That day I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t want to be having any kind of voice...
I want a louding voice.
When it comes to novels, the plot details aren’t the most important elements to me; that would be like saying that in a painting, the most important thing is its subject matter — and that’s simply not what gives a painting its artistic value. The Girl with the Louding Voice is similarly subject-driven, with a very simple paint-by-numbers structure and basic-level writing, and even if the story being told is important, it’s just not art. I appreciate that this was a passion project for Nigerian author Abi Daré, I congratulate her on the positive attention this novel has garnered for her, but I could have easily given this two stars; three is a rounding-up in recognition of the subject matter’s importance.
Morufu lie down and press his head to the floor in front of Papa seven times and Papa collect my hand, cold and dead, and put it inside Morufu’s own and say, “This is your wife now, from today till forever, she is your own. Do her anyhow you want. Use her till she is useless! May she never sleep in her father house again!” and everybody was laughing and saying, “Congra-lations! Amen! Congra-lations!”
In order to explore the challenging lives of modern-day Nigerian girls and women, we follow Adunni — a fourteen-year-old village girl who had hopes of receiving an education until her mother died and her father sold her into marriage — watching as she suffers as a child bride (the third wife of an old man desperate for a son) before escaping to the big metropolis of Lagos; out of the frying pan, into the fire. Along the way, Adunni meets a variety of abusive men and downtrodden women (also women who are abusive because they are downtrodden), finds a few allies who somehow see limitless potential in this smart-mouthed bumpkin, and after a series of very fraught events, the plot ends up going exactly where you expect it to. If it weren’t for some mature content around sex and violence, this novel would have the dramatic tension of a Hallmark movie.
If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?
The Girl with the Louding Voice was literarily unsatisfactory to me (repeated overt statement of the themes, the pointlessly idiosyncratic dialect [perhaps Adunni would speak like this when talking in English with others, but when she’s speaking Yorubi in the village? When she’s speaking in her own head?], the conflict-conflict-BIG conflict-easy resolution plotline), but I totally support Abi Daré’s efforts to shine a light on the conditions she witnessed in her Nigerian youth. For a more artful examination of those conditions, I would direct other readers to the works of Chigozie Obioma, Ayobami Adebayo, Akwaeke Emezi, or Oyinkan Braithwaite.
