Under the Udala Trees

The Girls’ Academy requires students attend church services and devotionals. Amina attends, despite being Muslim. After one Sunday service, Amina and Ijeoma go to the river, hold hands, and twirl with skirts flying up.

After falling down from twirling, Amina asks Ijeoma to touch her near the top of her yellow dress. Quickly, Amina becomes self-conscious and pulls away. However, Amina leads Ijeoma back to her dorm room (her roommate is away for the weekend), and they lie in bed, watching “each other by the light of the moon” and falling “asleep that way” (155).

Amina wakes from a dream of hailstones, fire, and children marching. Ijeoma remarks that it sounds Biblical, but they are not the fallen children. After a kiss, Amina gets out of bed, stands in the doorway, and walks out into the cold air.

The dream causes Amina to avoid Ijeoma for a few weeks. Ijeoma tries to hold her hand and embrace her in her dorm room, but Amina pulls away and asks Ijeoma to stop. Claiming to have a headache, Anima leaves Ijeoma on her doorstep. 

Ijeoma and Amina have theological debates about lesbianism, but Amina remains cold and distant, a “secondary-school-aged, Nigerian version of Margaret Thatcher, iron lady through and through” (159).

During their third year of school, an onye ocha, or white, minister visits to set up a revival. Before his visit, Ijeoma recalls how whites were perceived during the war. She hopes he can cure her.

In the rain, the white minister heals a crippled onye ocha woman with prayer and speaking in tongues; she gets out of her wheelchair and walks. The rain stops, and the minister prays over a blind man, sprinkling him with water. After this, the man can identify how many fingers the minister holds up.

Ijeoma waits in a line to buy “personal miracles” (162), and asks him to cure her heart-sickness. He prays over her and sprinkles her with holy water. She discovers that Amina is in line behind her, guesses that Amina’s request is opposed to her own, and wonders whose wish God will fulfill.

After canoeing in the river with a boy, Ugochi returns to the dorm room, and Ijeoma asks how the date went. Ugochi is looking for a younger beau who is interested in marriage (older men just want a mistress), and likes her young date more than she expected.

Claiming she still intends to play the field, Ugochi sets up a date with a different boy the next day. Ijeoma imagines heterosexual canoe dates and writes a letter to Amina: “All the things the boy will do, I promise to do better. In all the ways he can love you, I promise to love you better” (166).

In her third year, Ijeoma goes on a walk past the river to a gorge, thinking of Amina and death. She’s just left a party at her dorm, where Amina came wearing make-up, clothes, and accessories that Ijeoma had never seen before. When Ijeoma tried to pull Amina away from a boy she was flirting with, Amina resisted. Spurned, Ijeoma leaves the party.

The young women become estranged in their fourth and fifth years at school. On the last day of school, the grammar school teacher, his wife, Adaora, Amina, and Ijeoma gather. Amina announces that she is engaged to a Hausa boy.

They will move north after the wedding so her fiancé can attend university for civil engineering. Adaora and the grammar school teacher are excited and babble about the wedding, while the teacher’s wife offers Ijeoma a few words of comfort.

Ijeoma approaches Amina alone, “leaning on an udala tree behind one of the school buildings” (172). Amina asserts the marriage is what she wants.