Black female friendship at home and away
Jendella Benson on sifting the personal and political in Aiwanose Odafen’s We Were Girls Once and Maame Blue’s The Rest of You.
Review by Jendella Benson | Originally published in the print edition, October 11th 2024
“We have no say in the circumstances of our birth – the very things that determine the people we become: our parents, our families, our country,” muses Zina, one of the three narrators in Aiwanose Odafen’s second novel, We Were Girls Once.
While this is a thought that certainly has universal resonance, the sentiment ‘hits different’ when considered by the children and grandchildren of Empire; those who end up on foreign shores fleeing terrors of varying magnitudes; those weathering the consequences of tragedy as it reverberates through generations. This is something that Odafen’s We Were Girls Once and Maame Blue’s The Rest of You grapple with, through the multiple perspectives of their female characters.
In The Rest of You we meet Whitney on her 30th birthday. Her world is small, consisting of a shared flat with her best friend, the aunt who raised her, and her work as a massage therapist, intimating the deep, emotional needs of her clients as she works on their bodies. But this intuition doesn’t extend to Whitney’s understanding of herself and her personal history.
In the opening scene, Whitney is intoxicated and disassociating in a nightclub. Her mind lurches from thoughts of her dead parents to the man who recently assaulted her. This party is no longer a party for Whitney or for the reader bearing witness. The fault lines in her life are splintering, threatening to pull her into the abyss.
In contrast to The Rest of You’s intimate perspective, Odafen’s We Were Girls Once attempts to grasp both the personal and the political – the individual and the national – by weaving the fates of childhood friends Ego, Zina and Eriife with the turning tides of history and a nation’s politics. Though the scale is grand Odafen manages to translate the abstractly political to the agony of the personal.
Just as with Whitney, a party is not simply a party for Ego, a lonely Nigerian lawyer transplanted to the UK. At a colleague’s house party, she surveys the scene – and herself – at a distance. She adopts the ‘double consciousness’ that W.E.B. Dubois famously writes about: “...this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
Odafen ambitiously joins the dots between the forces that have created the world that the three women inhabit, or, as she writes, the “sleight of hand dealt by the lottery of birth”.
In both of these books we see young women contending with the fallout of history. While threads of recognition link the experiences of the African diaspora and those still living on the continent, Odafen and Blue show that both these cultural contexts pose different questions about anxieties around identity and who one is supposed to become in a world that is hostile and unforgiving.
Each book also presents female friendships that are safe havens and soft places to land at each narrative’s emotional climax. Despite conflicting machinations involving Eriife when she loses her daughter and leaves her husband, Zina and Ego are waiting for her. Similarly when an emotionally abusive relationship comes to an end, Whitney and Chantelle take tentative steps back towards each other.
These are the quiet, yet victorious, resolutions that sit at the heart of black women’s lives, both in fiction and real life. We can find each other again, wherever we end up.
In The Rest of You, the Akan sankofa symbol – a bird with its feet facing forward but head turned back retrieving a precious egg – looms. “Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyi: it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you have forgotten,” Pastor P, Ma Gloria’s longtime friend, tells Whitney, as he explains the philosophy.
In Odafen and Blue’s work, I also read ‘the forgotten’ as the self and the friends who fortify us as we sift through the cards we’ve been dealt. Fortunately, for Ego, Zina, Eriife and Whitney, as for each of us, there is always a way back.