Irenosen Okojie
Curandera
Soft Skull, 2025
The title of Irenosen Okojie’s new novel comes from the Spanish/Latin American word for a female shaman. Loosely defined as a healer who uses herbs, psychoactive plants, and traditional ritual to heal, induce visions, and provide guidance, curanderas are central to the novel. In prose that is at times soaring but also equally obscure and sometimes clunky, the narrative shifts in alternating chapters between seventeenth-century Cape Verde and present-day London. Two curanderas are connected across time through power and their relationship with Oni, a vengeful deity. In Cape Verde, Zulmira is a woman bereft and resisting her “kinship” with Oni’s followers. In modern London, Therese is an expert botanist who gathers her own “Oni kin” to her—identifying them by a shared strange birthmark.
When Zulmira runs from her kin and Oni, she ends up in Gethsemane, a remote mountain village in Cape Verde. One can assume that Okojie names her fictional village in reference to the biblical Gethsemane, where the Gospels describe Jesus undergoing the “Agony in the Garden,” betrayal, and arrest prior to his crucifixion. While this connection could cast Zulmira as a Christ figure, she has a very different trajectory. Grieving for a baby she abandoned when she left her Oni kin, she moves into the home of a fisherman, Domingos, ostensibly to use her healing powers to help his sick wife, Marguerite. In the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of the small home, Zulmira is drawn to the couple’s young daughter, Sueli. Domingos is often away with other women, and Marguerite is clearly dying. In the midst of a collapsing family, Zulmira and Sueli grow close, finding some moments of joy. But soon Sueli shows signs of becoming Oni kin, exhibiting strange powers that turn deadly.
Zulmira is blamed for the death of a man she tried to heal and imprisoned by vengeful villagers. Left to suffer unspeakable violence at the hands of her guards, she waits to be executed. When the day of execution arrives, the villagers fail to kill her—she is Oni kin, and not so easily dealt with: “The executioner … is unable to work the guillotine. His eyes are completely white, his irises gone. He is blinded, falls to his knees screaming. Kin take his irises as an offering to Oni. The smoke key unlocks the guillotine. The crowds are stunned into silence.” Zulmira’s revenge on the village is strange—temporary blindness among the men, unexplained pregnancies among the women. She returns to Domingos’s “battered homestead” but there is no peace for her. Soon Sueli’s powers erupt into extreme violence and Zulmira is blamed for the resultant tragedy.