55 pages • 1 hour read
Chinelo OkparantaUnder the Udala Trees
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 3, Chapters 24-27
Part 3
Chapter 24 Summary
Chapter 25 Summary
Chapter 26 Summary
During the New Yam Festival, seven months after the end of the war, the teacher is late in delivering his laundry to Ijeoma and Amina. Before describing the consequences of his lateness, Ijeoma stops the narrative to recollect her father’s ideas about infinity.
On the evening the laundry is late, Ijeoma and Amina are lying in bed. Their mothers encouraged discussions about dreams. Ijeoma dreamed of her teeth aching and falling out; Amina dreamed of floating away and being unable to return to earth.
Amina’s mother interpreted that dream as a rise in fortune followed by a fall. Ijeoma tries to remember a similar dream. Before Amina’s house burned down, she dreamed of a solitary yellow flower in a field.
Ijeoma tells Amina the Biblical story of Joseph: “God had given him a sign by way of his dreams” (122), a power that led his brothers to sell him into slavery. Amina questions the necessity of slavery before the brothers’ acceptance of the dreams as part of God’s plan.
They kiss and Amina kisses lower on Ijeoma’s body than she had before. Just as Ijeoma tries giving oral sex for the first time, the grammar school teacher arrives with his laundry and enters without knocking.
After grabbing the lantern and inspecting their naked, entangled bodies, the teacher slaps their faces, calls what they are doing an “abomination” per the Bible (125), and asserts that the Koran condemns it as well. He tells stories of women like them being stoned and drowned without naming the act itself. They are forced to listen to his continued lecturing while still naked.
Chapter 27 Summary
When Adaora arrives at the teacher’s house, Ijeoma hugs her and holds her hand. Adaora seems shrunken. Sitting in stools set up in the yard, the teacher, his wife, Adaora, Amina, and Ijeoma have a meeting.
Adaora tries to talk to Amina in Igbo, but she doesn’t understand all of the exchange. The teacher reveals that Amina is Hausa, which upsets Adaora. He, his wife, and Adaora, try to get Ijeoma to confess. She says she and Amina “didn’t think anything of it” and is able to only say “our clothes” (128) and apologize. Amina also apologizes.
After Adaora puts together what happened, she wrings her hands and cries. When she leads Ijeoma to the bus stop, her grip is tense. Amina remains behind with the grammar school teacher.
Chapters 24-27 Analysis
Ijeoma and Amina—Igbo and Hausa teens from opposing sides of the conflict—find solace in each other at the end of the Nigerian civil war. Their connection is bodily and mystical. On the physical side, Ijeoma has her first positive and pleasurable romantic and sexual experiences: “This was the beginning, our bodies being touched by the fire that was each other’s flesh” (117). This intimacy feels like marriage to Amina, whose trauma radiates from her body, and who makes love to Ijeoma “as if she were determined to fight off sadness this way” (123). On the more mystical side, pillow talk between Amina and Ijeoma includes sharing their dreams. Like the Bible, dreams are open to interpretation—an instability that foreshadows Amina’s eventual parting from Ijeoma because of a dream.
Both of these aspects of their connection suffer when the teacher bursts in on Amina and Ijeoma’s sexual encounter. Their physical pleasure is transformed into pain and shame, as they must endure his diatribe while naked. Their spirituality becomes a tool of homophobia, as the adults around them invoke cultural and religious taboos to condemn the girls.
The theme of contrasting chronological time with the more random ebbs and flows of memory continues here. Ijeoma remembers her father Uzo’s speculations about “infinite possibilities” (121), and considers alternate timelines and possibilities for the terrible night when she and Amina were discovered. If only one aspect of a situation was different, their tryst would have remained secret. This imagined alternate reality creates a new, false memory.
