X’s review of Death of the Author > Likes and Comments

I LOVED your thoughts, so much so that I'm feeling like I might try reading this just to see what I felt, even though I feel like I'd likely be frustrated.

... I was musing the meaning of family and the problems main characters have with families as I read your paragraph on Zelu's relationship with hers, and I was thinking how very culturally specific this is. American lit has one whole set of assumptions and stories that uphold those or work against those, but things are SO DIFFERENT if you grow up with different expectations. I've felt this reading Indian lit, Nigerian lit, some South American lit. I feel on uncertain ground, sometimes, because how people feel confuses me--but that's because what's expected of them, the ideals they're supposed to achieve (or maybe rebel against) are different. ... So then that really dovetails with what you say about Nigeria and outrunning Nigeria's problems: because Nigeria's problems and its experiences with tech are *very different* from America's problems and America's experiences with tech.

Fascinating; thanks.

@Francesca thank you! If you do give it a try I would love to hear your thoughts.

As I read what you wrote it occurred to me how odd it is that Zelu’s relationship to her family isn’t mirrored in any meaningful way in Rusted Robots despite other mirroring that *is* there between Zelu’s “real” life and her fiction. The Nigeria-inspired sci-fi she writes seems to have been stripped of the strongest emotional connection to Nigeria she has - or, again, maybe that was Okorafor’s intention!