Both these novels are about Nigerian women and their relationships with their culture, politics, their children and their men.
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Akin and Yejide are a modern Nigerian couple in a traditional patriarchal society. Having met when she was a student, he now works for a bank and she has her own hairdressing salon. When their marriage fails to result in pregnancy his mother and her stepmothers (her father’s other wives who have not been particularly maternal since her mother’s death in childbirth) arrive at their home with suggestions to rectify the problem. Yejide, ever willing to play the good wife, agrees to carry a goat up the Mountain of Jaw Dropping Miracles under the blazing sun, and to put the animal to her breast like a baby. But she feels deeply betrayed when Akin takes a second wife. The pressure of colluding, in order to protect male pride, with the assumption that the “fault” must lie with her almost drives her mad as she enjoys a phantom pregnancy extending well beyond the usual nine months.
With no miracles on the horizon, the couple find other means to produce the necessary child. Initially, Yejide delights in being a mother even as her relationship with her husband declines. When the baby dies before reaching her first birthday, the in-laws suspect that evil spirits are at work and Yejide isn’t even allowed to know where the child is buried. Not long after this she witnesses her second child, a much wanted boy, suffering the painful effects of sickle cell disease until he too succumbs. The weight of her grief prevents her from bonding with the third child, a daughter named Rotimi – literally stay with me – and her marriage collapses.
Despite the subject matter, Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s debut is a bright, warm-hearted novel set against the backdrop of Nigerian politics of the 1980s. It’s a fine achievement that the lightness of the voice, with many humorous touches, does not detract from the seriousness and poignancy of the couple’s predicament. Thanks to Canongate for my review copy.
With no miracles on the horizon, the couple find other means to produce the necessary child. Initially, Yejide delights in being a mother even as her relationship with her husband declines. When the baby dies before reaching her first birthday, the in-laws suspect that evil spirits are at work and Yejide isn’t even allowed to know where the child is buried. Not long after this she witnesses her second child, a much wanted boy, suffering the painful effects of sickle cell disease until he too succumbs. The weight of her grief prevents her from bonding with the third child, a daughter named Rotimi – literally stay with me – and her marriage collapses.
Despite the subject matter, Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s debut is a bright, warm-hearted novel set against the backdrop of Nigerian politics of the 1980s. It’s a fine achievement that the lightness of the voice, with many humorous touches, does not detract from the seriousness and poignancy of the couple’s predicament. Thanks to Canongate for my review copy.
Hajiya Binta Zubairu is a fifty-five-year-old widow and former schoolteacher living with her teenage niece and granddaughter in an unnamed Nigerian city. When, on returning from her lessons at the madrasa, she finds a young man in her home, she’s not only at risk of losing her jewellery and electronic devices, but her life. But, when she locks eyes with her intruder, she’s reminded of her dead son. At that point, she is unaware that her glinting gold tooth likewise reminds her assailant of a lost relative, in his case the mother who abandoned him as a small child. So begins the love affair between a younger man and an older woman, against the backdrop of a society becoming increasingly corrupt and violent as the elections approach.
Reza has earned the respect he craves as a gang leader and dealer in marijuana but, when the pressure mounts from his politician “boss”, he’s too distracted by his affair with Binta to properly protect his “boys”. Binta, similarly, is too besotted and focused on rehabilitating her lover, in the way she wasn’t able to do for her son, to notice the potential damage to her own reputation or the post-traumatic stress suffered by her niece. On the one hand, Fa’iza is like any teenager, obsessed with film stars, make-up and trashy novels. But the sight of blood cuts her off from the here and now as she relives the Christian-Muslim rampage that killed her father and brother. Like Sierra Leone in a novel by Aminatta Forna, the entire society is characterised by trauma and loss: Binta’s husband was likewise murdered in the communal violence and her son shot by the police. This brutality continues even within the family: a clever student, Binta was pulled out of school to marry an older man she didn’t know and custom forbade her from showing her eldest son affection, or even using his name, or intervening when his father savagely beat him.
Season of Crimson Blossoms provides a compassionate, if bleak, insight into contemporary Nigerian society in all its complexity and smashes the stereotype of the sexually repressed veiled older Muslim woman. The novel is enlivened by the prose and the proverbs that introduce the chapters (such as It takes more than a bucket of dye to change the colour of the sea and A snake can shed its skin, but it will still remain a serpent). Thanks to Cassava Republic for my proof copy.
Reza has earned the respect he craves as a gang leader and dealer in marijuana but, when the pressure mounts from his politician “boss”, he’s too distracted by his affair with Binta to properly protect his “boys”. Binta, similarly, is too besotted and focused on rehabilitating her lover, in the way she wasn’t able to do for her son, to notice the potential damage to her own reputation or the post-traumatic stress suffered by her niece. On the one hand, Fa’iza is like any teenager, obsessed with film stars, make-up and trashy novels. But the sight of blood cuts her off from the here and now as she relives the Christian-Muslim rampage that killed her father and brother. Like Sierra Leone in a novel by Aminatta Forna, the entire society is characterised by trauma and loss: Binta’s husband was likewise murdered in the communal violence and her son shot by the police. This brutality continues even within the family: a clever student, Binta was pulled out of school to marry an older man she didn’t know and custom forbade her from showing her eldest son affection, or even using his name, or intervening when his father savagely beat him.
Season of Crimson Blossoms provides a compassionate, if bleak, insight into contemporary Nigerian society in all its complexity and smashes the stereotype of the sexually repressed veiled older Muslim woman. The novel is enlivened by the prose and the proverbs that introduce the chapters (such as It takes more than a bucket of dye to change the colour of the sea and A snake can shed its skin, but it will still remain a serpent). Thanks to Cassava Republic for my proof copy.
I’m learning a lot about Nigeria from fiction (e.g. Under the Udala Trees; The Fishermen), but if you think its politics are distant from the Global North consider this observation from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in an interview with Emma Brockes for the Guardian:
“American democracy has never been tested. You might have disagreed ideologically with George W Bush, but he still kind of followed the rules. Here, it feels like Nigeria. It really does. It’s that feeling of political uncertainty that I’m very familiar with, but not a feeling I like. It’s ugly. But even worse, because America is so powerful, and so much at the centre of the world, these things have consequences for everyone. Nigeria doesn’t have that kind of reach, so our problems remain our problems.”
While I’m really enjoying sampling literature out of Nigeria, I must confess that I haven’t knowingly known many Nigerians in real life. So it was lovely last weekend to meet one of that select band of Anne’s Nigerian acquaintances at a local conference and catch up on each other’s lives. Or maybe not quite “catch up”, given that it’s over thirty years since he was a trainee psychiatrist and I was studying for a psychology PhD.
I always find it fascinating when I reconnect with someone from my youth because of the way it also reconnects me with one of my former selves. I wrote elsewhere about how meeting up with some former schoolmates fed into the themes of adolescent and mid-life coming-of-age in Sugar and Snails, and it always evokes knowing nods when I speak about this to my largely middle-aged audiences at events. So I’m making that the focus of this week’s flash, prompted by the theme of hello and goodbye. Unable to find a narrative arc, this is certainly writing in the raw, albeit reviving the iambic pentameter! All I can say is it’s a good thing I never had any pretensions to be a poet.
“American democracy has never been tested. You might have disagreed ideologically with George W Bush, but he still kind of followed the rules. Here, it feels like Nigeria. It really does. It’s that feeling of political uncertainty that I’m very familiar with, but not a feeling I like. It’s ugly. But even worse, because America is so powerful, and so much at the centre of the world, these things have consequences for everyone. Nigeria doesn’t have that kind of reach, so our problems remain our problems.”
While I’m really enjoying sampling literature out of Nigeria, I must confess that I haven’t knowingly known many Nigerians in real life. So it was lovely last weekend to meet one of that select band of Anne’s Nigerian acquaintances at a local conference and catch up on each other’s lives. Or maybe not quite “catch up”, given that it’s over thirty years since he was a trainee psychiatrist and I was studying for a psychology PhD.
I always find it fascinating when I reconnect with someone from my youth because of the way it also reconnects me with one of my former selves. I wrote elsewhere about how meeting up with some former schoolmates fed into the themes of adolescent and mid-life coming-of-age in Sugar and Snails, and it always evokes knowing nods when I speak about this to my largely middle-aged audiences at events. So I’m making that the focus of this week’s flash, prompted by the theme of hello and goodbye. Unable to find a narrative arc, this is certainly writing in the raw, albeit reviving the iambic pentameter! All I can say is it’s a good thing I never had any pretensions to be a poet.
| At the school reunion We’ve tangled time by merging now with then Our wrinkles cannot hide the girls we were Now screened again on weathered visages So in your face I meet my younger self In nylon shirt, white socks and hitched up skirt With curtained hair that veiled our flawless skin So much we did not could not know of life And yet we thought ourselves full formed, complete And so it seems from infancy to death Each decade pastes another coat on me The school reunion peels the layers away. Hello that girl. Goodbye that girl. Hello. |  |
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