Narrative Disruption and the Reimagining of African Identity in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death

This paper critically examines Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death through the narratological framework of Gérard Genette, arguing that the novel’s autodiegetic narration, scriptural framing device, patterned analepses and prolepses, and shifts in focalisation collectively produce a formally innovative narrative design that disrupts traditional storytelling to reimagine African identities within a speculative fiction context. By employing a marked non-linear order (analepsis and prolepsis), variable internal focalisation, embedded oral tales and the integration of African spiritual and cultural elements, Okorafor challenges colonial and patriarchal narratives, offering a transformative vision of African futures. The analysis demonstrates how the novel’s use of conventional devices such as flashbacks and foreshadowing becomes experimentally charged through their systematic association with recurring motifs, including desert landscapes, scarification and bodily inscriptions, prophetic visions, gendered violence, and the rewriting of sacred texts, which not only deepens thematic resonance but also aligns with Afrofuturism’s broader goals of reclaiming African histories and identities. This study contributes to the understanding of how specifically Genettean narrative categories – order, frequency, mood and voice – are mobilised in speculative fiction as tools for cultural resistance and the reimagining of postcolonial identities.