Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > An Unusual Grief

Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize

When the day of Yinka’s birth arrived, Mojisola had experienced a miserable 41 weeks. She’d imagined she’d be relieved to bear down, to surrender to the ripping of her tender passage but just when the midwife ordered that she push, Mojisola, with every intention to do as commanded (at this dark point in the process of birth no other action would be logical), discovered a resistance within her bones that seemed not of this world. Something stronger than her was at work. ‘Push, now!’ the midwife repeated, a touch of panic in her voice. She repeated it three times, louder and louder, until Mojisola once more mastered her bones. Holding her new sticky child, she’d felt ashamed for having possessed this will (greater than her will to mother) to resist, to fight and hold the child in limbo, rather than push it out into motion. And yet it was undeniable. Lying there, the nurse screeching, ‘Push,’ on the sidelines, Mojisola had had brief seconds of hope and ecstasy. She would experience the very same, but in reverse, many years later when she heard of the death of her child, but in that moment on the birthing bed, Mojisola fantasised that she somehow had the ability to reverse time. The fantasy that the child would go unborn, that she could reverse the irreversible and return to a simple existence that had gradually, over the many weeks disappeared.

This book is published by the admirable Cassava Republic Press – originally founded in Nigeria and now based in Nigeria and London and whose mission is ”to change the way we all think about African writing. We think that contemporary African prose should be rooted in African experience in all its diversity, whether set in filthy-yet-sexy megacities such as Lagos or Kinshasa, in little-known communities outside of Bahia, in the recent past or indeed the near future.”

This is the author’s third novel – part way through reading it I was struck by it being very much the type of novel that I expect to find on the Women’s Prize longlist and so was intrigued to find that her previous novel was indeed Women’s Prize longlisted.

Unfortunately, though it was reminding me at that stage of the type of book which typically features towards the bottom of my longlist rankings – and that was my overall view on the book: an uneasy mix of genre (initially a very slow moving family drama, then heading into Fifty Shades territory), neither of which is one that really appeals to me and the combination even less so.

The main character is Mojisola – a Nigerian who moved to Cape Town in South Africa with her academic husband Titus (a serial philanderer). They have one daughter – Yinka – now in her early twenties who moved out from home to Johannesburg and largely broke off contact with her parents largely over her mother’s refusal to confront her father’s infidelity. The book opens with Mojisola arriving at her daughter’s lodgings – some time after she has been contacted by the police to say that Yinka (who she was aware had always suffered with a form of depression, just as she herself has struggled with mental health) has committed suicide – news that drove Mojisola mad with grief.

There she meets with Yinka’s former landlord (and she soon finds out part time cannabis supplier) Zelda and decides to rent Yinka’s flat and try to piece together her daughter’s life in Johannesburg and what led to her death. At the extreme this leads to her taking up Yinka’s profile on a dating site which over time she realises has a fetish-element as she tries to trace some of Yinka’s artwork. At the same time Mojisola looks back on her life – her upbringing by her now deceased religious mother (and the role played by her mother’s sister – her Aunt – in her life, a role which has a deeper significance she realises late on in her Aunt’s life), her marriage and her relationship with her daughter.

A journal of Yinka that a friend hands over, and one that Titus (from who she has been estranged since Yinka moved out) is told to keep by a grief counsellor both feature in the latter part of the book and while partly helping her understand more of both their lives, perhaps functions more to help her understand more of her own.

Overall this is definitely an interesting examination of Grief – one that started very conventionally before taking a weird turn, an Unusual definitely but for me unsuccessful combination.

It has taken Mojisola decades to learn the fault lines in her own thinking. She was not at all on the outskirts of humanity. In her loneliness, lack of confidence, fears and terrors, she was right in the centre, along with everyone else. She had seen wrongly; or it had been a trick of light. Her mother’s fragility and devotion to a God she hoped would save her, save them both; Auntie Modupe’s regrets and earnest but clumsy attempts to repair. Even the mothers at Yinka’s school, impeccably made-up. Mojisola now imagines the make-up, the heels, as part of a suit of armour. Ferociously slender. And even as we lose (such is the design of war), we fight. That’s what she’d been seeing all along, seeing and not knowing what it was she’d been looking at. Not perfection, not people who never faltered, but rather the opposite. And so now, finally, she can include herself. Now she walks in the streets as if she built them with her own hands. Now she stares into faces as if mirrors; she sees herself, her fragility, her ugliness and wonder. She sees her shame and her courage, her capacity for failure but also for magic.