LightRay Reviews

Book in Focus: Daughters Who Walk This Path

Ejiro Umukoro in this audio book review, heightens your desire to want to read Yejide Kilanko's novel, Daughters Who Walk This Path, through dramatisation: https://youtu.be/vcD3ZLTYyaE.

A look at the fictional novel, Daughters Who Walk This Path, written by Yejide Kilanko, published by Farafina imprint for the Nigeria audience grabs you first with the book cover. The title, printed in black and aquamarine green with a distinctive imprint of footsteps in shades of red, brown and faded green against a background of other patches pulls you in. The more you look at the footprints, it's interesting how you keep seeing them as a metaphor of untold stories, hidden stories. Shameful stories.

Daughters Who Walk This Path, is a naked and unpretentious book. It does not aim to lift you with rich prose, a complicated plot or extensive use of literary devices. It is simply a narration that captures Nigeria’s historical references, timelines, mannerisms, metaphors, philosophical thrusts, and language of the Yorubas that delve succinctly and expertly using just the right amount of information to evoke memories of periods in Nigeria we all relate to differently. And in other instances it provokes the kind of nostalgia that lights a fire from the past you may wish to revisit, or not. 

Yejide knows her city of seven hills, Ibadan, the place where the heart of the story is located. Bringing the largest city by territory in West Africa to life, she captures the politics of the people in the 90s, which strikes you in the face like a wrecking ball seeing the ghastly resemblance of it to how the 2019 elections in Nigeria went. You hear Mr. Tiamiyu, a political candidate without the clout of big money bags, make a plea to convince electorates to vote for him. 

Her main character, Morayo through whose eyes we unfold both the magic of her innocence and  destruction of it, uses simple everyday language that captures everyday people living everyday life. Her voice does not reek of the middle class ‘poshness’ that seems to dominate stories written by Nigerian writers who win international book competitions or bestsellers as she tells the story of rape, its effect and consequences. The type of rape between a cousin and a family friend that does not have a categorisation like incest. 

Yejide sheds the untold stories of her characters with a deliberate stroke of her writing brush as she navigates the birth of an innocent child, Morayo’s sister, Eniayo who was born with a skin ‘anomaly’ called albinism. In Yoruba language they are referred to as Afin. She deftly tackles the issue of discrimination, shaming, bullying, cultural rejection and negative perception meted out to albinos in societies that prefer to normalise only colours they are used to. 

In narrating Morayo’s evolution from childhood to adulthood, Yejide encapsulate questions ladies who are not yet married at 25 face from society, exploring how the choice of living within the university campus or schooling from home can have both intended and unintended consequences. Thus raising the question: how do some get so lucky and others don’t. 

The scene at the market place on page pg 185-189 is very gripping. It captures the moment when Morayo’s aunt, Aunty Morenike came face-to-face with a violent police officer rounding of innocent passers-by on false charges brings to mind how SARs as we know them today may have metamorphosed from such police men with such mentality who raid markets, shops and even on the streets carting away pedestrians they label loiters in order to rob them by force using the tools of policing to achieve such brigandage. 

When Morayo hits her 30th birthday, the thorny issue of ethnic inter-marriage raised its ugly head. Morayo’s father years ago had called his daughters aside warning them not to marry outside a given ethnic group. While she was still in her teens, using a map of Nigeria, he circled off ‘accepted areas to marry from’ that was suitable for his daughters to choose from. Anything outside that was forbidden. But as you read the story further, it becomes clear that at the heart of such divisive thinking is the fear of falling into wrong hands by marrying into troublesome families as we eventually come to discover. 

As an ode to Morenike, a victim of rape and a brave fighter of cancer, who didn’t live to see her son’s child, or niece’s wedding or graduation, Yejide uses a letter Morenike writes to Morayo as the kind of gift a rape survivor can derive great inspiration from, the exact gift Morayo needed to push her on.

In closing off the end of each character’s story including that of the rapist, the question of redemption for evil done on others by the perpetrators slaps us hard in the face. Does the rapist deserve redemption? What kind of compensation would sooth, replace or ease what was lost or the effects of the acts committed by a rapist on its victims? Can it ever be enough?

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Book Reviewer: Lady E. Umukoro