An Unusual Grief and The Power of Seeing.

I am high up in the sky, in pitch darkness somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when I finish reading Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief. My eyes are a little wet and there is a feeling in my chest that I cannot quite explain except to say that it feels like I have just sat down with my mother while we both cried: happy tears, sad ones, meaningful ones as the waters flowing from our eyes tie us together in eternal embrace. I can say without a doubt that An Unusual Grief touched me in a place a book has not touched me in a long, long time. It pressed upon so many places in my heart, places I have hidden and brushed over, wounds I have tried so hard to ignore, the book pulls everything to the surface and made me think, pause, weigh and made me commit to — more than ever before — a life of honesty and vulnerability shaped by the knowledge of life’s ephemerality and the deep brokenness of the people we love.

I knew I would like the book when someone told me it was about mothers and daughters. I have developed a ravenous obsession with mothering, with my grandmother, with maternal histories and linenagies. It is an obsession that grows everyday and is calling forth my work in ways that both scare and intrigue me. The book opens boldly showing its belly to us: this is a book about a mother who must confront her daughter’s suicide.

Now, this premise alone is staggeringly revolutionary in our culture. Suicide is still very much taboo, and Yoruba people have this whole business where a mother/parent must never look too closely at the death of their children. As if culture can suppress humanity. As if culture can suppress the need to dig to the root of how the thing you crated inside your one body has now ceased to exist. I am not surprised that Mojisola, Yinka’s mother, upon hearing the news, is the one who walks into the road for hours like a mad woman: the one who goes down to her daughter’s flat to search through every crucible to find the bits and pieces of her daughter’s life.

I am not surprised that she is the one that goes because while there are two parents there is only one mother. There is only one person who has carried that heartbeat: the same one that can no longer be heard anywhere else in this world; the same heartbeat that began underneath her ribcage, swimming in the ocean of her body. So, it is only normal that she goes in search of it. However, and I must give total props here to Yewande Omotoso’s creating of Mojisola, her character is so wondrously woven with complexity, raw honesty and such surprising yet realistic contours. I have never seen such a character woven before, a Yoruba woman in her Middle Ages who becomes a dominatrix, who smokes weed with her dead daughter’s landlady, whose heart aches for her lost daughter, even as it aches for herself and her strained marriage.

Alongside Yinka’s death is the subplot of Mojisola and her husband Titus, and the author takes us back top their days of courtship in Ole-Ife (I must say, the flashbacks and multi linearity of the narrative are so smoothly and expertly done). And although it is the usual age-old tale of a cheating husband, the peculiarities of this particular couple reveal all the ways in which childhood trauma, the ways in which people are raised make or mar their chances at being decent lovers, at being people who are truly committed to the radical act of vulnerability and open communication. It is because of so many unspoken things: Titus’ life long battle with depression, Mojisola’s postpartum depression that irrevocably changed her, Yinka’s depression that was ignored because of fear, all these many unspoken things culminated in Yinka’s decision to leave this world. It is something I write about often: the ways in which silence can and will kill us. Open mouths are fountains of healing. Yet our people love to keep their mouths shut, especially on the things that matter most.

Mojisola’s visit to her dead daughter’s apartment in Cape Town takes on so many unexpected detours. From searching through Yinka’s laptop and phone, to meeting up with her lovers, acquaintances and colleagues, this mother is trying to learn in death, the daughter who she did not know in life. Yinka and Mojisola’s relationship seemed strained from the very start, as in right from her Yinka’s presence in her mother’s womb. Mojisola was shocked when she became with child, and not because she had not been participating in child-making activity but because mothering was not something she thought would happen to her. It was something she subconsciously flinched at the thought of, partially due to her own troubled relationship with her mother. In Mojisola, we see a kind of woman that Nigerians like to believe does not exist: the woman who may not want to mother children. The book has in it one of the most authentic depictions of postpartum depression that I have ever read, and as someone who has been looking forward to children with a surprisingly strong fervor these days, it quelled and quieted me. Yinka was Mojisola’s first and only child: likely because she never became herself again after birthing her and she knew she did not have it in her to mother more than one child.

There is a Yoruba proverb my mother chants wistfully at every turn: omo ti o da, iya e lo ni. The bad child belongs to the mother. And so does the dead child. Everyone looks at Mojisola and whether implicitly or nexolictly they ask the same question: how could you let this happen? How are you so bad of a mother that you failed to keep your child alive? I had to sit with that for a long time. The ways in which it is mothers that keep children alive, right from the start of their lives and for as long as they both live. In the midst of the most harrowing time of my life dealing with horrible illness, it was my mother seated at the side of my hospital bed feeding me fried meat and cold water because that was all I could eat. My father’s WhatsApp chats kept coming in but it was her who was holding my hand, it was her who used her body as an anchor to tether me to this life, the same way she did since I took my first breath in her belly. The older I get, the deeper and wider my fascination with and deep admiration for motherhood grows. It feels sacred in ways I cannot even begin to describe and to see that bind so served by death shook something inside of me. But Mojisola is committed to seeking her daughter’s hand past the cold confines of the grave, she seeks and seeks and seeks, calling her self: mother to a ghost. Because once a mother, always a mother even if now of a ghost, of a spirit roaming the earth. A mother’s hands are always open.

The novel is divided into four sections and the third section is the journal of Yinka’s father: Titus, a professor who essentially neglected his family and took on a barrage of extramarital affairs which his daughter discovered and challenged him over. Ashamed but too proud to say so, he hardens himself to her. When Yinka, fresh with the indignation of her father’s infidelity runs to her mother only to find out that Mojisola already knows, she is disgusted by her mother’s condoning of the act. Yinka moves out of her parents home shortly after, becomes estranged and keeps her distance from them, until the end of her life. I think about this very thing often. Especially in Nigerian society and all the way it excuses and even encourages male infidelity. The cost of that recklessness, the ways in which it mars the lives of their wives, their children. How grave the cost can be. Yet in Titus’ journal which he keeps at the instruction of his grief therapist we are able to trace his history of emotional suppression from the Catholic Sister that raised him upon the demise of his parents. All the ways in which he was taught to bottle up emotion, to lie about his feelings, to become an illiterate in the world of emotional expression. All of which he entered into his marriage with. Mojisola herself carried too many burdens to name, she also sworn to bottled emotions. So here they were: two people trying to love themselves with lifetime of secrets behind closed lips. Of course disaster was imminent. Yet they loved each other, and even after years of separation and reunion, it is Yinka’s death that forces them to confront the truth of themselves after seeing how heavy the cost of hiding. They bare each other to themselves and toward the end there is a scene where they make love for the first time in ages and it made me cry to see how tenderness is truly the key that opens veery door. That a body that has long forgotten what a caress means can learn it again, so long as the hand offering that caress is honest, open, patient, tender and true.

This book means so many things to me but I think what it has shown me most is how truth is the currency of a live to be well lived. Truth as in not performing for those you love. Truth as in saying: “I am sad and I do not know why and the sadness feels as though it will swallow me whole’. Truth as in: ‘I feel threatened by your success and because of that I seek out women who make me feel better about myself’. Truth as in: ‘Since I had the baby, sex no longer feels the same to me, I cannot recognize my body and so I do not know how to share it with you anymore’. Truth as in: ‘I miss you and I know I fucked up but please let me lay myself at your mercy and beg for your forgiveness’.

Do you know how many of us are raised to eschew honesty? Especially emotional honesty? The average Nigerian upbringing has no vocabulary for the language of interior vulnerabilities. I know this because when I started being openly honest about my emotions in my family there was always complaint, always discomfort, always eyes being averted and always me being labelled as sensitive and overemotional. But I remained resolved. Because for me vulnerability is the pulse of my being, it is the lens through which I see the world and it is one of the only ways I can remain attuned to my being. It is why if I cannot be vulnerable with someone, I know they can never love me because its means I am scared of letting them see me and how can you love somebody you cannot see?

Mojisola could not see Yinka, at least not entirely and that blindness was not entirely her fault; it was a blindness that came about by many of her own pressures and sufferings. It is not always easy to see people. It took my mother almost two decades of mothering me before she began to see me truly. And that seeing is a life long process. It requires open and honest communication, revelations that rise above discomfort and reach towards the core of a person. This according to Yewande Omotoso is what it means to love someone, to be a love-soldier, and she writes: ‘we are all love-soldiers: life’s unwavering assignment’. And this seeing is what Mojisola is able to achieve through sitting down with the fact of Yinka’s life and death, along with reflections on her and Titus’ life. In a searing close to the novel she sees Yinka, sees the truth of her depression and sees her death as freedom, as the only thing her daughter could do for her won self. Knowing what they average Nigerian sentiment is about suicide, it felt very warming to read this, to know that this kind of seeing is possible, even if only in a book. What can be imagined, can also become real. I take solace in that. Most of all, this act of seeing must begin with the self. It is only somebody that has done the work of seeing, truly seeing themselves that can truly see another person. A few pages to the end of the book, Mojisola speaks:

“And even as we lose (such is the design of war), we fight. That’s what she’d been seeing all along….Not perfection, not people who never faltered, but rather the opposite. Now she walks in the streets as if she built them with her own hands. Now she stares into faces as if mirrors: she sees herself, her fragility, her ugliness and wonder. She sees her shame and her courage, her capacity for failure but also for magic”

When we are truly committed to the radical act of seeing ourselves, we must be aware of the fact that we will not only see good things, we will see all the broken and terrible things we carry too but just like Mojisola we will also see wonder, we will also see magic and we will go on with this knowledge as soldiers of love, fighting to see the wholeness of others just as we have fought to see our own.