Ayobami Adebayo
A finalist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo is an impressive debut novel.
The setting is Nigeria. The narrative unfolds in the first-person voices of a young married couple, Yejide and Akin. The voices alternate, describing the same events from two different perspectives. There are also alternating shifts in time from the mid-1980s to 2008. These provide the back story of how Yejide and Akin met in university, fell in love, married, and were later torn apart by circumstances and events.
Yejide and Akin are initially presented as a happily married couple. Akin is an employee at a bank and Yejide owns a successful hair salon. They seem to have everything going for them with one exception. Even after four years of marriage, medical tests, and fertility procedures, Yejide has failed to get pregnant. Family members intercede and force Akin to take on a second wife to provide him with children. Understandably, conflicts ensue. Yejide resorts to desperate measures to get pregnant. And because he loves his wife and wants to save his marriage, Akin resorts to his own desperate measures to ensure his wife’s pregnancy. Their marriage falls apart as the lies, deceptions, secrets, and manipulations gradually surface.
Against the backdrop of a Nigeria subject to political upheavals and military coups, Yejide and Akin experience personal tragedies at the deaths of their children due to sickle-cell disease. The couple is subjected to intense family pressure to participate in traditional rituals to ward off the evil spirits that ostensibly plague their family. With her third pregnancy, Yejide determines not to get too attached to her child, fully anticipating she will die young as did her former siblings.
Adebayo knows how to tell a story that sustains reader interest with its many twists and turns, shocking revelations, dramatic tension, and skillful use of suspense, all of which pack a powerful emotional punch. The intimacy generated by the first-person voices of Yejide and Akin affords them the opportunity to describe the intense familial pressure they experience and to explain why they made the choices they did. We may not agree with their decisions, but we can understand and sympathize. The characters are multi-dimensional, flawed, and conflicted. Their voices are authentic, their plight generating compassion. The supporting cast of characters are equally well-drawn, especially Akin’s brother, Yejide’s in-laws, and her multiple step-mothers.
Woven into the fabric of the narrative are elements of Nigerian culture, traditional beliefs, customs, food, and folk tales. The plot is well-constructed with shocking revelations periodically interspersed throughout the narrative to sustain reader interest until the surprise ending. The novel lays bare the extent to which people are willing to sacrifice their core beliefs in order to satisfy their fundamental need for love and acceptance.
Highly recommended.