Storytelling as Reparative Act

Bernabé S. Mendoza examines Nnedi Okorafor’s “Death of the Author.”

By Bernabé S. MendozaJuly 6, 2025

• SF

Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers for Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor.

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ONE OF THE THINGS I enjoy most in reading science fiction is seeing how far the concept of the human is stretched. In classic science fiction, the human stretches in two opposing directions: toward machines via the figure of the cyborg, and toward animals via the human-beast hybrid. These deviations are rooted in the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. Merging with the object or machine is supposedly an ascension toward the higher and more rational spheres of the mind, while merging with the animal is degeneration. Strictly speaking, however, stretched too far into either direction, one loses the human altogether, so tension between the two poles must be maintained.

Western thought bifurcates the mind and body in order to give the mind dominance over the body. In The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997), Nigerian scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí explains that in Western history, bodies are understood as representing the debased side of human nature, while the rational mind is portrayed as “high above the foibles of the flesh.” “Bodylessness” is thus a precondition for rational thought, and the body is a prison from which the mind must escape. Oyěwùmí goes on to note that “women, primitives, Jews, Africans, [and] the poor […] have been considered to be the embodied, dominated therefore by instinct and affect, reason being beyond them. They are the Other, and the Other is a body.”

This division between mind and body occurs within science fiction as warfare: the mind of Victor Frankenstein is at war with his monstrous bodily creation, and Dr. Jekyll (again, the rational mind) battles with the grotesque Mr. Hyde. These pairings represent, as SF scholar John Rieder notes, “divided expressions of a single individual.” But these Western texts only offer death as a resolution to the conflict (Victor Frankenstein must die at the end, as do both Jekyll and Hyde). In contrast, Black feminist SF writers such as Nnedi Okorafor offer something entirely different.

Okorafor’s novel Death of the Author (2025) offers us new and scintillating conceptions of the Cartesian mind-body duality. The novel has two layers: the main storyline centers on Zelu, a disabled Nigerian American writer who, after receiving endless rejections to her realist literary novels, pens a science fiction book about robots and AIs that ends up becoming a global bestseller. This storyline depicts her astronomical rise to fame, her unconventional love life, her ever-growing attachment to technology as a paraplegic, and her complicated relationship with her Nigerian family.

Zelu’s story offers a view of literary stardom that is at once exciting, hilarious, and moving. It also provides a metacommentary on how books are consumed by the public, as well as how stories shift as they cross into other media: Hollywood guts the film adaption of Zelu’s novel of its African context, for example, to make it more palatable for white mainstream American audiences. The innovation of the text, however, comes in the second storyline—the text of Zelu’s novel Rusted Robots—which is told in 13 intermittent chapters against the backdrop of the main storyline.

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In this story within a story, Okorafor personifies and gives creative expression to the Western division of the human. In a far-flung future without humans, machine forces rule the earth and make war against one another. The two dividing (Cartesian) factions are AIs known as “NoBodies” (also called “Ghosts”) and robots called “Humes” (who are humanoid in form as opposed to having other robotic forms). The AIs detest the way that Hume robots cling to their machine bodies, while the AIs themselves have no physical identities (though they often use physical bodies)—hence the play on their name, “NoBodies.” “Of all robots, across automation,” we are told, “from the crudest machines to intangible AIs, Humes were created by humanity to be most like them.”

The heroine and narrator of the tale, Ankara, a Hume female robot, explains the NoBodies’ views: “When they looked at us, at our humanoid ‘skins’ and microchips full of old stories, they saw only humanity—our predecessors, but not our futures. To Ghosts, we Humes were the greatest, most pathetic abomination of automation.” The Humes are made in the bodily image of the human, just as humans are supposedly made in the image of God. They are thus seen as proper extensions of humanity, including their stories. In this posthuman world, automations can do almost anything that humans could do—except they cannot have sex, birth babies, or (significantly) generate their own stories. In other words, they cannot create and envision other worlds and ways of being, for this strictly falls within the domain of the human.

Ankara is a humanoid whose main function as a “scholar” is to search and store the stories that humans have left behind. The AI NoBodies, perhaps jealous because they cannot generate their own stories, find Humes and their obsession with stories despicable, and in a day known as the great “Purge,” they send out an automated command to destroy Humes (or if received by a Hume, the command is to self-destroy). Ankara explains that “Rusted Robots […] was both the name of the protocol code and the target of the protocol. The command embedded in the phrase was simple: Destroy the final bastion of humankind, all rusted robots. Crush all Humes.”  Here, bigotry and intense hatred of the Other—which, as Oyěwùmí notes, is always a body—are all displaced onto automation, an inheritance that humanity has apparently passed on to its mechanized creation.

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The great battle that ensues represents the mind at war with the body and vice versa; in other words, it is classic Cartesian warfare. Moreover, this battle is first interiorized within the person of Ankara and must be resolved at this individual level before it can be resolved at the collective level. Despite being attacked and severely dismembered, Ankara survives. After blacking out, she awakens to find “the wrinkly brown face of the last human on Earth” watching over her. As it turns out, humanity isn’t extinct quite yet. This last human, an Igbo woman named Ngozi, is truly the last of the human species and will die soon, but not before repairing and transmitting her personal stories to Ankara. As an aside, the character of Ngozi is named after the author’s own sister, who recently died, and to whom Death of the Author is dedicated. In a moving tribute to her deceased sister, Okorafor turns her into not only the last human on earth but also a healer who will begin to suture the mind-body bifurcation, eventually leading to the unification of all automation, or the posthuman.

Regarding Ngozi, we are told that “she just happened to outlive everyone else”; having “once worked as an engineer, […] she knew how to repair robots to keep herself sane.” Ankara tells us that Ngozi was happy to use her skills to heal Ankara’s body, and part of that healing includes uploading an AI named Ijele into the Hume’s network. This, Ngozi states, was the only way to “fix” Ankara, but upon realizing that there is another voice inside her mind, Ankara freaks out, shouting at Ngozi: “Fix me?! […] A Ghost will hollow me out, delete my data, remove my sentience, use my body! Don’t you know this, old woman? Don’t you realize what you have—” Then the AI Ghost within Ankara speaks for itself: “She isolated me,” it says. “If I destroy you, I destroy myself.” Not only are the AI and robot, representing mind and body, trapped together, but they are also in a symbiotic relationship. They are mutually interdependent. In this reparative act, Ngozi literally puts the “Ghost” in the machine.

Initially, the AI and robot hate each other, and each refers to itself as being “infected” by the other. The language of both contagion and invasion is used to mark colonization in the text, but gradually we see their relationship develop into one of friendship. What is most captivating about the inner story, Rusted Robots, is precisely the ongoing dialogue between Ijele and Ankara, between the personification of mind and body, or spirit and matter. From their initial entrapment, these figures are constantly seeking to escape each other, though they end up understanding and bonding with one another. This story is about their unification, friendship, and alliance. Moreover, their constant bickering with one another regarding whether to be or not to be (dis)embodied, which is both the question that the story poses and a question with which advanced technology attempts to seduce us, further makes the reader reflect on the mind-body tension within ourselves.

While Ankara and Ijele continue their efforts to try to disconnect from each other, the story of the greater war between AIs and Hume robots continues. After the death of Ngozi, Ankara sets out to Cross River City, where the last of the Hume robots are planning a counterattack against the AIs. Here, Ankara must hide at all costs the Ghost within her: “If anyone here knew there was a Ghost present inside me, I would be immediately cast out, if not dragged into the center of the meeting and pulled apart right then and there.” Their entanglement and alliance are read as the “worst kind of threat […] to both sides of the automation war”: a betrayal and revolt. In the first battle (the Purge), 87 percent of all Humes were eradicated, and in the second, with the help of the Ankara, the Humes respond in kind and serve the Ghosts a mighty blow. However, the resolution to the war comes by way of a third party.

In this world, humans previously created automatons designed to travel beyond the earth to explore space. These were robots known as “Chargers” and later “Trippers,” after going rogue from having flown into “the radiative zone, the heart of the sun” and tripped up their circuits (or in other words, lost their minds). Now, they are hell-bent on bringing the sun’s “death song” to all automation on earth. The losing of one’s “mind” here, associated with death and destruction, further speaks to the necessity of keeping mind and body knitted together. Although Ankara has been privy to this information from the start, no other automation bothered to listen or care since they were more worried about their automation tribal war on earth. At the end, however, they must unite to fight the mindless trippy robots.

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Ultimately, the only way to stop the Trippers and snap them out of their insanity is through narrative. Therefore, Ankara must do the one thing that automation cannot do: tell a story. The Hume robot emphasizes the centrality of narrative in helping us to define the world, noting how “stories are what holds all things together. They make things matter, they make all things be, exist.” Specifically, storytelling functions as an act of reparation, and as a glue that holds all things in the world together. Stories repair Cartesian dualism while disrupting binary ways of thinking. Stories, the text insists, unify the mind and body, spirit and flesh. And through unification, stories also heal. In Rusted Robots, narrative heals the tripped-out robots. With the help of the AI Ijele, as well as a spider robot named Udide (a character who also appears in various other works by Okorafor), Ankara manages to overcome her limitations as a robot and generate a story in the form of a novel. Drawing also from Ngozi’s “life, her family, her humanity,” Ankara writes that it was “Ngozi who inspired me. […] She was my foundation. Ngozi was my access point.” Working as a collective, Ankara tells us, “Udide asked questions, and Ijele and I answered them. I listened. Ijele supplied memories, thoughts, ideas, feedback. I thought some more. I felt. Then I started typing.” Shortly before the Trippers arrive on earth, Ankara finishes the novel, which gets sent to the Trippers in space. After the Trippers read the story, they “aw[a]ke from their fevered solar trance” and turn around to head back toward the sun.

In the end, Ankara saves the day by being able to generate a story—a whole novel, in fact—with the help of Ijele: “Without the perspective of a NoBody, this wouldn’t have been possible.” And what novel did Ankara write? (Spoiler alert!) It is the story of the author Zelu in Death of an Author, who we’ve been led to believe all along had written Ankara’s story in Rusted Robots. Through this inversion, Okorafor offers us a unique, bifurcated novel that contains two seemingly disparate stories, one pertaining to the human and the other to the nonhuman, that end up being mutually constitutive and inextricably woven together. This interconnectedness between human and nonhuman is evident in the final line of the text: “[C]reation flows both ways.” Shaped like a Möbius strip, the text indicates that the human is a creator who is herself created by that which she creates.

And yet, what enables Ankara to tell a story and save the world is her experience with Ngozi: “Ijele and I both knew the last human on Earth […] I couldn’t have written this without her.” Even though the robot generates Zelu’s story, it is Ngozi who enables it to do so, in part by transmitting her own stories containing her humanness, which is here decidedly marked as Black and female, as is also the future of storytelling.