Week 5: Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor (5)

 My first thought about Akata Witch is that Harry Potter walked so that it could run. It’s absolutely fascinating how changed our perception of ‘witches’ has changed in the time between these two series. Though I wasn’t around when the first Harry Potter book made it big, I’ve seen accounts of the protests pearl-clutching housewives gave of Rowling trying to convert their children to devil-worshippers through her burgeoning franchise. Extremely hard to believe now-a-days, given that Harry Potter is still relevant enough 30 years later for it to be in two of my book reviews thus far off the top of my head.

And Harry Potter is tame compared to the stuff that goes on in Akata Witch by far. The most hilarious thing to me though, is how effortlessly and naturally Akata Witch handles things older fans of Harry Potter found lacking in Rowling’s work, culture and world building specifically. Specifically, in how Rowling should have gone farther into how the wizarding world would have developed parallel to the muggle world as technically two separate ‘countries’, instead of, for some reason, having the whole culture stagnate exactly in the Victorian Era when the separation happened in the late 1600s. Also how adults act exactly like they’re still children at boarding school with a fourth of the population being called outright ‘evil’ because they fell into a certain personality range as an eleven year old.

True, it might just be a bunch of adults taking something meant for children too seriously way too long after the fact, but I personally can’t forgive Rowling for putting on the record that before Victorian plumbing wizards and witches just shit on the floor and magicked it away...when the ancient freaking romans had indoor plumbing and public toilets definitely by the time they colonized the British Isles and Hogwarts was established. And whereas Rowling fell into the trap of personal ignorance squandering the potential of her work, Okorafor didn’t. There is actual interaction between Lamb and Leopard culture despite Lambs not being fully aware of it, and the interaction of juju on the Leopards and their actions makes it feel more real to me than in Harry Potter, and the best way to describe it is the difference between a tool and trinket. 

Akata Witch has less novelty and more direct consequence, as shown when a child is caned for doing something as egregious as summoning a chaotic embodiment of nature - almost our equivalent to a demon - for a petty competition. If Akata Witch had come out around the same time as Harry Potter, people would have used the scene with the sheep’s head alone to outrage-culture Okorafor out of a career, regardless of cultural nuance. It’s really funny to me how things change - here we’ve come full circle, JK Rowling being harangued for not going far enough in her work where once she was criticized for going too far, and I praising Okorafor for not even hesitating.

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