Dazzling: A Novel

"This is a wonderful book. It’s set in Nigeria. Chikodili is a Nigerian-British author and spent some of her life growing up in Nigeria. So this book is steeped in West African culture and spirituality, particularly Igbo culture. It’s a very vivid, sensory world full of pitfalls and possibilities. One of the things Chikodili does is play those two alongside each other very deftly. Dazzling follows two young women on the cusp of adolescence, Treasure and Ozoemena. Treasure’s father has died and her family has been cast into poverty. One day when she goes to the marketplace to scavenge, she meets a man whose feet aren’t touching the ground. He’s hovering. He turns out to be a spirit. He says he can bring her beloved father back, if she’ll do a terrible task for him first. Her storyline is very moving because it does lay bare how society can commodify girls like Treasure. I don’t just mean in Nigeria, I’m thinking also of Epstein—and how young those girls were when Epstein got hold of them. In so many of these stories, there are no people protecting these women. They were ripe for the taking. Chikodili approaches it in a different way, but she’s making the point about how a girl like Treasure can be commodified and used. Ozoemena comes from a wealthier family. She has the prospect of a good education. She’s about to go to boarding school. But she comes to understand that she’s going to be the recipient of what the book calls “an honour never before bestowed on a girl.” She’s part of the Leopard Society—if you get a chance to hear Chikodili talking about the Leopard tradition, it’s very worth listening to. Leopards are spirit entities or avatars tasked with guarding families. In the book, the leopard spirit has always gone through the male line, but suddenly Ozoemena finds that it’s her. So the book is about her grappling with the physical and psychological effects of inhabiting a leopard entity. It’s a creature of enormous, not necessarily governable powers. At the same time, Ozoemena also an adolescent girl getting to grips with her peer group, life in a boarding school, and all that entails. Eventually the two storylines meet, there’s a confrontation in the end between the girls and their two destinies. The ending is very quick, and you can’t see it coming. It’s a very compelling, exciting book, but it is also addressing, in an allegorical way, what price women have to pay to find their freedom. I was thinking about that this morning. Victoria Smith published a very important book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Age Women , on this phenomenon, in which she took issue with the fictionalisation of witches and witch hunts. I can see why. Hilary Mantel also spoke of how she didn’t have any patience with the trope of all these wise women with their herbs and their lore. I think that is a legitimate concern; if you tip it into a kind of hippy-trippy dancing around a cauldron, doing their sympathetic magic—it’s all a bit, light, a bit woo-woo. But at the same time, how else do you write about a woman stepping fully into her power? I think it’s quite difficult to do without resorting to metaphor or symbol. What’s so great about Dazzling is that Chikodili does this completely unapologetically, and in part because in Igbo culture, magic is regarded as normal, as woven into everyday life. I grew up in New Zealand. Māori culture similarly does not have these hard and fast distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘other-worldly’ domains: they’re all-of-a-piece. So although patriarchy is everywhere, ways of expressing feminine power do differ. Witches and spirit avatars and familiars and all of these symbols are important vehicles."