Book Club Read 1: Golibe
So many lost babies.
The book club finally got around to selecting our books of the month (after confirming that they were in stock at a local bookshop and available on Kindle), and I was so sure we were getting this party started at last. And then the day came, and no one was able to make it. Bummer? Yes. But this I was prepared to experience. I sing in a community choir that meets for rehearsal every Tuesday evening, and even when the rains are terrible and traffic unbearable and people just can’t get there, there are still always quite a number who will show up, and that’s because the choir usually has well over 50 singers. Our book club’s much much smaller number has its benefits but also its disadvantages. This did prompt a pivot, however.
A learning here for me was about embracing uncertainty. Even though it would be better for organising purposes to have a system for getting RSVPs, I am reluctant to go in that direction because 1) more detailed organising means doing more, and I am a big believer in doing less, and 2) it is important to me that the space we create is expansive enough to accommodate the rest of our members’ lives. You come because you know you are welcome and because you want to spend time with other people doing this thing; there are no consequences for attending to other parts of your life. Embracing uncertainty means accepting that sometimes people will not come, for whatever reason, and focusing instead on making a space that they return to. So I have chosen to lighten the load of preparation such that all that we need is the gathering place and the people and the book. When we can manage the extras (Wine! Snacks! Roses!) with all of us chipping in, we can bring them back in. Doing less. So much of adult life is forever following up on things and I, for one, would rather not volunteer myself for any more of that.
Additionally, rather than mark time on the book we were to discuss, I opt to give it this digital space and then move along.
I found Golibe to fall into a cloyingly familiar category of women’s fiction: the kind that is most interested in not women, as such, but in marriage and children. This book is littered with dead babies. So many lost and longed for children. Children, and how society sanctions them, are the point of this book.
After the death of her father, the titular Golibe leaves London for the small town in Nigeria where her parents were from to find her roots. An adopted child, she wants to find out who her birth mother was. More than Golibe the young woman, she is Golibe the bereft child. In Ogwashi, the setting in Nigeria, she meets her cousins and aunt, each of them characterised in great part by marriage and children. Her old Aunt Ekwi is not married and had no children and is revealed to be bitter about it, wondering how women less virtuous than herself could find husbands when she could not. Her cousin Anuli elicits lots of shaking heads because she is unmarried at her big age and chasing after men who do not want her. Anuli’s sister, Awele, is married, a good Christian woman, but cannot have children though she wants them desperately.
So begins the book’s preoccupation with the parent-child relationship. As the story progresses, we discover that Awele brought shame upon her family as a teenager when she got pregnant and had an abortion that left her bleeding on the bathroom floor. She believes her inability to have children is God punishing her and her husband—her for this and him for having two children out of wedlock before they met. Anuli is revealed to have had a child when she was much younger with the only man she had ever loved. But the child was born sick, cerebral palsy, and died at three years old, and Anuli became a different woman. Golibe also learns that before they adopted her, her parents’ marriage was strained and nearly broken when her father impregnated one of his students, much to the joy of his family because Golibe’s mother had not borne him any children. His wife refused to have anything to do with the child, such that he abandoned his son and distanced himself from his family in order to save his marriage.
In the course of questioning the whole village about her lineage, Golibe finds herself entangled with multiple men, all who become infatuated with her upon their first sighting of her. The main love interest, whom she eventually ends up with, is Duke, and even that budding relationship is not free from the weight of lost children. Duke returned to Nigeria from London after a mental breakdown triggered by the discovery that his three daughters were actually not his, and his now ex-wife and her boyfriend had orchestrated the whole thing to use him to situate themselves in the UK. His ex-wife left him, taking her daughters with her, and after recovering from the breakdown, Duke longs for his children and wishes deeply to be reunited with them. Wringing this theme even further, it is then revealed that Duke’s own mother had a one-night stand and got pregnant while he was away in London. Though at first she was joyful because a baby meant new life to abate her loneliness, the village turned on her for this, and eventually, she went into premature labour and lost the baby.
In this story, as in many cultures, children make or break a woman. When they arrive outside of marriage, they are a source of deep shame, tearing families apart in ways that take decades to repair and ripping dignity from the mothers. Yet it is crucial for a woman to have them—within a union sanctioned by God and man, and only then. In what always sounds like a cruel joke, the absence of children within marriage has the effects similar to those of the presence of children outside marriage. But if you get it just right, get a man to choose you as a suitable wife and then have children, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. The happy ending entails Anuli, Awele, and Golibe all now mothers of living children.
It is not out of place for this story to keep children in its refrain. What it seems to say through Golibe’s journey is that self-discovery is tied inextricably to familial discovery. And usually, familial discovery takes form in the unearthing of secrets, most of which involve the very thing that gives rise to families—sex and the life it creates. In its way, the story is pointing to what happens when children are born outside the protection of marriage in a society that prescribes marriage as the greenlight for procreation. In the wake of each child conceived outside of marriage in the story is the deterioration of social connection and emotional wellbeing. The women are shunned by society, abandoned emotionally by their parents and partners, and the babies are lost. It happens to Awele, Anuli, Golibe’s adoptive mother, Duke’s mother, Duke’s ex-wife, and, as Golibe finds out finally, her own birth mother. There is nothing but pain down that road, the story says, and it is clear: that burden rests squarely on the women’s shoulders. We can see Golibe as the control group for this perspective: she does not have penetrative sex until her wedding to the man she loves and who loves her.
This book is steeped in Christian beliefs and highlights how embedded they are in many African cultures. For this reason it may be unpalatable to those with a more liberal outlook. The picture it paints is not untrue, but the story does have a stance, and not everyone will agree with it. I found out at the end of it that the author first wrote and published it as a serialised novel, which aligns with the experience of reading it. The writing relies mostly on narrative summary; a lot happens and there are several telenovela-like plot twists and cliffhangers and you get the sense that even as you are speeding through, you are not getting to the ending as quickly as you thought you would. Just like you might expect of a serialised story that just keeps going as long as it needs to.
So is it a romance novel? I mean, sure—who's to say? Genre boundaries are porous. And the blurb does not mislead: it is Golibe’s journey, and that happens to include several romantic relationships and one ultimate one. As it happens, for me, who will take just about any story as long as there is a romance I can root for somewhere in there, that is good enough.
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.