In his memoir Never Look an American in the Eye, Okey Ndibe tells the story of Karen U., a “nearly” 30-year-old lady who had never met her father. It is not that her father is dead. He is simply absent from her life. He had impregnated Karen’s mother as a graduate student in the US and abandoned both mother and unborn Karen after his studies, returning to Nigeria. “From her first moments of awakening awareness as a child,” Ndibe narrates, “she had wanted to know who her father was,” to understand “the origin of her last name.” Karen is a daughter seeking her father, a floating tree looking for its root. Karen’s mother, understandably bitter over her abandonment, refuses to give Karen information that can help in finding her father. On her deathbed, she finally gives in and leaves Karen with the full name and other information she has about the lover who had jilted her.
As a Nigerian journalist who had just traveled to the US, Ndibe was in an advantaged position to help Karen find her father. Through the efforts of Ndibe’s journalist friend back home, Karen’s father is found and months later she sees him for the first time. The meeting isn’t joyful, however. The man who had retired from civil service after rising to the head of its bureaucracy serves as the traditional ruler of his natal community; he had built a life, a family, a reality that does not have Karen in it, and is unwilling to admit her. Karen is like a “ghost he thought he’d interred in the dim past” intruding his present life.
The presence of absent fathers is something real-life Karen shares with Demola and Idera, major characters in Olukorede S. Yishau’s second novel After the End. While Idera’s dad denies her and her mother at birth, Demola’s dad abandoned him and his mother after impregnating their neighbour, Mama Yewande, and accepting her as a second wife. There is no shortage of terrible fathers (and husbands) in Yishau’s second novel and all main female characters suffer from them. For Idera’s best friend, Suliat, her husband abandons her and their son, Deji, for another woman more acceptable to his family.
Demola grows up plagued by a fear that has achieved a canonised place in African Literature—a son’s determination not to end up like their father. In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, that fear rules Okonkwo’s life and actions. He would rather die than share any resemblance with his father, Unoka. Where Unoka is considered weak, Okonkwo wants to be seen as strong; where his father is considered lazy, Okonkwo must be hailed as hardworking. It is ironic that Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, who we later meet in Achebe’s second novel No Longer At Ease as Isaac, also grows up loathing his father, making every effort not to be like him. Where Okonkwo is considered harsh, Nwoye presents kindness; where Okonkwo promotes exuberant masculinity, Nwoye presents an alternative, where one can be male and still be what the literary scholar, Uche Peter Umezuruike, refers to as a “receptive subject” (who will out of human empathy undermine norms that impede the “viability of every life”). For Demola, his is simply the wish to never be an absent father and husband, like his own father.
This sense of responsibility pushes him to marry Idera in the UK even when he already has a wife, Lydia, back home in Nigeria. The marriage goes on blissfully until the sudden appearance of Lydia in the UK. Again, to borrow from Karen’s story, Ndibe notes that “the sudden, unanticipated appearance of the unknown daughter would unsettle any delicate balance the man had constructed, give a violent jolt to his world.” Lydia’s appearance gives this kind of violent jolt to Demola’s life. But the latter is able, with Lydia’s cooperation, to manage it, to not let it unsettle any delicate balance by keeping it away from Idera and her children. However, Demola’s sudden death upturns this balance, and now it is Idera’s turn to feel the violent jolt—a realisation that her decade-old marriage had been nothing but “an intensely realistic hallucination.”
For readers of Yishau’s first novel In the Name of Our Father, After the End offers a different experience, an artistic improvement. While we meet another Justus, a journalist with the same first name as the journalist-protagonist of his first novel, it’s all there is to similarities between the two. While In the Name struggles to be a novel and not longform journalism sandwiched between epistles, After is an enviable work of art, one where gentleness, kindness, and beauty come in the form of letters.
Its descriptive strength cannot be missed. Whether in describing a person, an event, or a place, Yishau proves that his training as a journalist, rather than hindering his writing like in his earlier novel, is a blessing. Take for example the opening sentence: “Google died on the day the UK voted to leave the European Union.” As simple as that sentence is, it does not stop at situating Google’s (Demola) death within a timeframe but goes on to give context to the political volatility of that era, an information that becomes important to bear in mind as one progresses in the novel. His opening, which reminds one of Akwaeke Emezi’s in The Death of Vivek Oji—“They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.”—also becomes a pointer to and a foreshadowing of the disintegration that would become part of Idera’s reality: As the European Union disintegrates, Idera watches what she thinks she knows crumble too; the man she loved and thought she knew completely becoming a stranger she needs to investigate.
Yishau’s descriptive heft can also be gleaned from Idera’s description of Demola: “I looked at his face again, taking in the details of his lips, the compact shape, how tinged with pink the bottom lip was, how plump and luscious they were. He was clean-shaven, and his skin had a glow.” And in the description of a failed attempt at sex: “Every cell in his body was on fire, and he wanted nothing more than to bury himself inside her. In his excitement, he tried, frantically, awkwardly, many times, but he couldn’t penetrate her. It was his first time, their first time.”
Beyond being Idera’s story of love, betrayal, and healing, After the End is also an interrogation of grief and grieving. Throughout the novel, snippets are laid of what grief is, its different manifestations, and how it can be managed or overcome. Idera, for example, reflects:
Everybody told me that the grief would come in waves, and I discovered it was true. I’d lost count of the corners of the house where I’d been overwhelmed with tears and memories. But I’d also discovered that grief can feel like congestion, something heavy that sits on your chest. Something that you can’t push aside. It passes, but it always returns.
To be vulnerable in the face of grief here is not anti-masculine, as Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart believes. To cry, to wail, to scream and shout, are valid ways of expressing grief, even for a man, and Idera is always ready to teach her sons this, to teach them that “Grief didn’t have to be a silent, brave thing.”
This sort of gentleness, of kindness, of softness even, runs throughout the narrative, both in the actions and their constructions and presentation. The novel is not fast-paced. Its every moment is written to be taken in, to be savoured. You fight tears when Idera finally discovers why her son, Tunmininu, was almost stabbed to death—“Now, the pieces all fell into place in my head. The thing that was different about Tunmininu wasn’t his clothes, or his interests, or even his Nigerian background. He stood out because in the area where we lived, young boys his age had developed differently than he had”; you relate to the helplessness one feels in the face of the suddenness of tragedy, especially the permanence of death, when Idera observes that—“Unlike Britain, Google’s exit from life wasn’t heralded by talks or consultation. He simply died…”; you feel a certain type of undoing, a level of unbuckling of the human spirit, when Idera laments—“Strangers came to me with tears in their eyes and messages of sympathy for Tunmi. Yet, none of them could tell me who the culprit was.”
Yishau immerses readers in his characters’ experience, to laugh when they crack a joke, to cry when they cry, to be genuinely empathic for them. Even Demola who leads a deceptive life is humanised. We empathise with Demola, seeing that he is not being deceptive to Idera, but rather, trying not to end up like his father, as he suffers from a split personality, compartmentalising his wives and children, “Until Lydia’s text message shattered his peace, Demola avoided considering himself a man leading a double life. Rather he saw himself as a man with a complicated problem and an inevitable solution”; “He thought he was being brave, doing the difficult but noble thing.”
At the heart of this novel are single mothers not only making the best of life despite a world that vilifies them, but also give their kids the possible best. Through the lives of Mama Demola, Suliat, and Idera, single mothers are presented not as anomalies, but as hardworking women who strive to rise above the mud society heaps on them. Yishau reminds us that becoming a single mother can be sometimes beyond women’s control, in different ways. While for some it may be due to acts of sexual indiscretion, for someone like Mama Demola, it is due to no fault of hers as she must leave her husband’s house if she and her son are to live. And for Idera, it is due to the sudden death of her spouse.
While the novel starts as a tragic tale of woes and grief, it ends as a tale of survival and renewal. The novel’s ending, an integral part of its mission, can be captured in this lesson Idera hopes she is teaching her sons: “surviving a tragedy wasn’t only possible but crucial.”
For all his good intentions and improvement since his first novel, Yishau somehow falters again in this novel due to the limitations of the male gaze. It is clear that Yishau aims to create strong female characters, especially in Idera and Suliat, but the success of this is up for debate. All the women in After the End are reaching out, sometimes actively fighting—like we see in the case of Mama Demola and Mama Yewande, and to a lesser degree, in the case of Idera and Lydia—for men, their attention, love, and care. For all their faults, for all their absences, it seems men remain the prize in the novel, a prize the woman, no matter how strong, cannot do without. For Idera, we imagine that her friendship with Suliat, that sisterly solidarity, is what she needs to help her through the heartbreak of discovering she is Demola’s second wife—in fact, the narrator hints at this—but the sudden emergence of Justus Kensington casts doubts on this.
Justus Kensington emerges as Idera’s male saviour, for Suliat, try as much as she can, is still a woman, and men are the prize, or saviours. Suliat herself would continue to fight over her son’s father until she meets Ojo who is “a match made in heaven for her,” not minding that they fight like cat and mouse. Healing remains a strange concept to Lydia until she meets Liam who sets her on its path. Men and marriage may scar a woman in After the End but it is also only men and marriage that can heal a woman, it seems. Or, maybe, Yishau allows men to redeem themselves, to fix what other men damaged, and to uphold the institution of marriage as a liberating space.♦
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Ugochukwu Anadị’s review won first place in the After the End Book Review Competition. Read the second winning essay here.
Ugochukwu Anadị is a contributor at The African Theatre Magazine and the Book Review Editor at Afreecan Read. He writes when he’s not reading or trying, or being, an engineer.