Book Review: Tomorrow I become a Woman by Aiwanose Odafen
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Genre: Literary Fiction/ African Literature
Themes: Friendship, family, motherhood, marriage, love, domestic violence, war, mother-daughter relationship, religion, patriarchy
My least favorite character: Gozie and Uju’s mom are fighting quite hard for this position.
Interesting things to note about the book.
#1 — It’s the author’s debut.
#2- It will make you very angry
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This book follows the lives of three friends whose mothers bonded and became best friends after being on the same bus from Eastern Nigeria to South West Nigeria(Lagos to be precise) to get married to men they had not met before. If you find that terrifying, that’s the least terrifying thing about the characters in this book. I found myself having to pause my reading because I was so angry at many things.
While the book is fiction, if you are a Nigerian woman or even a woman from any part of the world, you probably know at least one Uju. Uju, the lead character in this book marries a seemingly sweet man with a sonorous voice who she met in church. She had her reservations but wanted to please her mother who never seemed to see any good in her.
As the story progresses, we see Uju, an outspoken woman with a great career ahead of her become a shadow of herself and a punching bag for her husband. There were also different variations of women being “second-class citizens” in their own homes. The church scenes in the book reminded me a lot of this statement while reading the book- Women are the gatekeepers of patriarchy (I can’t remember where I first saw this. Most likely Twitter).
I could not understand how Uju’s mother had that much of a stronghold on her children but that might be because I can be quite defiant where necessary. There was also this endless hunt for a male child that killed one of the characters.
Tomorrow I become a Woman is an easy-to-read and well-written book. It explored the realities of many women in Nigeria even in 2022 and while it was quite triggering and invoked a lot of anger, it is a good book to kickstart important discussions that need to be started in many communities. The only thing I did not enjoy in the storytelling is the end of the book. It just seemed to me like a woman cannot have a new beginning without a man being involved.
Question
- Why do many people still let their parents have such a stronghold on them even though it is evidently detrimental?
