By Abeer Hoque
“Anger is easier than shame.”
Ayobami Adebayo’s debut novel Stay With Me is the stunning story of Yejide and Akin. They are a young married Yoruba couple living in Ilesa, a southwestern town in Nigeria. Although the two are madly in love, their failed attempts to have a baby bring them to a catastrophic head against a rigid traditional society. Yejide is smart, enterprising, charming, and confident. It is impossible not to feel for her even as she ventures into ever stranger terrain in her efforts to conceive.
Contrary to her strong outspoken adult persona, Yejide grew up lonely and vulnerable. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father was scant protection against his other wives and their children: “In our polygamous home, eavesdropping was not just rude, it was criminal.” When she marries Akin, the oppressive power of her husband’s family combines with her lack of a support network to create a perfect storm. Add in personality, patriarchy, gender bias, polygamous family values, a failed state, witchcraft, medical crises, jealousy, and depression, and you have an intimate, intense, psychologically complex, and page-turning drama.
When the point of view shifts from Yejide to Akin, it fills out a deep and complex marital relationship with frustratingly real and damning communication flaws. It’s difficult to show two conflicting perspectives without throwing one of them under the bus, but Adebayo manages it with understated grace. For example, how true this passage rings: “Our relationship was still at the point where it didn’t matter who was wrong or right. We hadn’t arrived at the place where deciding who needed to apologize started another fight.”
As per my propensity towards language, I was taken by the gliding gripping prose as well as the Yoruba phrases and proverbs woven into the text throughout the novel: “when I was a little child, before my right hand was long enough to touch my left ear…” It’s the way a strange and particular story becomes something universal and haunting. Stay With Me was both a pleasure to read and deeply compelling. Adebayo was only 29 when this book was published. One can only imagine where she will go next, but it’s going to be good.
Stay With Me
Ayobami Adebayo
Knopf
ISBN: 978-0451494603
