I was showing off my new bookshelves on Facebook while pointing out plenty of empty space (we bought giant bookshelves that are 2.5 metres tall) and a friend of mine recommended Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s Stay with Me to fill the gaps. As she had previously recommended Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (a book I expected to be a witty love story, oh, could I have been more wrong?) and Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde’s What We Owe (a book that saw me sobbing uncontrollably for half an hour), I was intrigued. She also messaged me privately to say that if I do not have children as a choice, I should go and read the book; but if it is otherwise, I may want to read something else. So I put it to my two other friends with whom we are starting a very small long-distance book club and since they both said yes I opened this book on Tuesday and today I am 200 pages in.

The book moves back and forth in time, or so it seems at the very beginning, and interchanges two narrators: Yejide and her husband Akin. Shifting in time we only learn the story in parts and the chapter divisions create an impression of putting together a puzzle. The reader is invited to draw their own conclusions before they are presented one by one of the characters. However, everything is more complicated than it seems at first glance.

I have found myself gasp, internally, when some new fact or twist is introduced or revealed. It is a story of little outrages and I have to ask myself whether something like that is really possible. It is not a matter of supernatural, science-fiction or just plain bonkers but rather of the mundane where the characters are trying to do their best with what the life is presenting them and yet…

I think I can understand their actions and choices, I think. I, most certainly, sympathise with them. I find myself on their side but… What does that make me, I wonder.

Hundred more pages to go and I expect to gasp some more.

UPDATE:

Last Saturday we had our first book club through Skype and discussed this book in detail - sharing our different readings, perspectives and personal inputs.  We started the discussion a couple of weeks earlier by posting and answering each others’ questions, which provided us with a variety of themes and topics to chat through.

My original plan was to take notes but that went out the window pretty quickly so this will be a jumble of things that were said that I happen to remember.

I found it intriguing how acts and events resonated differently with each of us and how maybe our personal experiences informed our reactions and readings. We kept coming back to guilt, blame and victim; oscillating between Akin, Yejide and the cultural traditions – concluding neither could be blamed single-handedly. I struggled to stay on Yejide’s side as I saw her as fiercely self-centred, however, it seems that it served as a self-preserving mechanism for her - having no mother to fight in her corner. B. was of a different opinion, she saw Akin as the motor behind Yejide’s actions through the understanding that he was the one person Yejide chose to trust and open up to. D. was able to understand and exculpate every character (including Moomi, with whom I am still struggling) through the mitigating circumstance of traditions and societal expectations. I do not think there is a single right answer, I found it compelling how the perception of each character or act was fully fuelled by our personal and subjective responses.

Both B. and D. read the political events and the organised burglary threats much closely connected to the story line and gave those pieces a completely new meaning for me. D. talked about how Akin and Yejide met during a protest and how Akin ran away from Yejide as soon as the shots were fired only later realising he left her behind and he could not live without her. The burglary threats were put in the context of the inner world of Akin and Yejide being violated and destroyed.

Akin seemed to have been vindicated, at least partially, by his dedication to Rotimi and I believe we all wished for the family reunion at the very end. Afterall, Akin said very early on in the book: “If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”

We closed our analysis of the book by summing up its themes as marriage, loyalty (who and what you are loyal to), love, and culture and traditions and how they affect you.

I know much more was said but this will have to do and I am already looking forward to our next session.