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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Two new novels about the lives of Nigerian women

1/4/2017

15 Comments

 
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.

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.

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.
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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Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
15 Comments
Jeanne Lombardo link
2/4/2017 07:46:26 pm

So much here! First off, fascinating look at Nigerian society. The subject matter of both books sounds heartbreaking, and yet it is heartening to see these women authors hang on to their humanity and as you point out, dispel some ill-formed myths women in the West may have about Muslim women.
And interesting to referenced your book. After starting Sugar and Snails and putting in down some months back, I picked it up again and am deeply embedded in Di's story. I will have more to say once I've completed it, but for now, the way you interweave the different time frames and the characterization, dialogue, and pacing are beautifully executed. You've transported me back to urban England and to the phases of my own womanhood with this story. I've just reached the point where you catch up to the point at which you began, with Simon leaving for Cairo and poor Di doing damage to herself. Can't wait to see where you take it.
Finally, I have not responded to Charli's challenge yet, but well done! I do like your poem. it speaks so truly of what I experienced at my last high school reunion a couple of years back (40!). What a marvel the way my old classmates' younger faces emerged. I found it beautiful and suspect it would not be at all pretentious of you to write poetry. I can see how it informs your prose (In S & S, you are a master of metaphor and simile.)

Reply
Annecdotist
3/4/2017 09:39:17 am

Thanks, Jeanne, though I should say that I think the author of Season of Crimson Blossoms is a man (so more of an achievement to have written so well about an older woman’s sexuality), but of course I believe in the fluidity of gender.
Thanks for reading Sugar and Snails, and the encouraging feedback on what you’ve read so far. Yet just on the brink of reaching one of my favourite points.
And I’m so pleased the “poem” worked for you. Glad you recognise that sense of being simultaneously young and old(ish). I’ve only been to the one reunion and was so taken with the power of its impact.

Reply
Deborah Lee link
2/4/2017 08:45:41 pm

Oh my goodness, I *love* this poem! I've never gone to any of my reunions. I was always too intimidated. :-( If I'd read this sooner, I might have gone!

Reply
Charli Mills
2/4/2017 11:49:51 pm

Deborah, I'm wondering if Nevada high schools were particularly difficult. I've never been to my reunions either at Douglas High. I too, resonated with the insights of Anne's poem, but not enough to be persuaded to attend any future reunions!

Reply
Annecdotist
3/4/2017 09:42:35 am

Hah, Deborah, perhaps this will inspire you to go to the next one, though I have to say that UK schools in my day tended to be smaller than those in the US, so a less intimidating room to walk into an alliance to was less of a reunion than a small get-together of those who were still in touch with the woman who kindly organised it (I think at my instigation, so wasn’t that kind of her, as I’m not often in the area but had planned to be there for my own particular milestone.

Reply
Charli Mills
2/4/2017 11:56:34 pm

Anne, your post is as colorful as the covers. Your reviews bring out the cultural exploration the authors have done and readers can do, too. It's good that these stories are told by women from the culture and that it's not an outsider's view.

Your poem is lighthearted and yet, full of deep insight. I particularly resonate with this line: "So in your face I meet my younger self." Maybe my resistance to high school reunions is that I don't want to meet up with my younger self and all the burdens of that time. I focused on the road away and don't care to go back. I'll have to think on what that really means to me.

As always, the thought wheels get going here!

Reply
Annecdotist
3/4/2017 09:21:12 am

That’s interesting, Charli, because I suppose I’ve surprised myself by wanting to meet my younger self and that experience before starting to write Sugar and Snails did show me something really useful about my relationship with my dreadful adolescence, not in what was said but in the insights that came to me afterwards. And, as I started a long distance walk the following day, I was also symbolically leaving it behind (although that’s never possible completely). In just over two weeks I walked from one side of the country to the other – I guess you can’t really replicate that in the US!

Reply
Charli Mills
3/4/2017 09:00:10 pm

A long distance walk to process would help. Your comment to Deborah about smaller schools makes sense to me, too. My first 2 years of school were at a small town Catholic school, then we moved and the next six years were at the same small county school and my graduating class numbered 12. Our county was remote, sparsely populated and had no high school so they sent us California mountain kids over the border to the Nevada cow-town of Minden where the school had over a thousand students.

Annecdotist
5/4/2017 02:28:40 pm

Now that really is a small school! Must have been quite a culture shock to go to high school.

Irene Waters link
3/4/2017 09:27:00 am

The subject matter sounds as though it would sink me to the depths of despair but perhaps that is a good place to be plunged occasionally although if I try either I will probably go for the first with its touches of humour and lightness.
Your poem really hit the nail on the head. I like the way you describe each life period as a new coat being layered on top of those that have gone before. I have just been to our 40 year nursing reunion and certainly our young faces were revealed despite the wrinkles.I particularly like your last line.

Reply
Annecdotist
3/4/2017 09:46:53 am

Thanks, Irene, and yes Stay with Me is certainly the lighter novel.
I’m glad you also recognise that sense of the layers of selves. I have loved to have been a fly on the wall at your forty years’ nursing reunion. So long as it doesn’t get too competitive must be fascinating finding out where that core shared experience has taken you all.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
3/4/2017 11:20:10 am

Hi Anne, Interesting books to review. I often wonder how much we can extrapolate about a nation from fiction. I dare say fiction set in "exotic" locations tend to provide no more factual information than novels set in our own countries. I always reserve judgement. I am currently reading a biography of a Columban missionary in Juarez in Mexico, on the border with the US where the wall was built after 9/11. The story covers just a few years of his life but is quite an eye-opener. Horrendous. The priest is the brother of a work colleague so it makes it all the more interesting.
Crappy poem - no way! I too recognised those layers that we put on. I attempted to discard the one I wore in childhood but find that tatters still remain wedged in places where it seems I can't erase them. I attended one reunion long, long, ago (maybe 10 years out of school). As I hoped to leave those days behind I was always reluctant to go back as I thought others would only see what I had been and not what I had become. (If that makes sense. Or not.)

Reply
Annecdotist
3/4/2017 06:35:22 pm

Your comment on the “exotic” setting made me think, Norah, thank you. And it also reminds me that travel and tourism does not always broaden the mind but confirms prejudices. But although the portrayal in fiction cannot give us the full sense of a place and its culture because there’ll always be a gap in relation to what we read into it, I’m not sure that that’s necessarily different from biography (although that one you’re reading sounds interesting, especially with the personal link). And yes they probably provide “no more factual information than novels set in our own countries”, but that doesn’t mean either contains no factual information, surely? Maybe my title for this post was misleading as I didn’t see the novels as giving a definitive statement of what life is like for all or even most Nigerian women but, rightly or wrongly, I feel I’ve learnt about the culture and its complexity from these two authors who certainly know the place a lot better than I do (although perhaps I wouldn’t take much).
But interesting because, if I’m understanding you rightly, I can see why you might prefer non-fiction to fiction, which hadn’t really struck me before. While of course I respect science and facts, I suppose what interests me is a more emotional kind of learning (that’s probably a far too clumsy way of putting it) which I think fiction does well.
I’m glad you liked the poem. Yes, what you say about those reunions makes sense although of course having met you not just online but in person I don’t see how anyone could not see your wonderfulness. I think what I saw at that one small reunion I went to was not just the young/old physiognomy but actually that we were all proper grown-ups whatever we’d been like as teenagers which felt quite nice and civilised.

Reply
Rogr Shipp link
11/4/2017 12:53:17 pm

I have yet to be to a reunion. I love to reconnect one-on-one, not so much with large groups.

Reply
Annecdotist
11/4/2017 05:57:28 pm

One-to-one can be easier, I agree, Roger, unless you’re both shy and wishing for an extrovert to take over the conversation!

Reply



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