Cell One

“And when he told her she placed both hands on her head and cried, ‘Oh! Oh! Chi m egbuo m! My God has killed me!’ I wanted to slap her.”

This quote is one of the first moments that The Harms of Privilege-Fueled Apathy is on full display through the narrator’s apathetic attitude to her mother’s anguish. The narrator’s responding instinct toward violence serves as a sharp contrast and portrays the fact that she engages in the same violent cycles as other characters.

“Boys who had grown up watching ‘Sesame Street,’ reading Enid Blyton, eating cornflakes for breakfast and attending the university staff primary school in polished brown sandals were now cutting through the mosquito netting of their neighbors’ windows, sliding out glass louvres, and climbing in to steal TVs and VCRs.”

References to Sesame Street and Enid Blyton in the boys’ childhoods, juxtaposed with the deviance of their teenage years, both illustrate the affluent social setting of the university and underscore the ironies at the root of its crime problems. Ultimately, the popularity of robbery and cult violence among the children of the educated elite is presented as an insensitive performance of poverty.

“I don’t know whether Nnamabia felt remorse for stealing her jewelry. I could not always tell from my brother’s gracious, smiling face what he really felt.”

This observation marks one of the first key instances of disconnect between the narrator and her older brother. Throughout “Cell One,” the narrator scrutinizes the facial expressions of others, particularly Nnamabia, to discern their thoughts and feelings. Her methods of scrutiny are often unsuccessful, speaking both to the disingenuous demeanor of many characters and the narrator’s unreliability.