Nigerian author's debut is a bittersweet nuanced look at family matters and the burden social expectations can place on otherwise pleasant relations, writes Tymon Smith
In the week of #MenAreTrash and growing anger about the treatment of women in South Africa, Nigerian novelist Ayobami Adebayo's debut novel provides a sensitive and human reminder of the long history of social, political and familial pressures on the lives of young women everywhere.
An MA graduate in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, whose teachers have included Margaret Atwood and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adebayo tackles themes present in the work of her mentors but with a sensitive ear and slyly humorous touch that's all her own.
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Set against the political turmoil of Nigeria in the 1980s, the story focuses on Yejide, a young wife whose husband and in-laws are desperately pressuring her to have a child.
Yejide is the owner of a successful hair salon in the town of Ilesa, where her husband Akin earns his comfortable life as an accountant, and they lead what seems to be a pleasant, domestically peaceful middle-class life blissfully unconcerned by the political unrest on their doorstep.
Akin's increasingly exasperated mother at one point tells her daughter-in-law: "Women manufacture children and if you can't you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman."
In an effort to appease her, Yejide submits to a series of absurd solutions.
She even breast-feeds a goat in a scene in which Adebayo makes the reader cry with laughter and indignation at the superstitions of the old-world ideas she and her husband have striven so hard to move beyond.
When Akin bows to the demands of his family and takes a second wife, the stage is set for Yedije's journey along a path that will ultimately lead to tragedy and the dissolution of her love for her husband, even though she manages to conceive.
Adebayo skilfully weaves a bittersweet tale of the complex effects and reactions to long-held patriarchal domestic arrangements.
While the tragic obstacles which Yedije must face may leave her readers angry, Adebayo also conveys the nuanced emotional reactions of her well-crafted characters so that it's difficult to hate any of them without feeling a kernel of empathy.
You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll definitely keep thinking for a while on the book's lingering questions about love, marriage, social expectations and the difficulties many women continue to face all over the world.
Adebayo's assured debut proves that she's an author to watch. She has certainly earned her place among the multi-talented crop of Nigeria's present generation of writers who produce novels that carefully weave their spells across the blurring boundaries of generations, nationalities and thematic concerns.
• 'Stay With Me' by Ayobami Adebayo is published by Canongate, R415.
• This article was originally published in the Times.
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