Stay With Me – Ayòbámi Adébáyò

‘Have you ever seen God in a labour room giving birth to a child? Tell me, Yejide, have you ever seen God in the labour ward? Women manufacture children and if you can’t? You are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman.’

Yejide and Akin have been married for two years when Akin’s mother begins bringing potential second wives to his office every Monday morning. When she threatens to start visiting Yejide with the women each week, Akin agrees to marry Funmi. The deciding factor? That she doesn’t insist on moving in with him. Instead, he installs her in a flat, leaving Yejide blissfully unaware of her existence.

At the beginning of the novel, and four years into Akin and Yejide’s marriage, Iya Martha, Yejide’s father’s oldest wife, and Baba Lola, Akin’s uncle, present Yejide with Funmi. They’re convinced that when Funmi gets pregnant Yejide will too.

I had expected them to talk about my childlessness. I was armed with millions of smiles. Apologetic smiles, pity-me-smiles, I-look-unto-God smiles, name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick, and I had them ready.

Yejide is an educated woman with her own hairdressing salon business. She is smart, confident and independent, but the society she lives in isn’t constructed to recognise women as such. The lack of a pregnancy is seen as her shortcoming, and when Yejide calls Akin a bastard, Iya Martha criticises her for not allowing Funmi to stay in their house. She says Yejide should be grateful to her husband, while Yejide points out to the reader that she pays half of the rent.

The novel alternates between Yejide and Akin’s points of view. This structural decision adds depth, allowing Adébáyò to consider the effects of a patriarchal society which values gender constructs, particularly motherhood, from both a female and a male perspective. Adébáyò uses it particularly well for moments of dramatic irony, priming the reader for the point when the other half of the couple will discover a betrayal.

It’s obvious that Akin loves his first wife and not his second, but also that he feels torn between Yejide and his mother, who makes her expectations clear. As Funmi inserts herself further into their lives and Yejide tries everything – doctors, prophets, priests – in order to help her conceive, their marriage begins to feel the strain and both of them make choices that will have devastating consequences.

Stay With Me considers a patriarchal, patrilineal, heterosexual society’s expectations of a married couple. It examines the pressure for couples to produce children; the value that’s placed on the continuation of the bloodline.

Adébáyò incorporates something of the thriller genre with a few unexpected and shocking twists, while writing sentences as beautiful as these:

I did not feel better. I would not feel better for a very long time. Already, I was coming undone, like a hastily tied scarf, coming loose, on the ground before the owner knows it.

But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.

These days I tell myself that is why I stretched to accommodate every new level of indignity, so I could have someone who would look for me if I went missing.

Stay With Me is intelligent, provocative and gripping. Ayòbámi Adébáyò is an exciting new talent.

If you will be in or around London a week today (Tuesday 7^th March), I will be chairing a New Nigerian Fiction night at Waterstones, Gower Street featuring Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Chibundo Onuzo, author of The Spider King’s Daughter and Welcome to Lagos. More information and tickets are available here.

Thanks to Canongate for the review copy.