Well, it's significant because his grandmother had the same scar and she died on the same day that he was born. I think that there are multiple realities, and we might be centered in our own, but that doesn't invalidate a reality that someone else is centered in. And it was such a surreal world to grow up in, because it felt like they created a bubble for us and they made sure they raised us inside that bubble despite what was happening outside." And my Austrian auntie is teaching me how to make waffles from scratch, and my German auntie is teaching me how to swim in the pool. And then we have this community of aunties from all over the world. So we've got riots going on outside and all this kind of violence. "And so they raised all their children together. "But I grew up in a community of the Nigerwives, the organization that's mentioned in the book, which is a real organization of foreign women married to Nigerian men, and they created an organization to help them assimilate into the community. And so there was a lot of electoral violence, there was a lot of religious violence," they say. "In the late 90s, we were transitioning as a country from military rule over to quote-unquote democracy. It's set in a part of Nigeria where author Akwaeke Emezi grew up, so I asked them to describe what this place was like when they were a kid there. But this novel about a death is full of life - the life of a person who doesn't conform to the community's expectations of their gender or sexuality.
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