The book is written in a very accessible, deceptively simple style. it's emotionally moving - but you'll also come away from the book feeling like you've truly gained an insight as to what it was like to live in 1960-1970's Nigeria. Under the Udala Trees is a new entry in Okparanta’s ongoing commitment to chronicling the lives of gay and lesbian people in Nigeria. Okparanta won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for her collection Happiness, Like Water. One of the stories in that collection (America) recounts a transatlantic lesbian relationship, and a mother’s disappointment in what she deems her daughter’s choice to be gay. It also adds to the work of Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country) and Chimamanda Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) who have both found ways to reassess the Biafran conflict and the effect it had, and continues to have, on Nigerians.