A week after I interviewed writer, critic, and academic Ainehi Edoro on her debut book Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, I went on a road trip from Accra to Elmina. When we drove past a sprawling green landscape, whose lushness stood out in contrast to the beige city view to its left, I was informed that the green belt was Achimota Forest, where runaway slaves hid and found refuge. It was later established as a reserve for fuelwood plantation for a nearby school. Such is the immediacy of Edoro’s book; its focus, the forest, is not only pervasive in African landscapes, but is strongly echoed in African histories. But, of course, Edoro is not speaking about real-life forests but, instead, those we find in African fiction.

Forest Imaginaries argues that analyses of the forest as a stage for magic or an allegorical tool are limiting. The more expansive and effective perspective, she offers, is that of the forest as a mechanism or “experimental laboratory” for worldmaking. If we think about the fictional forest with its mysterious and imaginative qualities as a distinct category of space, then we can push our thinking beyond spaces in African fiction like the household or the nation, towards a more radical imagination.

Edoro builds on four novels—although she references many more—to form the chapters of the book: Chaka by Thomas Mofolo, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. All four are wild, imaginatively unbound texts where the forest is a repository for knowledge, a reengineered utopic future, or even a juridical methodology for deciding right and wrong. While Achebe’s forest is an exclusionary mechanism that keeps “abominations” out of the village, Okorafor’s aquatic forest is a refuge where all human creatures can exist safely. Through fictional forests, we can glean insights on power dynamics, and how the author suggests we might circumvent them to build better worlds.

Most significantly, the book contributes to the long-standing and necessary tradition of orienting the global form of African fiction, into something that comes from “local soil,” as Edoro puts it in our conversation. Forest Imaginaries uses indigenous storytelling and cosmology to expand what the novel—a European invention—can do. This expansion creates something new altogether; something that Edoro argues, is only visible when you cease to look at African fiction from its European genealogy.