There are a thousand ways to approach a drama, but the best is irony, humor. The Nigerian Lola Shoneyin has achieved it by describing the unique family that Baba Segi has formed for her, a simpleton merchant who accumulates women within the polygamous scheme of his culture; who resorts to an ignorant Teacher to consult him about the important things in life; that he distributes sex and nights equally among his four wives as if he were fair and that he proudly attends a male domain without ever guessing what is being plotted out of his sight. What is the best.
The secret lives of Baba Segi’s wives, a 2010 novel brought to Spain by Baobab Books, African collection of Bad Companies Dedicated to the memory of Antonio Lozano, it has won several awards and has been translated into several languages. And it is undoubtedly one of those jewels that the mental distance that we maintain with African history and culture places it too far from our frame, our shelves, our bedside table. unfairly.
Through intelligent, sarcastic and accurate sections, Shoneyin (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1974) places the focus on each of Baba Segi’s wives, from the first, the one of his youth, who has a hierarchical ascendant in the family by arranging tasks, distributing the pantry and maintaining a certain preference and loyalty of the male, to the fourth, a young woman with a university education who does not manage to fit into the environment of illiterate, ignorant, jealous and intriguing before they make up the family. Her arrival upsets everyone: the husband, overjoyed at having brought a distinguished girl; to the wives adapted to that habitat and that are displaced; to the children eager to let themselves be helped with their homework by the university, but forced to ignore it by her mothers; and even the driver, for reasons that it will be better not to reveal. Because they’re going to have fun reading it. The turn is spectacular.
Based on this change of focus, the author builds a melting pot, a choral work that illuminates the reality of polygamy from within, not through description and external condemnation and even less through legal impositions, but by making it emerge from her own culture and —according to what is recounted on the back cover and explained in the interview with Ana Carbajosa in EL PAÍS— from her own family experience.
This is how we will know that a new wife does not have the right to a chair until she is a mother, even if sex is shared equally; that, to advance through the roads to go to the hospital, you have to pay bribes. Going out alone to buy at the market can lead to punishment. Not getting pregnant can be grounds for expulsion. That healers and teachers precede doctors for many people. And endless stories that place this book -also- on the list of all those who teach us to know the world.
Page by page, the holes left by each narrator in his story will be filled by others. And the luminous description of those routes, of the criminals on the road, the checkpoints, the dirt of a house, of a man, the most devious tricks and even the local eschatology are brilliantly defined by an ironic line, also surreal, that captures and effectively portrays a parodic universe, but very real.
Africa has given us masterful writers who have narrated the clash between the white colonizers and the local communities, from the Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah (Paradise, By the sea) to the great Chinua Achebe (Everything falls apart) or the Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste (The king in the shadow). On this occasion, however, it is not the clash between two cultures, it is not the savagery of the invaders and the weakness of the native that we will see, but rather the very shortcomings that are manifested in a society —Nigerian, in this case— where the general lack of culture, atavism and the dominance of men over women, especially powerful men, leave devastating gaps through which backwardness still creeps in and settles. Lola Shoneyin’s merit is to be able to tell it from the literary creation from within. And have fun, too.
That is how The secret lives of Baba Segi’s wives it is becoming a perfect literary blow to ignorance and submission.
The secret lives of Baba Segi’s wives
Lola Shoneyin
Translation of Federico Vivanco
Bad Company Books, 2022
288 pages. €19.18
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