A young woman and a man met
in a movie hall of a university one night. It was love at first sight. Politely
and deceptively they both broke with their former dates and soon after tied the
knot of matrimony. However, their marriage is afflicted with the inability for
conception and childlessness that only a brother in-law could solve.
Ayobami’s book is rough,
gripping, breath-suspending; as you reach one climax, you reach another climax
to discover how husband and wife kept each other in the dark.
Page after page, readers
grapple with the storm of rising issues: pain of childlessness and obsession
with childbearing, the place of women in society, the political ’80s, the
secret going-ons in the religious underworld, competing struggle between the
modern, spiritual and the tradition.
The problem of childlessness
is an enduring theme in African literary narrative. People are conditioned to
unreasonably put the blame on female side. Yejide must conceive and deliver
children since, in the words of her mother in-law, ‘Women manufacture children,
nobody has ever seen God in the hospital ward giving birth to children.’
When she conceives, Yejide
is not seeing the burden and trouble involved in pregnancy — morning sickness,
vomiting, difficulty eating and other eerie eccentricities — sweetly blind to
the difficulties and ‘bragged about the enormity of my feet,’ and “proudly”
‘complained incessantly about how difficult it was to find sleeping position.’
In fact, what supposed to be wearing and taxing is, for her, ‘the best time of
my life’ (122).
But that is all her
imagining, having believed, after visiting Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles,
to have immaculate conception — in the process she slips into mental
condition — until she is diagnosed with pseudocyesis, showing all signs and
symptoms of pregnancy where there is none. Nebbish and impotent Akin constantly
debunks her claims of Bluetooth pregnancy.
From the first few pages you
will get to realize you are in Yoruba world, bits of life rendered in natural
prose, speaking real-life-like world neatly woven in unpretentious language. In
fashion of Adichie, the salon is the chat-room of intimate locker-room gossip.
The book speaks in language that everyone will understand, yet not everyone can
understand. Adebayo’s pestle is a cousin to Lola Soneyin’s snail in Baba
Segi’s Wives and Yemi Aribisala’s ‘egg’ in her fainting girl essay.
Modern love gets into
loggerheads with tradition as Akin’s mother pressured him to get a second wife.
To spare Yejide insult and harassment, he gets into an arrangement and travels
regularly to find cure for their barrenness. In between the travels Yejide gets
into sexual affairs and delivers three children. Out of which two had died.
Orphaned herself at childbirth, her unthreatening threat to her dying kid is
‘You this child, I will kill you if you die’ and anxiously prays Olarotimi will
‘stay with me’ all trying to mend the dent in her missing motherly affection.
Coming and going alternately
between the world of the living and the dead, suspected as Abiku, Moomi insists
the third baby should have marks inscribed on her, lest she returns it could
easily be identified. She firmly stood her ground when Akin objected. ‘…What do
you think? We should just fold our hands against our bodies and watch doctors
treat what they cannot cure when we have another route we can take? Another
route my daughter? The whole world knows there are many routes into any market
place. But the white man has deceived some of you, told you his way is the only
way’(199).
But the children,
scientifically speaking, are not Abiku. Not even Yejide, even the reader is
being kept off-kilter, wondering and guessing. Given the disruption and pain
that truth can cause, Adebayo challenges the traditional conception of
paternity for the educated people who live on a patina of modern society with a
collapsed sense of tradition and community, beneath which lies the culture
residuals and mystic cosmology. For even when lettered people like Akin
‘trusted in medical science,’ hard truth can force them to conveniently retract
and eat back their words. ‘There are things scientific test cannot show, things
like the fact that paternity is more than sperm donation’ (192).
One thing led to another and
culminated in the hospital lab, where revealed is the truth about Yejide’s
sexual affairs which in turn leads to the discovery of Akin’s terrible secret.
