/ 7 April 2017

Judging a book by its cover: Sci-fi that looks good too

Nnedi Okorafor and the front covers of her book What Sunny Saw in the Flames. Photo: Joe Mazza/BraveLux
Nnedi Okorafor and the front covers of her book What Sunny Saw in the Flames. Photo: Joe Mazza/BraveLux

The cover art of Nnedi Okorafor’s books is usually the subject of excitement, mystique and in some cases outrage. Not too long ago, the author shared on Twitter her disappointment at a publisher’s “whitewashing” of the cover for The Shadow Speaker, a story whose protagonist is based in a futuristic Niger. The author threw a “shit fit”, as she put it, but also announced that, after changing publishers, she considered the incident behind her.

Other covers, like the marine life entanglement of Lagoon, are exciting because they appear to set the scene for the wonderment contained in the pages. Lagoon was apparently partly conceived as a response to the film District 9, but later drew criticism in some quarters for replicating the very same tropes.

As an author of young adult fiction with a fanbase spanning the diaspora, having a trilogy of covers for any of her books is par for the course for Okorafor.

What Sunny Saw in the Flames, also known as Akata Witch, has at least four covers, each doing its bit to complicate the fraught portrayal of people with albinism. Here, we look at three.

Sunny, the protagonist, is a New York-born 12-year-old girl with albinism living in Aba, Nigeria. With her skin condition, she has to carry an umbrella to protect her from the sun, can’t play football with her friends as much as she would like and endures insults such as “yellow” and “white Akata”.

She gets introduced to the Leopard People by her new friends and enters a new world of magic, “where your worst defect can be your greatest asset.”

Sunny can see into the future but as a “free agent” she needs a crash course in shapeshifting and dimensional travel while keeping her newfound skills from her family. Eventually, the foursome of friends will all have to confront a threat that is facing their society.

The American cover features Sunny waving her juju knife or magic blade, leaving a technicolour swoosh in her wake. Her dress sense, a knitted cap and a sarong tied at the front, renders her slightly exoticised, alluding to her otherness in the market where the book is published. Her skin colour more or less blends in with the colour palette of the book design, in a sense normalising her skin condition to focus on her other powers. 

The Nigerian cover features two profiles emerging from the sides of a ceremonial mask. The profiles mirror the split colours of the mask, which is a fiery colour on the one side and orange on the other. Lagos tenements rise in the background of the central masklike image.

Here, the emphasis seems to be on stressing to its readers just how much of them is in this book. Whereas What Sunny Saw in the Flames is, on the one hand, comparable to other fantasy books like Harry Potter, it is also influenced by the folklore of Okorafor’s own people.

The British cover features Sunny in blue jeans and a turquoise T-shirt, with her sheathed juju knife in her hand. Her face is turned and her extensions are wrapped in her bun, allowing us to see the full contours of her features.

The background is covered with what looks like Nsibidi script, a nod to the source of Sunny’s superpowers.

An interesting contrast between the American and British covers is the choice of apparel. In the latter version, Sunny is dressed in Western clothes, which may shed some light on just how entrenched the African diaspora is in British society.

So charismatic was Sunny and her portrayal that she inspired tons of fan art from readers of this book, which was aimed at teenagers. In this case, Sunny’s so-called defects were, indeed, her greatest assets.