Alula Hunsen on Uzodinma Okehi

House of Hunger. Uzodinma Okehi. Brooklyn: B.Okoye Ltd/bokoye.com, 2023. 76pgs. $10.

Blue Okoye is thirsty. One of the more sex-minded characters I’ve ever read (though nothing could ever top Philip Roth’s David Kepesh or Annie Ernaux’s self-insertions in both of their works of auto-fiction); clinically and and impatiently driven to consume one woman’s sex, and thus consumed in the overwroughtness and neuroticism that fills such an obsession.

Uzodinma Okehi’s latest novella, House of Hunger, is Okoye’s saga of frustration, observation, and fixation, speaking to the reader in diary-like and at times conversational tones, always quick-paced at the speed of thought. Where Foster Wallace whined, Uzodinma quips in commas and curt clauses. From jump, Okoye’s then-virginal curiosity bleeds off the page in the first conversation outside of his own thoughts; the stereotypical male-coded “locker room talk” idea, rarely a real-life occurrence, plays out in Blue’s fascination with white friend McTier’s new sexual entanglement. But Blue’s interests, and indeed the interests of the narrative, don’t sit comfortably in the realm of fetishization, at least not yet--Blue thinks about the girl, Ellen Cho, through her entanglement with McTier, as an intentional and agentic being, wondering how she arrived at her decision, playing the scene over as a choose-your-own-adventure movie (“how, exactly, did she go into that room… was she laughing about it?”; “was she some sort of sexual nihilist? Was there eye contact, or was it a game from the start?”). The aforementioned thirst for sex, nomenclated as hunger, contextualizes McTier’s story as “him explaining in great detail to a starving man about delicious food.” Noticeably throughout, Blue’s Africanness is rarely addressed, save for as points of social mis-reading (as McTier mis-reads him at the end of their conversation); he asks people to call him Blue despite his obvious Nigerian surname (and we never even receive his full first name, only the nickname “Anelly”), seemingly an act of self-denial but simultaneously mirroring a supposed disinterest in race that Uzodinma himself has mentioned in an interview with Vol 1 Brooklyn; here, we learn that House of Hunger is also auto-fiction, with elements of self-insertion and “real-life” contexts that inform the story on the page.  

House of Hunger’s second chapter, recently published online via Hobart Pulp, takes on white women as objects within a sexual and commercial economy that markets the possession of white femaleness as a sort of idealized freedom dream, communicating consumptive desires of white women to sell credit cards--Blue bears witness to whiteness’s capitalized nature, and its social choreography, but is ultimately unswayed by the call (besides his acquisition of a credit card from a saleslady under whose touch he acquiesces), opting instead for “the one spot of color”; Okehi’s facility in tracing a form of wages for whiteness here makes me question why, exactly, he claims in interviews that these dissections of race are “not [his] bag”.

The meat of the tale, beyond the extended cast and character-sketching which fills out much of the structure and middle chapters, is Blue’s infatuation with Inez, a thick-hipped Mexican girl seemingly attracted but reticent to relate sexually with Okoye; the novel spends its length working itself over Inez, or rather working itself over the sexual opportunity she presents as the object (key word) of Blue’s attention. A propulsive feeling of naive dissatisfaction, Blue’s sense of masculinity and drive, all focusing toward wish fulfillment in the sexual realm. From getting beaten up in kickboxing classes, to losing himself in the snow-whiteness of Iowa City winter wilderness, and traversing the neo-brutalist dorm building whose nickname gives the book its title; the “hunger” is not so much a sexually perverse thirst as it is an emptiness of humanity, necessarily a chasm of circumstance and personal lostness, and it’s this that frustrates Blue. As soon as Okoye arrives at anything amounting to a real dream, (a trip to Hong Kong via credit card), his obsession with Inez falters, their badly fumbled attempt at consummation playing a key part in his loss of interest. Uzodinma writes Blue as near-incel, but what holds him back is not sexual lack so much as deprivation of the self. Fundamentally, Okehi’s approach works; his novella-ization of Blue Okoye’s origin story builds out a fuller person from the non-linear episodes appearing in lit-mags and online forums for almost 15 years. It also stands alone as a study of maleness from the margins. Pick up a copy if you’ve got a couple hours to spare.