Binti: Home

A reread for my book club :)

I was apprehensive to start this one, having just deducted a star from the first novella. Isn’t it satisfying when books hold up on a reread?

Importantly, the book stops pretending to be sci-fi and reveals its colourful science fantasy outfit. Thank you! Binti’s trauma and PTSD are addressed and explored in ways that lessened my gripes with the first novella.

Trying to reconcile who you are and your home and culture can be hard. It’s a culture that you love, yet it imprisons you, in more ways than you know. Your family loves you and hurts you – because of fear, because or prejudice, because of “this is how things should be”. Oh, Binti. This is indeed “the pain and glory of growth”.

I loved the show more scene when “Desert People” appeared:

“You people are so brilliant, but your world is too small,” the old woman who was my father’s mother, my grandmother said. “One of you finally somehow grows beyond your cultural cage and you want to chop her stem. Fascinating.”

The story ends with one of those horrible cliffhangers that shouldn’t be allowed. I do have the final novella within reach, so I am fine ;) show less

A reread, because I now have the third installment. Oddly, I remembered a lot about Binti, but almost nothing about Home. And yet, Home is so much more impactful. Change. Growth. The cage of culture. The cage and comfort of family. A girl becomes a woman, becomes an alien, becomes uniquely herself. A world unfolds. It's all here. Except the ending--that's what costs a star. There is no closure, only more questions.

Let me start with a complaint so I can get it out of my system. I hate this emerging practice in Science Fiction to slice novels up into novellas and drip feed them to us.

I hated it with Murderbot and I hate it with Binti.

I was blown away by the first novella, "Binti" It deserved the Nebula and Hugo awards it won. It was a startlingly innovative novella about identity, about us and other, about fear and harmony, about how defining what it means to be alien also defines what it means to be human. "Binti" worked as a standalone, self-contained story.

It took two more years for "Binti Home" to reach us and, very disappointingly, it does not work as a self-contained novella. It's a sequel, so it can't be standalone but I did expect it to be show more self-contained. What I got is the second act in a three-act play.

It turns out it's a very good second act in what I'm sure will be an excellent novel but I wish the publishers had had the integrity to wait until the whole book was ready before publishing it.

Ok, complaint over.

There are lots of good things in this middle act of Binti's story.

It retains the freshness of the original novella. It doesn't reprise any of the previous action but carries straight on from where "Binti" finished.

It keeps the humour as well as the drama of the previous events and uses both to explore being alien. Here's what happens when Binti persuades Okuwu, an alien shaped like a massive jellyfish that moves through air rather than water an is always referred to as "it" to put cover its tentacles with otjize, a mix of mud and oil that Himba women cover themselves with:

Covering them with so much otjize, Okwu told me, made it feel a little intoxicated.



“Everything is . . . happy,” it had said, sounding perplexed about this state.



“Good,” I said, grinning. “That way, you won’t be so grumpy when you meet everyone. Khoush like politeness and the Himba expect a sunny disposition.”



“ I will wash this off soon,” it said. “It’s not good to feel this pleased with life.”
"Binti Home" explores the issue of self and other from a new angle by following Binti's own physical and spiritual evolution from the Himba tribal girl she thought herself to be into something other and more than that.

When Binti returns home to restore her sense of identity as a Himba woman she is instead forced to confront the prejudices that shape her view of her homeworld and prevent her from seeing herself clearly. Binti's skill as a "harmonizer" is tested when she finds that it's her rapidly changing self that she needs to harmonize.

The tension builds. Revelations are made. Threats are introduced. Then the novella ends. Well, actually, it just stops.

So I'm going to stop as well. I have to go and read the third act, "The Night Masquerade", which I've just downloaded from the Kindle Store for the princely sum of £2.63. show less

I loved Nnedi Okorafor's novella Binti and had only the small and very minor niggle that the story was a bit plain and resolved rather too easily. Minor niggle to me at least, other readers thought different about that, and apparently so did the author herself - if there is one thing that it is impossible to say about Binti's sequel Home, then that it presents its reader with pat and easy solution. In fact, it leaves us with so many narrative threads dangling (not to mention ending on a cliffhanger) that one cannot help but suspect some kind of Hegelian dialectics at work here: If Binti presented a bold and simply stated thesis, then Home is the antithesis to that, negating and dismantling every apparent certainty established in the show more first novella.

This makes Home an unsettling and occasionally outright uncomfortable reading experience which is far removed from the exuberance of Binti. It is no less fascinating however, the world building continues to be jaw-droppingly bizarre, and the character of Binti only becomes enriched when we learn that the events of the first novella did not pass her by without leaving a trace, something she has to struggle with during her time at Oomza Uni and which leads her to return home where she plans to make a pilgrimage in order to cleanse herself. The pilgrimage however, turns out to be not the one was she was expecting and in the course of it she - and the readers - discover a third culture besides the Khoush and the Himba, along with some reveals about Binti's and her world's past.

There really should be a third novella which harmonizes everything into a synthesis, and I find myself hoping that it will be released very soon. Great stuff, and I really need to read more by Nnedi Okorafor. show less

My wish that this was longer will be a running theme, I think. There was so much to cover, and not a lot of words to do it with! But I could not stop reading it, and it improves on the first in the best ways.

Content warnings:
- PTSD flashbacks
- panic attacks

Representation:
- the MC and her family are Himba, indigenous people from parts of Namibia & Angola
- a few secondary characters are nomadic people described as “old old Africans”

Binti has been at Oomza Uni for a year now, after having been the lone survivor of a mass murder committed by the Meduse on her way to the university. She’s decided it’s time to visit home and go on the pilgrimage that would traditionally make her a woman, even if her people might not accept her anyway. show more As a symbol of the truce Binti created on her flight to Oomza Uni, the Meduse Okwu will be coming with her to visit home. He will be the first Meduse ever to see Earth. Will it create further harmony, or will the Meduse and the Khoush of Earth never be able to coexist?

You don’t even know how happy I am that this second installment deals with trauma. There was no way Binti would be able to live through all she did in the first book and not be greatly affected by it. I have PTSD, too, and the panic attacks, the flashbacks … it all feels very real and genuine.

Binti: Home is written in the same style as the first, with somewhat simple language and a few typos here and there, but it feels much more mature. Not only does Binti have to face what happened on the ship with the Meduse, she has to confront her own decision to run away from home and the pain it caused her family. As well as the judgement from her very own people -- and some prejudices within herself.

I couldn’t put it down. show less

I liked this even more than I liked the Binti. In this sequel, Binti returns home with Okwu and has to deal with familial pressure, and learns about her own heritage. My only complaint was that this book ended on a cliffhanger -- a rather huge one. But before that, it was completely fascinating to learn about the people on Binti's Earth. The world building is, as always with Okorafor, phenomenal.

It's been a year since Binti left home and began attending Oomza University. Her studies are going well, but she's having emotional difficulties. She keeps having bursts of increasingly difficult to control anger. She's also suffering from PTSD-related panic attacks. Anything that reminds her of the slaughter on the spaceship that brought her to Oomza Uni can bring them on, including her best friend, the Meduse Okwu, who also happened to be one of the beings who participated in the slaughter.

Binti secretly fears that the changes the Meduse made her undergo have somehow made her unclean. She decides to return home and go on a pilgrimage to help cleanse herself. However, her journey soon takes an unexpected turn and forces her to confront show more her prejudices and some of the things she thought she knew about herself.

One of my biggest complaints about Binti was how it seemed to brush off the horrible things Binti had gone through. She lived through the slaughter of most of the people on her spaceship, several of whom she'd become friends with, and she spent a period of time terrified that she would die too. The Meduse physically changed her without her consent, robbing her of the hair she'd braided to reflect her culture. So what did she do? She became friends with one of the aliens who participated in the slaughter and who'd threatened to kill her as well. It made my skin crawl and put me off this series to such a degree that I almost couldn't bring myself to continue on.

Yes, Binti is a "harmonizer," someone who, among other things, is supposed to act as a peacemaker. I was fine with her acting as a mediator for the Meduse, but it wasn't necessary for her to also become friends with one of them so quickly after they traumatized her on multiple levels. In Binti: Home, I finally got the emotional reactions from her that I'd expected in the first work, but still combined with her bending over backwards to try to make her friendship with Okwu work. I know other readers enjoy their friendship, but I can't understand why. It struck me as unhealthy and harmful for Binti.

There were some interesting revelations in this volume, and I know there's only one more novella to go, but I think I'm done with this series. It rubs me the wrong way, and I'm not interested enough in the direction it's taking to want to continue on.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less