Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
What lengths would you pursue to have a child? How much will the pressure placed by family and custom change you to your core? How long does deception and its reverberations have to run before you decide it has fundamentally changed everything about the person you love and the person you yourself have become?
In her stunning debut novel, Stay With Me, Ayobami Adebayo deals with all these issues as she explores the love story of Yejide and Akin, two young Nigerians who fall in love at first sight and know they want to be married. Theirs is a deep and abiding love, they see the world in the same way, living through political turmoil in their native Nigeria. She runs a successful hair salon and he has a good job at a bank.
But four years into their marriage there is a problem that will rock the very foundation of this deep intense love. As Akin muses “Before I got married I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it is in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”
Yejinde and Akin are forced to follow an old custom, even in contemporary Nigeria, the addition of a second wife if the first one cannot procreate. Yejinde finds herself in the position of iyale, first wife, when representatives from both families come to announce a new bride for Akin, Fummi. “She was fair, pale yellow like the inside of an unripe mango. Her think lips were covered with blood-red lipstick.” The fact that Akin knew this was coming hits Yejide like a bolt from the blue and it is the beginning of betrayals that affect husband and wife.
Ayobami is a writer of extraordinary grace and feeling. She calibrates the slow burn of a potential second wife’s presence beautifully. Though Fummi does not live with them to begin with, the quotidian details of Yejide and Akin’s life together is haunted by the specter of a second wife, poised to move in with them as soon as it is clear a pregnancy is not in the offing. Akin is adamant that he does not “do” polygamy and anyway, “we (he and Fummi) had a problem. We had nothing in common apart from the fact that we were married.”
Yejide’s only hope was to become pregnant before Fummi. Not only have the couple sought out modern medical support, Yejide is willing to pursue ancient folklore and custom in her desperation. In a marvelous set piece we follow her on a climb of the Mountain of Jaw Dropping Miracles, a site under the leadership of miracle worker Prophet Josiah. Her task, to drag a white goat to the top of the mountain, a white goat without wound, blemish or a speck of another color” Such is her desperation she is even willing to breast feed the goat as commanded.
The reader is completely absorbed by the heartbreaking challenge of Yejide’s efforts to become pregnant, an almost feverish psychosis that overtakes her. She undergoes a phantom pregnancy after that trip to the mountain and the strain on her marriage is intense.
Ultimately Yejide does become pregnant and the birth of the daughter is heralded across both families. Where could the book go now that the couple have overcome their hardest obstacle?
This is where Adebayo’s novel soars. She has chosen to tell the story in an alternating timeline, moving from 2008 at the beginning of the book and the gathering for Akin’s father’s funeral, and she moves back to the beginning of the love story in 1985 and moving forward, skillfully painting the story of this marriage through the eyes of both Yejide and Akin. It’s becoming a common device in marriage plots, used with great effect in Gone Girl and Fates and Furies amongst others.
The twists and turns and astonishing revelations of how we got to the birth of this child and moving forward in the life of this couple are superb storytelling. You get yourself into a comfortable rhythm and then she messes with the tempo and you are left gasping because you never imagined the secret just revealed or the twist about to befall this family.
This is a book about love, honesty, jealousy, changing cultures, external pressure, the delusions we easily convince ourselves of and what we will do to make sure that the person that we love the most in this world gets the thing they want the most.
It’s an enlightening story about contemporary Nigeria too. Yejide and Akin represent a new generation of Nigerian’s in an increasingly modern country, but the draw of older customs and the cultural clashes that ensue is something that they, like many other countries, are still working out.
It is also a story about strong women in this most patriarchal of situations. The men are powerless in fighting the tides of tradition and culture and the overwhelming sense of shame of not producing an heir overrides everything. It is the women who propel the story, the women who fight, the women who take matters into their own hands. The book is populated with women characters who are all trying to make the best of the hand they are dealt.
Ayobami Adebayo is a wonderful, gifted young writer who has crafted a book that is incredibly well structured, with language that is lyrical, empathetic, sensitive yet vibrant, with an ear for dialogue that radiates authenticity. She also writes about love, family and commitment with such maturity and wisdom and the book stays with you long after you have finished reading it. I’m so excited to have discovered this immensely talented young writer and can’t wait to read more of her work.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 260 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Themes: marriage, parenthood, changing cultures, jealousy, deception
Commitment: Absorbing and beautifully told story that will stay with you.
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