Her dream of being a lesbian was shattered when the schoolteacher caught them making love and sent her back home to Aba, where her mother resides. She brought her home from under the udala tree, and they both worked as maids for the grammar teacher. She accepted and fell in love with Amina, a Hausa girl living in Nnewi. She found herself being detached from her mother to live with someone else- a school teacher based in Nnewi. Her father’s death made her heavily reliant on her Christian mother. She is a young and enthusiastic girl who tried to come to terms with her sexuality in the homophobic environment she found herself. Ijeoma learned Uzo’s critical ways of thinking, which she used to reinterpret the Bible against the widespread belief the Holy Book was against homosexuality. His demise shut Adaora down and plunged her into depression, making her send her daughter-Ijeoma - to live with a schoolmistress in Nnewi as she couldn’t cater to her needs anymore. An air raid at the civilian quarters during the Nigerian War killed him, pushing Adaora to the brink.

He appeared only at the beginning of the story as a critical-thinking man who cared for his family. Adaora had to embrace her daughter in her default and reinterpreted the Bible to favor her dear girl. Eventually, her prayers to change Ijeoma’s sexuality yielded no result as she ran away from her husband back to her – Adaora after growing tired of living with a man she didn’t love. Her mother constantly rebuked her desire to date a fellow girl and tried to exorcise her of the homosexual spirit through prayers. She was a lesbian, and the society she was born into gave no room for the association. It tells the story of a girl struggling to come to terms with her sexuality in an environment hostile to homosexual people. It is classified as queer literature and historical fiction. Under The Udala Trees is a novel by a Nigerian-American writer, Chinelo Okparanta, published in 2015 and won the 2016 Best Lesbian Novel of Lambda Literary Awards.

Here is a quick peak into the characters in Under The Udala Trees, a book by Chinelo Okparanta.

Under the udala trees sparknotes