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Binti Question 8 - Characters
Aside from Binti herself, there were several major characters in the book. Binti's grandmother, father and mother. Okwu, Mwinyi. Haifa. New Fish. The Bear. Did you feel they were well drawn? Individuals? Interesting in their own right? Did you have any favorites? Who would you have liked to know better?
Comments
Yes and no. They certainly didn't all get the same development. The Bear is hardly developed at all. New Fish is a little more, but only really in the end of the last story did (she?) start to get interesting. Okwu is a tricky one - Okwu is with us from the beginning, but (he?) can't really afford to have too much personality or he won't feel alien any longer. Mwinyi was pretty well drawn. For the most part the the secondary characters were types, I think, rather than individuals.
Yeah - the Bear is just an interesting minor character and shouldn't have been included. I personally thought Okwu both had a distinct personality and did not seem human.
I think this became more of a problem as the story progressed. The question is what people are, and so who their characters are, I'll paraphrase Jill Lepore in a recent Guardian article:
and
Thus, how could our narrator give us insight into other character's motivations?
I didn't feel many of the characters developed beyond being background... but also that this didn't really matter for the narrative purpose. Okwu is probably the only exception as he started to develop some complexity of tension between opposing impulses.
I still think this is basically a YA trilogy, and as such I wouldn't really expect anyone other than the main character - Binti herself - to get much development or indeed agency in the plot. For example, the university is supposed to be super-duper clever and all, but in a crisis all they can do is say "let's ask Binti"
Like Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker series, it's a "Trilogy in four parts".
Okwu spends a lot of time being a stand-in for a whole species, so there's a question of how much his personality is his as opposed to his culture's. I agree with @Apocryphal that it develops some personality by the end of the trilogy, finding it's own way that isn't just the bidding of the rest of the Medusae.
Of the others, we don't spend a lot of time with them. Mwinyi had his own personality. I liked how Dele represented another way of growing up in the Himba. I also liked that there was a contrast between the different Himba people and how they went about dealing with the situations they found themselves in.
Yes - Okwu could be typical Meduse at the beginning, hard to tell, but I agree in the end he had become an individual. Dele! I forgot him. Whether he is a type or an individual, he is very different to Binti's family.