So I'd began reading this book because two people said it was exceedingly painful. I was done with it in 2 Days and I'm asking... Where is the pain here?
Save from when she lost Sesan to Sickle Cell, an incident that made "God Forbid bad thing" raced out from my mouth and my finger quickly tapping the button to shut down my screen for a minute, I don't think there's anytime Yejide sadness had come home.
Maybe because I see Yejide stronger than how I should see her, a blend of ifemelu and nnu-ego, a kind of low budget. Maybe I saw Yejide from a stand point where children didn't matter at all, she was full in every area, and I was caught up in that Yejide the salon woman, the wife to Akin, the daughter of a Fulani woman who happened to be here father's first lover and the outcast daughter of 4 step mothers. Yejide's strength to pull through childhood had made me not be able to feel whatever she would have me feel for losing her kids. And why should sadness set in, when conception has juicy stories around it?
I was caught in the unravelling of the mystery trailing around the book that I forgot to give a sympathy for a dead baby, maybe if she had a history any close to Nnu-Ego it would have called for sympathy, for me, it was her life I was thrilled by and interested in.
Yejide. I like the sound. The sound of that name.
Yejide shagged Dotun and gave birth to Olamide, did it again and gave birth to Sesan, did it again and gave birth to Rotimi. But that wasn't all the doing, they did it couple of times more. Dotun, the brother of Akin her husband. When I first got to find out, I was like, "is this woman crazy?"
Yet she pointed out that her husband was a one minute man, a man who "before he had barely started had poured his semen on her" so ehrrm I thought it was quick ejaculation that had made her loved Dotun's preeq and gone for it. I was surely mad, but being sex starved is on another whole level, I felt Yejide has a right to own her happiness, but then I was mad because she was getting it from Akin's blood relative. That is wrong. In Uganda, that is not really really wrong, I'd gazed in shock at Makumbi's Kintu when those who were discussing with Baale had told him that "a man who cannot impregnate his wife can call his brother to help him out, it was a kind of brotherly help, the children borne will bear their father's name, and shame and worthy to be ostracized is the brother who after helping his brother donate seed goes about telling it" so when I saw Yoruba culture deems it abominable like the Igbo culture and many other in Nigeria, I thought of Uganda and shook my head, the variation of culture. It makes me question morality and African deity and the universal code.
But what is this help when Yejide was chopping Dotun's work in the absence of her husband? This is adultery, and cheating on one's husband in one's matrimonial home is evil. So I kept on looking at Yejide with that one kind eye look, only to be shocked by the realization that Akin knew about it. What's more staggering? He was the one who had besought Dotun to come sleep with his wife to make babies. God, I froze!
Then Kintu had played a bit in my mind, and my Nigerian mind had also played its part. I've concluded that the both of them are not feeling fine. Why will Akin ask Dotun to come sleep with Yejide?
You see the many mysteries that surrounds the story that kept my emotion at bay? I was enjoying the gossip. Ayobami pulled me aside and gossiped the Akinyele's family to me and the mysteries where so much that emotion and sympathy flew off the window.
Akin was impotent! It brings me to another question, why did he marry? Yeah, why do impotent men fall in love and marries? I know you can be looking at me like I've lost human conscience, but since sex is vital, it is on the basis many things are shaped in the relationship, why should a man who cannot get up talk a lady into spending a life time with him, a lifetime void of sex? Or happiness, compassion and adultery? Akin asked Dotun to always branch his house once every year for five years to give him at least 4 Children, but for sickle cell that took Sesan away and the cold hands of death that took Olamide, he should have had three. Three kids borne by the cheerful donation of Dotun's thrust and sperm!
Akin redefined fatherhood, for him it was more of commitment than sperm donation, I agree with that. And I like that he was glad doing this, embracing his deficiency and looking for a way out of it! The only evil he did was not telling Yejide.
Oh, And Funmi. The second wife of Akin, the one Moomi brought for him because of Yejide's barrenness. Again, this issue was brought up and I think I should talk about it here and now.
Yejide was tested and was declared fertile, she said, Akin said he is fertile, that means she didn't see any result of his test, and then his mother brought in Funmi to replace her barrenness when all the while, her child's gun cannot cock talk more of shoot a bullet. I believe modernity should have taken care of this retarded belief rummaging through Africa. "All cases of infertility aren't the woman's fault", Dear Mother in-law!
When Yejide started suffering from psy-whatever made her went to see the psychiatrist because she was shouting she is pregnant when there's no baby in her womb, Akin had affirmed that she wasn't. For once I'd thought if Akin has a hand in her not getting pregnant, how could he be so sure, so able-to-convince-another sure that his wife was running mental instead of having uncertainty until the Doctors confirmed? I know now. It is because he knew, his gboola is not working. I felt for him sha.
That house is a house of plenty secrets. Yejide trying to keep her dirty secret with Dotun from Akin who was trying to keep his dirty secret plan from Yejide, the plan Yejide was playing out and trying to keep secret. Scattered World!
So Akin caught Dotun shagging his wife. I had to say it like this because that's how Ayobami first said it, Yejide had wanted her husband to see that she is sleeping with Dotun, and I kind of wonder why, the man already knew. And yeah he already knew. So I was half expecting him to punch his brother, broke his nose and his head. I was not even expecting that at all. That Akin is a character on his own, and I wanted to tell it to his face that he has no right doing that to Dotun when he had in fact gone to Lagos to beg him, convince him to save his face of shame and come sleep with his wife.
Ayobami had said Akin did that because Dotun slept with Yejide without his permission, he wanted to be in charge of the whole doings, to tell him when, and how, and when not to. He wanted it to be transactional, not a deep intimacy that normalized the 'abomination' going on in his house. But I know why he had done that. It was shame responding. The shame of seeing Dotun pounding his wife continuously then ejaculating. A thing that life had took from him an opportunity to get to feel. It is that feeling of being robbed, watching another do what you have all the apparatus to do but can't do. It is that shame that had launched him towards Dotun and sought for no other reason but to kill him.
If there's any tragedy in this book, it is not the tragedy of Yejide that I see, but of Akin, so to me, Yejide is the antagonist, Akin is the protagonist. The very one in which the story is centred around, though initially hidden by the patriarchy but not for too long.
The tragedy of being impotent.
Of seeing the bulging belly of your wife knowing fully well that it is not your doings but your brother.
The tragedy of having to daily be hunted by the reality of what your brother is doing behind closed doors with your wife.
The tragedy that is Funmi.
The tragedy of living a lie.
When Akin told Dotun in his finals that he was impotent and Dotun had supplied him as part of remedy therapy, series of pornography and like Ayobami will say, "Man and Woman, Man and Man, Woman and Woman" I was asking Dotun what in the world made him included man to man in the list of pornographic videos for his brother, do impotent men resort to homosexuality to help their impotency? But since none of them replied and Ayobami didnt explore that, I just kept quiet and laughed!
You would want to read Stay With Me though!
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