Book Review: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
“I must leave this city today and come to you.” These are the arresting first words of a novel of singular tenderness.
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo stays with one in several strange ways. The voice is that of Yejide, who is about to leave the city of Jos in North-Central Nigeria in December 2008 to reunite with her lover, Akin in the town of Ife in the Southwest. “There’s a house waiting for me in Ife, right outside the university where you and I first met.” Yejide’s serenade makes whole a tremendous journey in longing, deceit, heartbreak, triumph, and all the allied troubles in-between.
From this beginning of hope and reconciliation, the novel switches back in time to Ilesa in 1985 when a second wife, Funmi, is, unbeknownst to Yejide, presented to Akin by Yejide’s stepmother. The narration then swivels to Akin lamenting on the travails of marrying for four years without any childbirth to crow about. The brand new second wife boasts of the children to be given birth to and Yejide redounds to anger, especially as her mother-in-law is only interested in having a grandchild.
A woman in search of the so-called “fruit of the womb” can fall for any prank. Yejide climbs “the Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles” to meet Prophet Josiah who promises a miracle pregnancy. Funmi’s imagined pregnancy gets to all of 11 months without any delivery, and to compound matters, the second wife Funmi moves in into the house to make for a crowded marriage.
Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo tells a very intriguing multi-dimensional story. There are so many set-pieces, notably: breastfeeding a goat, the birth and death of Olamide, Yejide sleeping with Akin’s younger brother Dotun, the death of Funmi, the birth of Sesan who is eventually diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia, the doctor telling Akin that he cannot biologically be the father of Sesan, the revelation that Akin actually arranged with Dotun to impregnate Yejide, the death of Sesan, Akin catching Yejide and Dotun in flagrante dalliance, the birth of Rotimi, the scepter of a curse, the revelation of the impotence of Akin, etc.
Adebayo’s Stay With Me throbs with realism in the depiction of events that happened in Nigeria within the span of years that the novel covers. The novel has a personal touch with me because I was a student at the then University of Ife back in 1981 when a student was killed and the protest march that followed led to the death of other students. The event is captured in Stay With Me, thus: “I was sure that a perfect moment would present itself for me to divorce Funmi, just as one had presented itself for me to marry Yejide in ’81. That year, Bukola Arogundade, a student of the University of Ife, was murdered.”
In another dimension, the slain journalist Dele Giwa lends to the novel a measure of authenticity. When the Gideon Orkar coup against Babangida happens there’s much animation as Akin says: “I told Dotun someone would take this man down. That Dele Giwa matter was too fishy.”
This is the first novel that throbs with felt life. Stay With Me deserves the multiform accolades it has thus far won across the continents.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist, and author.
Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.
