Book Club Read 2: The Sweetest Remedy
Rich dead men always leave a big mess and a good story behind.
This book felt stunningly similar to the last one, Golibe—and, as a book club member pointed out, to Ghana Must Go. The familiar theme of a young woman from a Western country returning to Nigeria after a parent’s death to reconnect with her roots, discover her identity, and fall in love in the process is front and centre right away.
I’ll be honest, the first seven or so chapters felt unbearable. The writing keeps repeating things it just said, which is by far my biggest criticism of it. Do you trust your reader’s intellect or not? Then there’s the dead father, who looms over the story so intensely he may as well be the main character. Every character’s being and behaviour goes back to his being and behaviour. The story makes sure you know quickly that he is the catalyst—like a father should be, it almost seems to say. And in these first chapters, it becomes rather irritating because everybody is presented already filtered through this man, and you can’t help feeling like it would have been more enjoyable to have him revealed to us in drip form over the course of the story so that we can not just get to know who everybody else really is but also make up our own minds about whether he was, in fact, a good man.
So I arrive at my main gripe with this and similar stories. So far, it seems like a lot of at least West African literature is deeply invested in portrayals of how everyone must deal with the messes that a dead man’s indiscretions leave behind. In romance, the indiscretions are so often to do with his poor treatment of his wife and/or children. The question that lingered for me was: when does a man’s treatment of the women he loves have bearing on whether or not he is a good man? Further, why are African men allowed to “make mistakes” where their families are concerned and have the consequences be played down rather than viewed for what they are—devastating. Why do you get to cheat on your wife, abandon your pregnant lover who didn’t even know you were married, and abandon your child, and still have everyone speedily gloss over your actions and insist that you were a good man?
I have a theory. In Christian African societies, marriage exists in a state of tension, caught between traditional cultural norms and Christian ideals—two frameworks that are often at odds. Traditionally, marriage was a way to organise society, a socially sanctioned vehicle for procreation. Through the institution, we know where every person belongs. We can trace your roots, make conclusions and predictions about who you are by looking at who you come from. Whether or not the couple grew fond of each other was left to fate, and other wives or other non-wife women were largely waved away because surely a man must have some hobbies. My parents tell me that in the Nandi community to which we belong, if a young wife displayed distress at her husband’s gallivanting, the older women would ask: “Why are you crying? Did he take the cooking stick with him?” He is doing his thing; you need to do yours and tend to your home and offspring.
In modern Christian marriages, however, the covenant of monogamy complicates the dynamic. The vows—only one woman and one man till death do them part—are spoken before God and man, but in reality, if they are broken, you must, as a woman, as much as it is within your power, ensure that only God knows. Meaning: be quiet, hide this shame, protect the institution, never mind your broken trust. Be faithful, you are in a covenant, but if your husband steps out, forgive and forget because he can still be a good man even if he cannot be faithful to you.
The book doesn’t spare any time at all to address the feelings of the wife who discovers upon her husband’s death that he had a whole other child this entire time. This story, the book says, is not about her. Instead, her mother and children immediately shift to proclaiming what a good man he was, directing any anger not at him but at Hannah, the daughter he abandoned. Sustained anger at the dead serves no purpose. This is true. But the story emphasises continually the right of the Jolade family to resent Hannah, the child out of wedlock who has now been thrust upon them in a precise will, and I have to wonder…why? None of this was her fault. She was mourning too, just for a different thing. When Hannah learns that it was her father’s sister who dissuaded him from folding her into his family, she also learns that her grandfather would have disowned him if he did—not for being unfaithful to his wife, but for having a child with a white woman.
This is what stayed with me throughout the book and in the time since I finished it: that to be African is to accept a man’s flaws, and as long as those flaws “only” involve marital or romantic betrayal, they are bearable. After all, there are much worse things he could be, so count your blessings.
So far this isn’t sounding much like a romance novel, so now the romance. Just as in Golibe, this was not the centre of the story. Hannah and Lawrence are immediately drawn to each other and begin a relationship as soon as she arrives in Nigeria. There’s no real tension or obstacles between them: the family accepts the relationship without qualm, they are both anxious about the fact that Hannah has to return to her home in San Francisco after the funeral but seem optimistic about their chances of making it work (long distance becomes less significant in the face of wealth), and the only conflict comes towards the end when Hannah wrongly assumes that the family, including Lawrence, was only kind to her to get their inheritance. She packs up and leaves, wanting nothing more to do with them. (This exact scenario also plays out in Golibe.)
The question this had us asking in the book club discussion was whether these books count as romance when the romantic storyline is the side plot. I think an argument can be made that maybe African romance has to be so deeply intertwined with identity and family because romantic relationships within our local contexts are rarely allowed to unfold in a vacuum. “When you marry someone, you marry their family.” I wonder whether this is just a realistic portrayal of what is, in which case, it would be disingenuous to say this is not romance just because it looks different from Western genre conventions. Maybe this is just what African romance often looks like: love budding amidst much larger familial and existential tensions. I am eager to find out whether this tendency appears in romance novels from other parts of the continent and in other collectivist cultures as well.
I enjoyed this a lot more than Golibe, even though the extent of the similarities was surprising. Once the story found its rhythm, I became invested in Hannah’s growing bond with her newfound family and her newfound romance. The premise is certainly compelling—rich dead men always leave a good story behind. And the book was a breezy read that didn’t overstay its welcome. In many ways, it was comforting. The siblings’ different personalities and their relationships with one another, their parents, and their grandmother were heartwarming. They felt like a group you could enjoy hanging out with, which I loved.
Except Tiwa. She’s the typical headstrong, abrasive, control-freak firstborn daughter that everyone insists is “actually really sweet deep down,” though we don’t see that side of her until the very end. What I will say is she probably deserved more depth than the story gave her, but ultimately, this wasn’t her story.
I’ve made an intentional decision to select a novel that’s not West African for our next read, so I am looking forward to seeing whether these themes emerge in that as well.
The Roses & Wine Book Club meets two Thursday evenings a month in Nairobi to discuss romance novels by African writers. If you are interested, please check out this Google Form.