Apollo

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2015

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Themes

The Heartbreak of First Love

In her interview with The New Yorker, Adichie says, “I think of Okenwa’s attraction to Raphael as a certain kind of first love, childhood first love, that early confusing emotional pull, that thing filled with an exquisite uncertainty because it does not know itself and cannot even name itself” (Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “This Week in Fiction: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” Interview by Willing Davidson, The New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2015). This theme is central to “Apollo,” as the plot revolves around young Okenwa’s budding romantic feelings in a culture that does not recognize them as legitimate. Adichie depicts the rollercoaster of Okenwa’s infatuation with Raphael, from the first thrilling moment of connection, to the growing sense of closeness and emotional vulnerability, and finally to the bitter betrayal of realizing that his feelings are not reciprocated.

The first time Raphael reveals that he shares Okenwa’s love of Bruce Lee movies, Okenwa experiences “a thrill of unexpected pleasure” (15). The word choice—“thrill,” “pleasure,” etc.—is lightly sexual, but the real joy lies in the sense of meeting a kindred spirit. Okenwa is drawn to Raphael because Raphael offers him an escape from the expectations of his parents and allows him to express himself in an authentic way. As the boys grow closer, Okenwa’s connection to Raphael begins to develop into something more. Even looking back as an adult, he can vividly remember a day when the two of them were play-sparring outside, and he felt physical attraction to Raphael:

A duel began, his hands bare, mine swinging my new weapon. He pushed me hard. One end hit him on the arm, and he looked surprised and then impressed, as if he had not thought me capable. I swung again and again. He feinted and dodged and kicked. Time collapsed. In the end, we were both panting and laughing. I remember, even now, very clearly, the smallness of his shorts that afternoon, and how the muscles ran wiry like ropes down his legs (22).

Okenwa and Raphael’s childish play teeters on the edge of something more flirtatious and suggestive, evoking early adolescent attraction. Okenwa’s first cautious sparks of feeling are fanned into a flame during the scenes in Raphael’s room. The privacy of the setting and the boys’ physical proximity as Okenwa administers Raphael’s eye drops makes these scenes feel charged with romantic tension. Okenwa becomes lost in details of Raphael’s features: “the early darkening of hair above his upper lip, the ringworm patch in the hollow between his jaw and his neck” (54). Even the way they speak to each other changes, taking on new intimacy: “[W]e said things that we had said before, but in the quiet of his room they felt like secrets. Our voices were low, almost hushed” (54). The forbidden nature of the relationship—not just between members of the same sex but also between people of different classes—contributes to the rising romantic tension.

Because it is Okenwa’s first brush with romantic love, and because society treats his feelings as illicit, he does not fully recognize his infatuation at the time. This makes it all the easier for him to assume that Raphael has experienced the relationship in the same way, setting the stage for the misunderstandings and irrationality of the story’s conclusion. Okenwa grows resentful when Raphael doesn’t visit him during his own case of Apollo, though he knows Raphael could suffer severe consequences for disobeying his parents, and when Okenwa realizes that Raphael is more interested in Josephine than him, he feels hurt and betrayed. His impulsive decision to lie about Raphael is a cruel thing to do—one that has repercussions throughout the rest of Raphael’s life—and Okenwa obviously regrets it later. However, it is the result of a confused, immature child trying to deal with emotions he doesn’t understand. Adichie suggests that the powerful feelings that come with love, combined with the emotional immaturity of a preteen, are the perfect recipe for heartbreak.

The Different Forms of Guilt

The adult Okenwa carries a perpetual vague sense of guilt, though its source is not immediately clear. He views his role of taking care of his parents as an obligation he must fulfill to “make amends” for some failure on his part. Part of his guilt clearly stems from the fact that he is unmarried and has no children—an early foreshadowing of his orientation. Internalization of societal prejudice no doubt exacerbates such feelings: Okenwa is a gay man living in the anti-LGBT society of Nigeria.

Even as a child, however, Okenwa experiences a constant feeling that he has failed his parents and needs to apologize for himself. He feels like an “interloper in [his family’s] house” (14), and while he tries to perform the role of the perfect book-loving son his parents wish him to be, there is always an air of inauthenticity about it. When his parents question him on his reading, he is sure they see through the façade: “I sensed their disappointment in the way they glanced at each other” (14). How much of this disappointment is real versus imagined is unclear; what is clear is that Okenwa has internalized a great deal of shame about his authentic self, with his parents as the main source. He has learned to see himself as a burden, even when he is sick with Apollo:

My father brought me Panadol. My mother telephoned Dr. Igbokwe. My parents were brisk. They stood by my door, watching me drink a cup of Milo that my father had made. I drank quickly. I hoped that they would not drag an armchair into my room, as they did every time I was sick with malaria, when I would wake up with a bitter tongue to find one parent inches from me, silently reading a book, and I would will myself to get well quickly, to free them (67).

Okenwa’s explicit guilt about his interests and implicit guilt about his orientation both center on who he is—something he cannot control. By contrast, the guilt and regret with which the story ends concern a concrete action: Okenwa’s choice to ruin Raphael’s life in a moment of childish anger. Looking back on the moment, Okenwa laments that “there was time” for him to take it back (92), but he chose not to. Though the adult Okenwa seemingly hasn’t consciously thought about Raphael in years, he still carries his regret over what he did as a child with him on some level, mingled with all his other guilts.

Perception, Transformation, and Loss of Innocence

Adichie has said that she is “fascinated by how aging can reshape a relationship with parents. How an adult child sees a parent through eyes often sharply different from the eyes of childhood” (Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “This Week in Fiction: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” Interview by Willing Davidson, The New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2015). Because the story unfolds through Okenwa’s perspective, it is never fully clear whether Okenwa’s parents have truly changed or whether Okenwa simply perceives them differently as an adult. The story seems to suggest that it is a mix of both. The passage of time has transformed parents and child alike, but where it has rendered Okenwa’s parents more naïve, it has had the opposite effect on Okenwa. He no longer views his parents as the godlike figures of his childhood, and while this may in some sense be a relief—as a boy, his parents inspire fear as much as awe—it also comes at the cost of some of their stature and even individuality: “Retirement had changed them, shrunk them. […] They seemed to look more and more alike, as though all the years together had made their features blend and bleed into one another” (1).

The transformation—both real and imagined—of Okenwa’s parents prefigures the transformation of both Raphael and of Okenwa’s attitude toward him. Raphael’s name first appears in the story when Okenwa’s mother is talking about a group of thieves who were attacked by a violent mob. She mentions that the “ring leader” of the thieves was Raphael, and Okenwa’s father comments, “It’s not surprising he ended like this [...] He didn’t start well” (8). This image of Raphael as a “troubled criminal” contrasts sharply with the Raphael of Okenwa’s flashback: a hardworking, innocent boy who enjoys Bruce Lee films and is too timid to put eye drops in his own eyes. Through this contrast, Adichie encourages readers to wonder what could have turned Raphael into the criminal they know he will become. The answer comes only at the very end of the story, when Okenwa, jealous and bitter about Raphael’s perceived betrayal, tells the lie that results in Raphael being fired. The clear implication is that Okenwa’s betrayal of him was the first of many dominoes that would bring about this reversal.

This change, however, is preceded by a subtler one. Early in their friendship, Okenwa idolizes Raphael. He is attracted to him, but he also looks up to him with childlike adoration. Various narrative events puncture this adoration, revealing Raphael to be merely human rather than the all-knowing “kung fu master” Okenwa revered: He is “clumsy” with a nunchaku; he contracts conjunctivitis and fears administering eye drops; he does not visit Okenwa during his sickness; and he awkwardly flirts with Josephine. This painful stripping away of childhood illusions parallels the transformation in Okenwa’s view of his parents, but it also contributes to Okenwa’s lie about Raphael. Okenwa’s changed perception of Raphael thus lays the groundwork for the actual change that will occur in the latter’s character.

Class Differences and Cross-Class Relationships

Okenwa is an upper-middle-class boy who lives a relatively comfortable life, while Raphael is a lower-class boy from a nearby village who works as the hired help for Okenwa’s parents. The flashback section establishes Raphael’s lack of power from the start, telling readers that a previous houseboy was fired for allegedly insulting Okenwa’s mother, while another ran away in fear of her wrath after accidentally breaking a plate. The boys’ unequal positions in the household are further emphasized through the contrast in how the parents deal with their cases of Apollo. While Okenwa’s father does buy Raphael medicated eye drops, he confines Raphael to his room and leaves him to take care of himself, never bothering to ask if he needs help. When Okenwa comes down with Apollo, his parents do everything in their power to make sure he recovers quickly, calling a doctor, building him a “patient’s altar” of medicine and fruit, sitting at his side, and administering his eye drops for him every day.

Okenwa himself often behaves as if he doesn’t understand the power imbalance inherent in their friendship. He certainly recognizes the material signs of that difference: Upon entering Raphael’s room for the first time, Okenwa “look[s] around his room and [is] struck by how bare it was—the bed pushed against the wall, a spindly table, a gray metal box in the corner, which [he] assume[s] contain[s] all he own[s]” (44). Earlier, when playing with Raphael outside, he says that his parents don’t notice the two of them growing closer because “Raphael [is], of course, part of the landscape of outside: weeding the garden, washing pots at the water tank” (22). While Okenwa claims to feel unseen by his parents, Raphael truly is all but invisible to them, and Okenwa knows this. Nevertheless, Okenwa only seems to notice these things as passing observations, never really absorbing the full implications of them. His tone is almost annoyed as he describes how the houseboys “treated [him] with the contemptuous care of people who disliked [his] mother. Please come and eat your food, they would say—I don’t want trouble from Madam” (12). He doesn’t seem to grasp how dire the consequences would be if these boys fell on his mother’s wrong side. The houseboys’ fear of “Madam” is framed through Okenwa’s selfish childhood perception; he recognizes the way they treat him but doesn’t fully empathize with why they treat him that way.

Yet as soon as Okenwa feels that Raphael has betrayed him by flirting with Josephine, his first instinct is to weaponize his class status to punish him. Perhaps in his childish anger, Okenwa does not fully consider what kind of long-term consequences this action could have, but it’s clear that Okenwa understands—and always understood—the power he wields over Raphael simply by belonging to a higher social class. Despite the seeming closeness of the boys in the days before Okenwa’s sickness, Okenwa turns out to be little different from his mother, who had all the houseboys living in terror because of the power she held to ruin their lives.