The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives | A Review

"The wives sigh and stare into emptiness. They act as if a fist of stone has been stuffed into their throats. They don't swallow; they just sit and stare. They don't even seem to be bothered with me any more, which is in itself confusing. I liked it better when they were predictable. Now I can't tell who has left food outside my door."

I appreciate dissent in a work of art. I love the sensing of an iconoclast ripple of notions battling with time, dogma and norm. It is until when the huntsman forbids the compass that the jungle then begins to unravel to him the incautious routes of bounty. To the writer also, I reckon this to be prime. Imagination can reap a certain kind of colouration but should know no leash, whether culturally imposed or fashioned from the insistent dictates of social systems. The very nature of this precondition, when consented to, helps the writer to spawn brave new realities. 

Few singular artists like Lola Shoneyin forbid the compass. At the mention of polygamy, a common mind will often envision the reign of feud and indifference and distress in a world of villains. To have successfully preyed on the melancholy of that vision, Lola’s mind is of no common design. For while although it is true of a house of many wives to spell war, envy and antipathy; it is also true that it just might entail surprises, cravings and desperation – and the gorgeous complexities thereof.

Lola’s Orange Prize long-listed debut The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives is a free-spirited invention. An emotional immersion into the private web of existence of four wives who, to be, have to weather the stifling storms of past and present; it is easy to place the book as another feminist commentary on one of the many oppressive social structures dehumanizing women as Egyptian Nawa Saadawi wrote against patriarchy in her God Dies by the Nile. 

Of a semblance notwithstanding, the quality of the lives of Baba Segi’s wives to bear upon secrecy invites a questioning. It is where the fun and the catharsis begin. Lola makes the journey worthwhile with a mild construct of poetry and self-selling narration. In them, polygamy wears new shades of meaning and assumes a different essence. In some way, it passes as a shell of restitution, of gathering of clarity. One comes to realize that one cannot weigh the grief of human want from act to act but rather from reasons. After all said and done, even villains are burdened with tragedies.    

Lola Shoneyin

Egocentric Baba Segi, insensate, self-involved and hungry to brood is a constant humorous antithesis from his show-off as a material consolation against his shallow marriage paradigm as a means to a sole procreant end. To this stalk of providence do the fated branches come to bear.

Iya Segi is the survivor child of a distant world who has fought man-tides of youth to prosper as first wife. She will continue to fight so that her prosperity stays. Iya Tope the second lacks the poise of a fighter. Young, forgiving and yielding, she is the pensive symbol of care stilled by doubts. The third is Iya Femi, self-acclaimed Queen whose story of torment and betrayal has forged into a fine schemer. It is Bolanle, the young fourth graduate wife that slips into the scene as an aesthetic coup. Her advantage of enlightenment swells jealousy and insecurities from the Iyas but her barrenness does more than swell. It bursts the plot open with episodes of where histories connive and secrets cease.

Yearn for secrets? You can buy yourself a copy here at Cassava Republic.