Domestic intranquillity
Fertility struggles can provoke significant anxiety — so much so that it can be hard for would-be parents to fathom how much fear and grief might be generated if their desires are fulfilled. Ayobami Adebayo’s taut, intimate debut novel, “Stay With Me,” skillfully dramatizes a worstcase scenario.
Set in Nigeria, the story is told by both Yejide and Akin, a married couple that seemed meant for each other, but who are unable to conceive early in their marriage. Both want children, and they live in a place and time where having children remains crucial. Their families’ and society’s expectations related to reproduction are crushing — but worse things are yet to come.
The novel careens backward and forward in time against a backdrop of politics, protests, crime and civil unrest. It opens with a direct address by Yejide to Akin about their relationship in 2008 from the Nigerian city of Jos. Her tone is sad. It is clear even before we learn about their marriage that they have separated, and that infertility and a second wife played a role in the separation. However, there is also a mention of children, so we know from the outset that something other than infertility became an obstacle in their relationship.
In 1985, the spouses’ respective families come to visit, “prepared for war.” Not a literal war, but the battle they intend to wage against Yejide and Akin as a couple in love. They try to persuade Akin to take a second wife, and they’ve brought a candidate for this position, Funmi, a woman “fair, pale yellow like the inside of an unripe mango” with blood-red lipstick.
Yejide writes, “I had expected them to talk about my childlessness. I was armed with millions of smiles . ... name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick — and I had them ready.” A couple of weeks after Yejide reluctantly accepts Funmi into her life, there is a military coup, followed by a new government.
Despite the melancholy tone struck by Yejide’s initial address to Akin, an interesting mixture of energetic rage and dark levity propels the chapters set in the past. An obvious comparison is to Chimamanda Adichie’s novels, which also speak to a tension between tradition and contemporary desires in Nigeria. But in its he-said, shesaid consideration of betrayal in a marriage marked by angry humor, “Stay With Me” is also close to Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies.”
Betrayal precedes Akin and Yejide’s marriage, and even the couple’s origin story is stained with it. Akin reminisces about how the couple met while on dates with other people in a movie theater, and he dumped his date to be with Yejide. During their relationship, he provides financial support for Yejide to open her own salon. Within two years of Akin and Yejide marrying, however, his mother begins to visit him with potential second wives. Believing that Yejide won’t be able to tolerate his mother’s relentless pressure, he secretly agrees to marry Funmi, a woman who seems not to want much from him.
Rarely do novelists convey the mixed emotions of early motherhood — the tedium, confusion, terror, guilt, ecstasy and delight — as accurately as this book does. Yejide’s perspective as a betrayed wife struggling with fertility and later as a mother struggling with her children’s sickle cell anemia is conveyed with an operatic intensity that almost approaches the pitch of Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment.” Adebayo’s prose is so direct you mainline the drama, rooting for Yejide and Akin to make it in spite of many narrative twists and turns that require a reconsideration of their relationship.
The twists and turns make for powerful storytelling, but not all of the twists work. A reveal toward the end feels like a bit of a cheat. We’ve already been inside the character’s point of view so frequently before that point, it doesn’t feel right that vital information should have been kept from us. Still, after many heartbreaking revelations, the novel resolves with an unexpected degree of warmth.
Early on, Akin tells the reader, “Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends . ... But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”
This is perhaps the most striking theme of the novel — how romantic love shattered by personal betrayal, societal pressure, family pressure, infertility and illness is not necessarily destroyed, but may endure in a new form. The story is ancient, but Adebayo imbues it with a vibrant, contemporary spirit.