In the sci-fi bits of this novel, we clearly have a narrative forming around the importance of storytelling - the search and preservation of stories are driving the narrative.

It seems we've also got a throughline with the interviews - each of Zelu's relatives connects their description of Zelu to a story about themselves or their community in a sense. Even prior to interviewing Zelu herself, the journalist went to others for stories about her. Also, uhhh, fucked up he spoke to the white academics surrounding her controversy before talking to her, and tried to record her reaction being blindsided by that. Scummy.

We're seeing this framework of Zelu around the stories other people tell about her. From what we can see of the interview portions with Father and Amarachi, these stories are a lot about how they see themselves and connect themselves to her.

Zelu falls asleep watching The Martian after reading this unbelievable narrative built up online around Dr. Hugo Wagner and wakes up to Naruto saying "Believe it!" (Which made me smile.) All three of these stories can be considered guys with a hardworking, somewhat frightening and/or tragic situation, and independent nature overcoming impossible odds. Dr. Wagner and Matt Damon in The Martian are obviously white, and Naruto, while potentially understood to be narratively existing within a fantasy world consisting of people who are Japanese, has blond hair and blue eyes. An interesting commonality.

As if to drive it home, Zelu was paralyzed while enacting a well-known story, while playing 'The Hunger Games.' There's a definite reason they weren't just playing tag, and probably a reason they were playing a game based around a story/movie series written by a white woman (and in the case of the movie, starring a white woman). It is a story that introduced a lot of readers of a certain generation to a lot of ideas about revolution and rebellion. Why are they playing this game instead of regular tag? Why pull from that particular inspiration?

Why does Zelu think roll credits when she's thinks she's at the end of her life?

It also doesn't miss my notice that the boy Tyrone, in addition to his name having cultural baggage - sometimes being used as a racist, stereotypical caricature for Black American men - feels a little bit like a 'troubled teen' out of a certain type of movie or TV show. He's consistently called a drug dealer, a proud drug dealer, but what do those details contribute to how we see him in comparison to Zelu? Who perpetuated that as being an important characteristic about him? Did Tyrone tell her that himself, did the others in the hospital, to the doctor? Why is this just hanging in the air around a sixteen-year-old boy? It's stated three times within a short amount of time (p 115, 116, 118), but it's not like we ever see him dealing drugs in that setting.

It almost seems like, while Tyrone is in the hospital, he is existing in a different, arguably more authentic, narrative than the one he exists in outside of it. He is living a different life and he doesn't want it to interfere with the life that exists outside of it.

The way that that Zelu gives Tyrone an inspirational little speech that grants Tyrone some perspective (even as it's clear she's genuinely suffering) gives me pause. (p117) And yet he's out of her life, just a blip along the way, almost as if he served the opposite purpose as the self-sacrificing, wise, wheelchair bound Black girl would be in a different story - if the story were about Tyrone.

Considering that almost directly preceding this, Zelu has a random conversation with a character who could be seen as following the trope of a Wise Old Black Man (103). Not necessarily a wise old 'magical' one, which is a further iteration on this trope, but he does somewhat pull her back from the edge and ground her in the importance of the work she's done. I think it's quite interesting how Okafor is using these characters, ones who resemble the sort of exploitative to well-meaning characters who exist narrative shorthand to further a story about Zelu. Even the myopia and lack of understanding from her family could potentially be read as being fairly in line with the tropes associated with a lot of diaspora literature.

Reflecting on the title of Death of the Author, and often what that means in the general pop culture sense of the term, I wonder what these devices are driving toward. It seems like she is the troubled character of an author. Zelu herself seems somewhat pulled around by the narrative, by the people in her life who barely take her seriously - even - she's even literally handled roughly by the AI driven cars that take her from point A to point B without a lot of consideration for her, even as she 'chooses' this path.