Book: NIGHTBLOOM
Author: Peace Adzo Medie
Published by: Oneworld
Price: Rs 499
In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway asserts emphatically: “There is always the other side, always.” Peace Adzo Medie’s Nightbloom is an attempt to tell two sides of the same story by two narrators which will finally merge into a section where their voices will meet and fill in the gaps in their respective narrations. Akorfa and Selasi, born on the same day, are cousins and close friends living initially in the small town of Ho; they will move to Accra, the capital of Ghana, later. The narrative charts the relationship between the two and the power dynamics within their extended families over more than three decades.
Divided into three parts, the book begins with Akorfa’s narration of her life which is entangled with that of her cousin. However, the close relationship they shared as a child sours and turns to bitter hostility as the two girls grow into womanhood. Akorfa is able to make a life for herself in the US: her wealthy parents could afford to send her there for higher studies.
The second part, narrated by Selasi, recounts the same episodes — at least up to a point — but from her perspective that provides a very different, yet entirely plausible, account of what had happened between the two cousins and their families. Selasi stays back in Ghana and becomes a successful restaurateur until the vindictiveness of a powerful and corrupt politician threatens to destroy everything that she has so painstakingly built for herself.
The third part of the narrative, told from a third-person, omniscient point of view, brings the two cousins together to reveal a secret, a shared trauma, rekindling sparks of the old friendship and the affection between the two.
Nightbloom is a novel about perceptions and paradoxes; it is a novel about rebellion against a society and oppressive family structures that scar the lives of aspirational young women; it is also a novel that exposes and critiques the overtly racist American society towards which many affluent Ghanaians are drawn in search of a better life. Medie’s debut novel, His Only Wife, in which a young woman is trapped in a marriage with a network of lies and family pressure, had explored some of the same themes. Traditional Ghanaian society, with its monumental expectations from the members of an extended family and its strict hierarchy of status and gender, is a bundle of contradictions. Akorfa’s mother is paranoid about her marital family breaking up her marriage as her father’s family did, leaving her and her siblings almost destitute; there is ample evidence in His Only Wife that such a situation is not uncommon. Ironically, the same network of relatives provides a safety net for children like Selasi whose father abandons her after the death of her mother and starts a new family, refusing to take responsibility for the daughter from his first marriage. Wealth, education, and status do not change the traditional view of the family and its sanctity, even if it means exposing young girls to sexual assault from members of the family. The narrative also foregrounds the immense power and privileges enjoyed by corrupt politicians and ministers. However, in Nightbloom, the two cousins push back against these oppressive, patriarchal power structures that threaten to undo in a minute what they have built over decades with the collusion of their family members. Unlike His Only Wife, Nightbloom does not conclude with an impossible longing, but with a glimmer of hope and a sense of poetic justice.
Medie’s clear, unencumbered prose gives the narrative a rapid pace. This is an eminently readable novel that blurs the boundaries between black and white, asks readers to tease out the nuances of a situation, and presents them with a narrative that underlines the triumph of hope, aspiration, hard work, and self-esteem. Medie’s name may be added to the growing list of women novelists — like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Oyinkan Braithwaite — from various African countries who are weaving intricate narratives about nations and cultures at the crossroads of traditionalism and a Western concept of modernity.
