Me and Binti
Relationship status: It’s complicated.
There is so much in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy: Binti, Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade to like, to appreciate, to marvel at, that it’s almost heretical to admit that it should have been better.
For one thing, Okorafor is a masterful stylist; her prose is beautiful and spare, the cadences and rhythms sure. Her words fall on the imagination like rain. Binti is a terrific protagonist; she’s sensible, curious, smart, humane, and uniquely qualified to bridge the cultures that she bridges. She’s a “harmonizer,” which involves math and the ability to mediate and bring peace in disputes small and large. It suffices to say that her character, as well as the supporting cast, are all worth investing in, worth spending time with.
It’s an enjoyable read—the entire series is an enjoyable read. And it’s classified as Young Adult in, I think, the same way that typifies the YA genre: an out-of-depth protagonist learning to cope in a world of arbitrary rules and shifting mores, an outcome that isn’t entirely triumphant but reaches a reasonable accommodation with the Powers That Be. We’ve discussed this before, in relation to dystopias.
What sets Binti apart from most “wizard goes to school” YA novels is its ground, its roots. Binti is a child of the Himba people, who today live mostly in Namibia. The Himba have endured and survived oppression and genocide, and the endurance, the strength, of the cultural heritage of the real-world Himba strongly flavors Okorafor’s treatment of the Himba of the distant future. Binti says of herself:
We Himba don’t travel. We stay put. Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish. We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land. Here in the launch port, most were Khoush and a few other non-Himba. Here, I was an outsider; I was outside. “What was I thinking?” I whispered.
I was sixteen years old and had never been beyond my city, let alone near a launch station. I was by myself and I had just left my family. My prospects of marriage had been 100 percent and now they would be zero. No man wanted a woman who’d run away. However, beyond my prospects of normal life being ruined, I had scored so high on the planetary exams in mathematics that the Oomza University had not only admitted me, but promised to pay for whatever I needed to attend. No matter what choice I made, I was never going to have a normal life, really. (Binti)
Binti’s stubbornness and her identity as a child of the Himba anchor her through her cataclysmic travels. The way she refers back to her traditions and her sense of self, of which the otjize that covers her skin is emblematic, is one of her most endearing and psychologically realistic qualities.
The novels are fantasy with science fiction trappings, like Star Wars is fantasy with an overlay of sci-fi. [Fight me on this, and we’ll go 12 rounds, I guarantee.] Giant fish that serve as transport ships, producing their own oxygen and wandering around in space — that’s cool. A warlike race of gas-based life forms that look a lot like giant jellyfish — also cool. A university that takes up its whole planet and deserves its reputation as the most prestigious school in the galaxy — ah, the academic in me swoons. “Treeing,” a zen-like meditative practice that involves the visual contemplation of math, and mathematical/electrical “currents” that surround and power everything — okay, I can go with that. The protective qualities of Binti’s edan and the miraculous healing nature of her otjize, it’s magic.
All of which is interesting and fun, but it’s not the heart of the Binti trilogy — that belongs to Binti’s own identity, her relationship to herself and to her people, her adherence to tradition-as-identity and her need to remain Himba even as she is exposed to forces that make her grow and change.
Okorafor has described the trilogy as: Girl leaves home; girl comes home; girl becomes home. [Suck it, Hemingway, and your four-word novels — this is a nine word trilogy!]
Here ends my Binti introduction. Spoilers abound beyond this point, so read at your peril.
No debate, I liked the books. If anything, they’re too short, with too much packed in and alluded to but fundamentally left unexplained. That’s not really a problem in that it leaves Okorafor space to return and build new stories. But it is a problem in that the trilogy suffers for lack of development. The brevity of each book (around 90 pages each and, at most, a two-hour time investment per volume) allows less room to paper over the problem areas. The problem areas are more insidious than I expected at first, and my dissatisfaction has grown as I’ve gotten further away from the reading. Most of my objections arise from a creaky plot structure and incomplete, or frankly unbelievable, character motivations.
A lot of the plot joints I can chalk up to the YA designation, because younger readers aren’t going to puzzle over things like: just how and why did the Khoush manage to steal the stinger of the Medeuse chief and send it to Oomza Uni to be put into a museum? Really? A museum? Can we talk about cultural appropriation now? No, let’s not. Why do the Medeuse have to inject their DNA into Binti to allow them to talk to her without the edan but the head of Oomza Uni doesn’t need to be stabbed in the spine and get a fundamental hair replacement (that’s a joke, by the way)? How dumb is it that, just one year after the massacre of a ship full of Khoush “best and brightest,” one of the perpetrators decides to visit an area under Khoush domination when there’s no peace agreement or treaty, and the Khoush are known to be arrogant and violent? And why, after the attack at the landing site, does Okwu not sensibly get back on Big Fish and go somewhere where it would have been safer? The head spins with questions, and they don’t resolve; in fact, they compound.
The stupidity of the adults in control of Binti’s world is not a subject that younger readers, the target audience, would pay attention to, but any reader above the age of fourteen is bound to wonder at some of the gaps. The Khoush and the Medeuse have been at war for generations, for so long that no one on either side remembers why they’re fighting. So when Binti decides to go home in Volume 2, why does Okwu go along? Because the plot requires it, so far as I can figure it. Otherwise, the Khoush won’t attack Binti’s village and put on display their full measure of arrogance and inhumanity. Damn, I’m giving myself a headache.
Likewise, the decision to show Binti the Night Masquerade is never explained and, although it’s beautifully described, the requisite cultural impact of the apparition appearing to a female on the verge of her traditional pilgrimage makes no sense, especially since the initiators of the Night Masquerade have nothing to do with the appearance of the desert people, who whisk Binti off on an entirely different pilgrimage, one that the plot requires but circumstances within the plot simply don’t. As far as the Enyi Zinariya know, Binti is not operating under a tight deadline, so why do they take her away instead of letting her go on the pilgrimage that she’s come home from light years away to undertake?
At least Binti’s attempt to broker a peace deal in the face of her own peoples’ betrayal and Khoush demonstrations of sabotage, revenge and wholesale violence falls apart. It’s the whole point of the third volume — can Binti stop the war? She tries, but the Khoush start shooting, the Medeuse shoot back, and there are a lot of casualties. The Enyi Zinariya say, “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” The Himba bear the brunt of the initial attack; Binti’s family is apparently killed.
It’s a refreshing imposition of narrative reality — to have Binti, a young woman that neither the Himba nor the Khoush respect, end a multi-generational war with a mild scolding would have been a terrible let-down, dramatically speaking. The entire event preaches a sensible caution of the stupidity of adult leaders, much in keeping with its YA focus.
And I’m not even looking at the Golden Ones and their nanotechnology or communications methods, or the call to the rings of Saturn, or Binti’s resurrection in Little Fish. Plot joints, and a perspective carefully calibrated to a teenager’s experience, and I feel very old and grouchy to be kvetching about it.
So let’s talk about what Binti does well: strong characters, beautiful evocative descriptions. The coming-of-age aspect of Binti’s life is well-drawn, her realization when she comes home that she has changed, and it takes her family a while to process through their feelings of selfish anger and betrayal at her leaving them (her sister never does seem to get there, but that, too, is typical of family). The portrayal of the Himba in good and bad aspects. The deft management of all kinds of prejudice. Okwu’s character — grumpy and alien but relatable. The scene when Okwu jumps into the lake with a joyous “My ancestors are dancing,” is lovely, as are the desert sequences. The entire conceit of growth as the taking in of new experiences and influences that produce change, made concrete as fantasy does, in Binti’s evolution on a molecular level as well as a psychological one, discovering and embracing her past even as she sweeps toward the future.
What to make of all this? The books should be longer, the plot shifts better grounded. I haven’t even touched enormous parts of the plot and themes. There is too much plot spread over too few pages.
There’s a lot to be said for reading imperfect books. I would a thousand times rather read an ambitious flawed book than a safe but cautious and circumscribed success. In that spirit, I can recommend the Binti trilogy. It is certainly ambitious, entertaining, and thought-provoking, as long as you keep in mind that you’re likely not the target audience. For more mature fare, look to Who Fears Death, which we’ll pick up when we get back from the Middle Ages.
Next week: Apocalypse boot camp, or Let’s Get in the Mood for The Name of the Rose. We start for real on June 18.