Book Club Read 4: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
When I say romance by African writers, this is what I mean.
I'll come right out and say it: I enjoyed this book immensely. I enjoyed the story and, far more importantly, I enjoyed the writing. This matters because so far in my foray into romance novels written by African authors I have been met with disappointment after another as far as the writing itself is concerned. I have felt that the books were not executed as competently as they could be, that there was a technical ability falling short. It stood in the way of my enjoyment of the stories and was rather upsetting because I wondered, uncharitably, whether the team behind the books was taking for granted that I was here, engaging with what it had put out into the world—where “I” means the reader in general. It felt like a lack of care, which I sometimes translate into a lack of resources. But I am not always convinced, especially where the book in question might have started out self-published but was then acquired by a large publisher. In such a case I then have to wonder why the African reader is not worthy of editorial rigour in a book telling their stories and marketed to them.
But this, oh, this was not that. I found this book beautifully written, as by a craftsperson who knows what they are about and takes it seriously. The language is masterful, intentional, in a way that now highlights for me that not only was the writer present but so was the editor. For this reason, it is the first one I have come across that I recommend without reservation. Because we can disagree about what the story does, but I am confident that anyone who takes this recommendation will not have their experience of the story sullied by writing that has not been tended to adequately. For the others, while the story might have been great, the poor construction of the thing at the sentence level made the reading experience unpleasant enough that I would not return to it nor vouch for it. This one I will return to multiple times, I suspect, and I encourage anybody interested in romance by African writers to give it a shot.
Akwaeke Emezi is a skilled writer, this is not in question. What has been interesting in my conversations about this particular book is how strongly people seem to react to it. The book club discussion was the liveliest we have had so far. It appears to me that readers already familiar with Akwaeke’s other work disliked this book, I assume because it is considerably different from others like Freshwater or The Death of Vivek Oji. My very first conversation about this book was two or three years ago, before I had read it, and the person talking about it with me was reading it and hating it. I got the sense that a lot of the hating it was to do with the genre. All the criticism sounded to me like the typical criticism levelled against romance. I find similar sentiments in other conversations, and I conclude that people without a taste for romance tend to dislike this book. It is not that Akwaeke’s skill is in decline here; it is that here they write romance, following the familiar beats of a romance story, and that is going to delight some and distress some.
As a romance reader, I was delighted. This, by the way, is my introduction to Akwaeke’s work. I own three other books by them—the two mentioned above plus Dear Senthuran—but I have not gotten around to those. I tend to delay getting around to Important BooksTM. I have read essays and snippets here and there though, so I appreciated deeply that I found the same writing ability in this book. I love that an established author with the backing of Big Publishing’s infrastructure turned their gaze towards what I am learning is a neglected audience to write a story in which romance makes up the core rather than the frills.
And what a story. Beyond just the fact that it is romance, the book elicits strong reactions because of the love story itself: a young woman is dating a young man and it appears to be going okay, only for her to meet his father and discover that that, in fact, is the love of her life. Mess ensues. You can’t tell me that’s not a compelling narrative.
That mess is precisely why I enjoy romance and why I enjoyed this story. We love to imagine ourselves capable of controlling the experience of falling in love, even though we know first-hand that it is a kind of madness. I’d like to think that I am not the sort of woman who would date a man and then fall in love with his father, but the truth is that I cannot know, and so I cannot even judge Feyi, the main character. We have all these rules about how we intend to conduct ourselves with potential partners, and then love and desire teach us how quickly we can throw those rules out the window, how deeply we can regret it when we don’t.
Feyi finds herself in a situation I hope to God I never experience. She is seeing Nasir, taking things slow. He expresses that he is serious about her from the get-go and is happy to be her friend in the ways that she needs until such a time as she is ready to give more. Feyi is an artist and Nasir’s father is a wealthy celebrity chef, who happens to be a big art collector. Their relationship opens the door for Feyi to gain a spot at an important art exhibition, and she and Nasir fly to the island he is from, where they will stay at his father’s while she prepares her installation for the exhibition. And then upon her first sighting of Alim, Nasir’s father, she starts to feel things. So a man professes to care for you as a friend, confesses that he hopes you will become more, supports your career by using his network to give you an opportunity to showcase your work among the best of them, caters for all your expenses for this trip, and opens up his family and home to you…and then his father is the one your spirit and body are drawn to.
The reason I hope to never find myself in her situation is not that I think Feyi did an abhorrent thing by falling for Alim. I do not. It is that nothing I know about men suggests that one would be able to handle it with honour if he were interested in me and I ended up choosing his father. And when he eventually finds out, Nasir handles it as badly as you might expect, bringing to the fore the question of whether he was ever truly a friend or was already exercising claim to Feyi before she consented to it. I can understand his emotional anguish. Still, Feyi did not intend to hurt him by falling for his father, and she hadn’t even committed to Nasir yet. In many ways, love makes hostages of us—nobody involved would have chosen for this to happen. But it happens nonetheless, and it is costly. For Feyi and Alim’s relationship to bloom, other relationships are destroyed: between Feyi and Nasir and between Alim and his children. They are forced to decide whether the price is worth it.
I do not think Feyi is faultless. I imagine that in her situation I would have opted to remove myself from Alim’s house, broken things off with Nasir, and only then pursued a relationship with Alim. But again, it’s easy to say how you would handle things better in a situation you have never experienced.
Feyi’s back story adds so much depth to her love story with Alim. She was married before and lost her husband—and much of herself—in a car accident. This bleeds into her work as an artist, and the book is deeply concerned with what grief makes of us. In the scenes that show how she channels this grief into her projects, you are right there, pulled into your own griefs and the truth that they will always be with you. The story says, I think, that there is nothing to be done for it, that it will not grow smaller within you, but hopefully, you will grow larger around it, and you can still make a life.
I categorise this as a romance because what I took away most heavily was the relationship between Feyi and Alim and how it blossomed (so much desire! So much pining! So much connection! So much heat!) in the aftermath of grief, even though the book was also about what it takes for an artist to create and to walk through the right doors. For this reason, I love the cover with the hand holding the chain and the ring. That cover is what the story actually is. On the cover of the copy I have, Feyi is lounging in a bikini, a plane is overhead, palm trees are on either side of her, and a sunset is behind her. In this cover, the trip to the island is the focal point of the story, as if this were mainly about a fun vacation and not about artistic work and love after loss. Interestingly, the back cover blurb reaffirms this, selling “a dream island holiday: poolside cocktails, beach sunsets, and elaborate meals.” I wonder about this, about whether it was necessary to market the book this way. It feels like a poor representation to me, incongruent. The island setting does play a significant role in the story; I’m just not convinced it's the thing the cover needed to emphasise.
I read this back in March and I have been holding it since. It is easily one of my favourite books of this year. When I say I am looking for romance by African writers, this is what I am hoping to find. Now if I could just find it set in Kenya and in other African countries and written by authors from beyond West Africa.
The Roses & Wine Book Club meets two Thursday evenings a month in Lavington, Nairobi to discuss romance novels by African writers. If you are interested, go here.
Book cover image sources: