Victoria Nwankpa’s 2025 novella, When Love Found My Scars, begins with a familiar opening—“It was a bright cold day in April” (George Orwell, 1984)—about the condition of the weather: “On a breezy Monday morning, the city of Lagos was already alive with its characteristic chaos, honking danfos, hurried pedestrians, and street vendors hawking everything from gala to cold sachets of pure water.” Permit me to continue that Orwell opener: “…and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.” Nwankpa’s novella, meanwhile, continues: “Amid this chaos was Ifeoluwa, a young woman stepping into the gates of the prestigious University of Lagos for the very first time. Her heart thudded with excitement and trepidation.” And so, a story begins.
For fear of giving away spoilers, since it is a very short read—completed within an hour or two, at most—let’s stick to some peculiarities of this work. The story is simple, if not formulaic, yet takes twists that disrupt its familiar trope. There’s Ifeoluwa, our protagonist. She has been thrown into the wild resuming in the University of Lagos, having come from good home-training, with enough discipline, or restraint, a mind singularly focused on getting a degree, the “ticket out of poverty,” for a better life with her widowed mom: “As she clutched her admission letter tightly, the words of her mother echoed in her mind: ‘Ife, education is your key. Lagos will distract you with all its glitter, but focus. Remember where we’re coming from.’ ” She does focus but lives with a roommate, Teniola, a rather curious foil to Ifeoluwa’s reserved goodness, who reminds her—or, rather, seeing how the story turns out—that life doesn’t tolerate modesty, “Babe, you need to wake up. Lagos is not a fairytale. You have to play the game sometimes.” A philosophy repeated to Ifeoluwa by a preying lecturer, Dr. Olumide, who wants to sleep with her. “You think you’re different from the others, don’t you?” he tells her. “Some high-and-mighty girl with moral standards? Listen, Ifeoluwa, UNILAG is a game. You either play it or get crushed by it.”
There might be a few moral considerations in this book, as a work of fiction cannot have a singular moral or theme, even if that’s what an author intends, because how then are we to consider fiction as a work of dream, multifarious? For me, however, this carnivorous education presented to the protagonist stood out throughout the novella, bellying its narrative till the end. And it is an important moral to be reminded of, not just in a book, but because it is an all-too-familiar case with life daily: to eat or not be eaten? Thus arise a few misfortunes to Ifeoluwa, even if one feels Nwankpa could have been less contriving, and more subtle, of these events, if not only to add to the story’s profluence. Life in uni goes on well. Ifeoluwa is studying. Her roommate is always out and partying and tempting her to carpe diem. Academic demands become harder too, Ifeoluwa soon realises. Before things eventually, nay, drastically fall apart as we later find out, she gets a call from home. Her mother has been hospitalised. Kidney problems. Dialysis needed. 10 million naira to raise. This is where the skies darken, I guess, like a herd of buffalo. But we’ll get to that soon. The man who doesn’t live up to his endearing name “Brother Kunle,” who drives her to the hospital and back home, to discuss how to raise the medical bill, tries to sleep with her. But she manages to escape after smashing his head with a bottle.
Ifeoluwa, from whatever training or upbringing she’s had, always insists on her dignity, when she says no to her roommate’s temptations to live a little. It is the same in her refusal to give in to her lecturer’s sexual demands. And of course, Brother Kunle, even as his is a case of sexual assault. In every scenario, nevertheless, there’s something to profit; in Brother Kunle, for example, money for her mother’s treatment. But Ifeoluwa never concedes. “The weight of [Dr. Olumide’s] threat hung heavily over her, but she knew one thing for certain, she would never compromise her dignity, no matter what it cost her.” The problem here, however, is that she has no strict idea of her morality, but that “dignity,” to her, is tied to her virginity. This explains why what happens next might be a weak plot twist, when Ifeoluwa gets gang-raped. By flattening Ifeoluwa’s moral curve, Nwankpa does not give her a chance for a genuinely complex trial either, nor allow us follow a more complex outcome for Ifeoluwa. This also accounts for the weak character development, or switch even, as Ifeoluwa’s experience makes her suddenly become rogue.
It is either Nwankpa cannot explore moral complexity, or this is just a story to enjoy. Neither does Nwankpa allow us to gauge for ourselves Ifeoluwa’s transformation into a villain. She tells us in subsequent passages, rather than show: “beneath the surface, she was bitter, cold, and merciless”; “But Ifeoluwa’s heart had already turned dark, darker than she ever imagined possible”; “A chilling resolve hardened in her chest . . .” For all her sense of dignity, why does Ifeoluwa choose that because she’s contracted HIV, she’d become sexually loose and start scheming sexual partners? It means she never had any in the first place.
But what saves this thematic fallout is understanding that her actions are a result of what happens when one is broken by violence, to give back violence. But being excited when one of her victims, Dr. Olumide, dies from the disease (although this might be a mistake in the novella, to say he died of AIDS within a short time) seems like a stretch in returning the violence that’s happened to her. This way, one isn’t certain it is just a response to her trauma. What are the unexplored desires and proclivities within us? Perhaps, Ifeoluwa doesn’t know herself. And what if she does? This is why her contrition later on in life, now broken once more by the unconditional love of a boy, feels unconvincing or just her realisation that life is much more than her medical condition, or even bigger than her. A realisation which leads to an even more unsuspecting but not so unpredictable twist at the story’s very end.
There are signs in this novella that the author is in a nascent phase; some plot leaps are outrageous, or, sometimes, parts of it are left hanging. For example, three months pass, and we do not read about Ifeoluwa’s mother in the hospital, nor of her condition, given its severity. Was she having dialysis during this time? Because, as the story continues, absent this plotline, Ifeoluwa hasn’t raised any money for her mother’s health. But when she does eventually, by sleeping with men, we do not miss the uncanny hand of fate in Ifeoluwa’s story. She was asked to let go of her purism, to sacrifice her conscience, even if by coercion, as in the case of the men who wanted to exploit her. But she never buckled. And yet she gets punished like this? Talk about the meek not inheriting the earth. What then does she learn from the fact that not capitulating to the exploitation of her body for gain is the same thing she had to do after the rape incident to make ends meet? And do we readers, too, learn anything? Life is carnivorous. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how careful you are. It consumes us all, one way or the other.♦
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Carl Terver is the author of Glory to the Sky, and founding editor of Afapinen. He was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024.