Book Reviews

Book Review - Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

I have never known a book to be so emotional and personally relatable. It addresses the current socio-economic problems that men and women face everyday.

Invoking so much emotion, I literally had to stop after a few chapters to avoid tearing up. Women go through so much pain. Pain to make a marriage work sometimes undeservingly so. Men also going through the most and facing pressure from their parents and society siring them to bring forth offspring which sometimes would not be.

I understood that when people are married, especially in our African culture, society feels entitled to fruits of the marriage which are children. They do not expect anything less of that and will make you do anything to have that happen. They force people to be ashamed about not having children and having that as a choice is actually taboo. Most people suffer and the only way to avoid that prejudice, judgement and scorn is to migrate to the foreign land so that your parents blame it on the other ethnic groups that would have corrupted their children.

Stay with me, depicts an average successful and learned Nigerian family. The mother in-law drives the son and daughter in law mad all by herself. Them being the good children try by all means to appease her and go the extra mile consulting spiritualists and herbalists. I was quite intrigued by the mental state Yejide was in after she visited a spiritualist and believed she was pregnant.

What interested me the most was her inability to tell that Akin her husband was sick since he could not achieve a boner. For all those years they stayed married and Yejide despite being a virgin had a little experience which other men, she should have seen the problem from the onset. Should i blame it on love? Naivety? I don't know but I felt that the author short changed us there for a learned virgin's story.

The next issue was all the secrecy on Akin's part seeking treatment and not disclosing his condition to his wife. I think Akin was selfish individual who only cared for himself and him alone. He watched his wife suffer and dragged by his own mother in a bid to get pregnant and get he knew the fault was with him and medically it was proven that the wife was ok. He kept the secrets to himself of the treatments and his sexual dysfunction. This is an issue which to date most people are uncomfortable with. The general acceptance that a men is infertile is taboo but women are labeled barren instantly without hesitation. That is a societal ill that targets women . I think they loved each other deeply and vibed a lot.

Yejide was such an unfortunate girl ever since she was born with no biological mother to look up to but bad step mothers. She grew up to be a strong woman and i feel like if her mother was alive she would have been helped sooner. She would have confided in her about her marital problems and maybe the awkwardness of it avoided. She slept with the brother's husband because of desperation but fate had other plans and took away 2 children from her. Sad ordeal altogether she left her broken after years of mental instability and being labeled barren.

The ending is quite alright as she finally gets to be called moomi (for mother) by a child who was named Rotimi which means stay with me. For a change it was a happy ending which i liked. From experience, i have learnt not to expect a happy ending, it can be anything which leaves you feeling rather perplexed if not annoyed. Chimamanda taught me well, expect anything!

For a debut novel, Ayobami Adebayo did well to add to African Literature. I recommend this book a worthy read.

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