I was absent for the discussion last Friday about Spider the Artist, by Nnedi Okorafor, which I feel is both a positive and negative thing. I feel upset about missing the discussion because I think I would have much more clarity about the meaning and dynamics of the piece, yet I’m glad I have time to process it on my own and create my own meaning of it over a longer period of time. While the story offers many alluring subjects, I found the most interesting one to be a bit more hidden. I found myself close reading a part of the first paragraph.
My husband used to beat me. That was how I ended up out there that evening behind our house, just past the bushes, through the tall grass, in front of the pipelines. Our small house was the last in the village, practically in the forest itself. So nobody ever saw or heard him beating me.
I was intrigued by the idea of the forest, and how it provided a type of shadow to hide the crude truth and reality of her life. Her house was hidden “practically in the forest,” masking her injuries and abuse under the trees. She notes that because of this forest, nobody ever saw or heard the damages caused by her husband. In many ways, it harmed her because it hid the reality of her life to the rest of her community. It also hid the reality of life to herself, as when she needed to leave, she escaped past the bushes and through the tall grass to the pipelines. The forest offers her a liberation from her husband, it is somewhere she can go to play her guitar, feel joy and sorrow, and truly acknowledge her own feelings. Her husband does not inquire about where she runs to until later in the story, when their relationship gets better. Only then does he wish to explore the forest which used to mask her injuries and discovers the truth of their relationship, the only reason she stayed around for as long as she did was because of the Zombie. The first paragraph of this story serves as almost an prologue to the story.
