They wait outside for the relief lorry to bring food supplies. Children roam the streets with “begging bowls” and distended bellies. Ijeoma is sent off to be a housegirl-a live-in servant-to ensure she is educated, clothed and fed. Losing her father in a raid, Ijeoma and her mother quickly devolve into poverty and nearly starve. Transitioning from a life that centered around the wet and dry seasons to one proscribed by bombing raids, where she and her family must run and hide in their secret bunker, Ijeoma swaps a privileged middle-class existence for one of dangerous instability. Divided into six sections, the novel is narrated by Ijeoma, a ten-year-old Igbo girl living in Ojoto, whose life of prosperity takes a downward spiral due to the effects of war. Chinelo Okparanta’s debut novel Under the Udala Trees begins in 1967, seven years after Nigeria gains its independence from Britain, and one year into the Nigerian civil war to reclaim the separatist state of Biafra.
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