Latifa spent the whole day familiarizing herself with Baaba and Umar. She found their behavior somehow weird, but you find different kinds of people here in Kano, she thought.By Fatima Dansumaila
Last semester during one of the courses I was taking, I had the fortune of meeting the first published writer I ever personally met, Nigerian-born Fatima Dansumaila. Her novel was published when she was seventeen, and she kindly offered me a signed copy of it. I was fascinated by it, naturally, but didn't get around to reading it until a few days ago.
It's fair to say this was one of the most engaging narratives I have read. The book was page-turner, which I don't think is necessarily the easiest feat. It chronicles the lives of two sisters, Saratu and Latifa, who have been raised in the US but returned to Nigeria due to their increasingly politically active father. After a foiled kidnapping event, the sisters discover their parents have been assassinated in the middle of the night and they are handed over to their conniving next-of-kin.
In many ways this novel follows the classic trajectory of a Cinderella tale with a twist. A feminist narrative, the two sisters and their helpful friend help overturn their drug addicted and abusive relatives who have every intention of swindling them of their inheritance (which runs in the millions) and at the same time are plotting to have them married off to men four times their age.
The secondary characters are intriguing: the poor, aged, and unorthodox widower--whose late wife was Indian, and as such developed in him an appreciation for Bollywood songs and movies-- who lives across the street where Latifa is confined, and who eventually helps her achieve her freedom, and Maryam, the wealthy girl who lives across where Saratu is kept and who seems to have it all except that she is struggling with being caught pregnant out of wedlock to a man her father doesn't approve of and who is coercing her to undergo an abortion.
I once read somewhere that every successful story has an identifiable and strong villain--and this novel is adept at creating villains that are at once realistic without being reduced to cardboard characters. Hajiya Jamila, the woman who takes Latifa under her wing, is a notorious drug dealer with numerous young boyfriends and a kitchen full of alcohol. Yet she isn't happy -- her boyfriends are addicted to heroin, and her days are filled with a seeming endlessness. Her spurts of remorse over her master plan to rob her niece of all she has are in some ways preferable to the family that adopts Saratu, showers her with compliments but are even more greedy and are preparing for her marriage to Maryam's sixty year old father.
I enjoyed this novel for a number of reasons: reading about the different foods in Nigerian households, the socioeconomic setup of the community mirrored what I've noticed in Bangladesh, for example, the way a wealthy person is estimated by how many cars they have or generators in their home (as the electricity is prone to going out) and the ways in which differences in wealth can sour relations between blood relatives and especially so if one has grown up away from the country without the opportunity to develop emotional bonds with relatives. The naivete of Saratu, who truly believes in all the kind words she is hearing at her adoptive family and their disdain at her innocence is quite similar, perhaps stereo-typically so, to something I've heard time and again directed to me and my sister. The kind of street smarts that a place like Nigeria can teach children, as well as the very omnipresent misogyny of the culture and its interpretations of religion are both eye opening and tragically realistic.
What bothered me however was the conclusion the two sisters and even the relatives came back to again and again--that they can all achieve their dreams if they travel to the US. It's almost as though all they could see in their "motherland" was corruption and decay, and they are not given the ability to find a way to be reconciled with Nigeria, or win the war and remain on the turf instead of being exiled. It's as though they were equating Nigeria with all that is bad--and as such I felt it descended into a 2D plane instead of reaching greater psychological depths. Of course, this could be arguably counteracted by the ending in which the reader sees Hajiya Jamila, even after attempted murder of Latifa, manage to get away and track her to the US -- implying that as long as the sisters are not of age and have vast amounts of money to their name, they will continue to be targeted, no matter where they are. But I felt this was very possibly included more as a suspense or thriller hook than to make a point about the world not being safe, as opposed to only Nigeria not being safe.
I liked: The pacing, the humor which mocks the hypocrisy of people and their ways of justifying unethical acts through religion (in one scene where after the aunt, Baaba, who had adopted Saratu realized she could use her role as the guardian to secure Saratu's inheritance, she immediately thanked Allah and prayed out of gratitude for having been given the brains to cook up such a scheme) the plot, the side characters.
I disliked: The edition I was reading had numerous spelling and grammatical errors and some words which I felt were awkward in context. The story was stereotypical at times, and many of the situations and characters are one-dimensional.
68/100
All in all, a thoroughly captivating novel and especially so for anyone interested in the domestic life in Nigeria, in familial drama, or in just a very feel-good story about the struggles of two orphans.
In many ways this novel follows the classic trajectory of a Cinderella tale with a twist. A feminist narrative, the two sisters and their helpful friend help overturn their drug addicted and abusive relatives who have every intention of swindling them of their inheritance (which runs in the millions) and at the same time are plotting to have them married off to men four times their age.
The secondary characters are intriguing: the poor, aged, and unorthodox widower--whose late wife was Indian, and as such developed in him an appreciation for Bollywood songs and movies-- who lives across the street where Latifa is confined, and who eventually helps her achieve her freedom, and Maryam, the wealthy girl who lives across where Saratu is kept and who seems to have it all except that she is struggling with being caught pregnant out of wedlock to a man her father doesn't approve of and who is coercing her to undergo an abortion.
I once read somewhere that every successful story has an identifiable and strong villain--and this novel is adept at creating villains that are at once realistic without being reduced to cardboard characters. Hajiya Jamila, the woman who takes Latifa under her wing, is a notorious drug dealer with numerous young boyfriends and a kitchen full of alcohol. Yet she isn't happy -- her boyfriends are addicted to heroin, and her days are filled with a seeming endlessness. Her spurts of remorse over her master plan to rob her niece of all she has are in some ways preferable to the family that adopts Saratu, showers her with compliments but are even more greedy and are preparing for her marriage to Maryam's sixty year old father.
I enjoyed this novel for a number of reasons: reading about the different foods in Nigerian households, the socioeconomic setup of the community mirrored what I've noticed in Bangladesh, for example, the way a wealthy person is estimated by how many cars they have or generators in their home (as the electricity is prone to going out) and the ways in which differences in wealth can sour relations between blood relatives and especially so if one has grown up away from the country without the opportunity to develop emotional bonds with relatives. The naivete of Saratu, who truly believes in all the kind words she is hearing at her adoptive family and their disdain at her innocence is quite similar, perhaps stereo-typically so, to something I've heard time and again directed to me and my sister. The kind of street smarts that a place like Nigeria can teach children, as well as the very omnipresent misogyny of the culture and its interpretations of religion are both eye opening and tragically realistic.
What bothered me however was the conclusion the two sisters and even the relatives came back to again and again--that they can all achieve their dreams if they travel to the US. It's almost as though all they could see in their "motherland" was corruption and decay, and they are not given the ability to find a way to be reconciled with Nigeria, or win the war and remain on the turf instead of being exiled. It's as though they were equating Nigeria with all that is bad--and as such I felt it descended into a 2D plane instead of reaching greater psychological depths. Of course, this could be arguably counteracted by the ending in which the reader sees Hajiya Jamila, even after attempted murder of Latifa, manage to get away and track her to the US -- implying that as long as the sisters are not of age and have vast amounts of money to their name, they will continue to be targeted, no matter where they are. But I felt this was very possibly included more as a suspense or thriller hook than to make a point about the world not being safe, as opposed to only Nigeria not being safe.
I liked: The pacing, the humor which mocks the hypocrisy of people and their ways of justifying unethical acts through religion (in one scene where after the aunt, Baaba, who had adopted Saratu realized she could use her role as the guardian to secure Saratu's inheritance, she immediately thanked Allah and prayed out of gratitude for having been given the brains to cook up such a scheme) the plot, the side characters.
I disliked: The edition I was reading had numerous spelling and grammatical errors and some words which I felt were awkward in context. The story was stereotypical at times, and many of the situations and characters are one-dimensional.
68/100
All in all, a thoroughly captivating novel and especially so for anyone interested in the domestic life in Nigeria, in familial drama, or in just a very feel-good story about the struggles of two orphans.
The book is surely great 8/10
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