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By Olu James
Abimbola Ogunmolasuyi’s A Woman’s Valour is a boisterous novel that tells the stories of two women united in sorrow. The novel also explores the imperfection of love and flawed humanity. This, in fact, is where the book’s beauty lies.
Janet and Jennifer are the eyes of the camera through which the readers see the novel. Using the third person point of view and plural heroism, the writer touches sensitive, unexplored emotions of female gender in Africa: the sentiments of female genitalia, revealing in the process, a complex human emotional sentiment through her major characters.
With a simple plot, the author takes her readers through the life of Janet, who is married to Johnson. The marriage is blessed with two children: Jennifer and Caro. However, not long after she gives birth to Caro, her husband dies in an accident on his way home after a visit to his village.
The story continues with Janet’s struggle to give her children a future. She sees to Jennifer’s journey to school, graduation and marriage. But then, the reader is not allowed a peep into the life of Caro, as the image of Jennifer looms very large in the novel.
The travails that follow her husband’s death birth the book’s main plot: Jennifer, who works tirelessly and never believes in any man to give her a break – a trait she inherits from her mother. Her marriage to Tunde, miscarriages, retrenchment, her husband’s life of debauchery and disappearance from his responsibilities, abandonment, Tunde’s life in America with Maggi, his moment of peripeteia and the eventual discovery that he had led an unworthy life.
The book, A Woman’s Valour, takes a cursory look at the challenges of the female character in Africa. “Some of them go out of their way to work hard, both secularly and domestically, which then invalidates the African contextual expression that limits the roles of women in the kitchen. There is no doubt that many women who have balanced both of these worlds also remained the pillars which held their families up, and they are still the central foundation upon which a real family stands,” Ogunmolasuyi says.
She conveys their passionate attachment to the freedom of their deep connection to nature, along with the adult doubts and betrayals happening off stage. What’s her reward? Is it worth it for a woman to give 100 per cent of her labour to her household, even to the detriment of her happiness and joy? All these posers and many others are answered in this book.
But the challenge is that Ogunmolasuyi has created protagonists who are perfect and others who are imperfect. The only way you can know good or bad is to be a staunch supporter of any of the characters. Be that as it may, their imperfections and mistakes make them more humane and relatable.
However, the work is not a pamphlet on feminism, but it reflects in a concise manner, male tyranny, oppression and rebellion with global relevance. The author celebrates the vital roles women play in providing support for their families’ needs.
Throwing light on it and giving a glimpse of the man behind the ‘tragic moments’, the book retells story from the time of her birth to when she graduated. In the process, the author highlights the little-known aspects of Jennifer’s remarkable life and retells it through her point of view. Her protagonists look real as the emotional dilemmas that they deal with, the conflict of sentiments that they battle and the difficult decisions that they take are so very relatable.
With chapters such as Humble Beginning, How the Journey Started, Weather the Storm, Mission Accomplished, Challenges of Rearing Children, For Greener Pasture, Not As Planned, If the Hard Way is the Only Way, The Bad News, The Unexpected and Tough People Last, the book journeys through the challenges of womanhood in Africa. It celebrates matriarchy, with two women – Janet and Jennifer – as the lead characters in the interrogation of alienation. The author’s moving narrative and easy writing style makes the book a fascinating read. It’s indeed an ideal read for long journeys and weekends. For those who like reading simple fictions, it would not be a bad idea to add Abimbola Ogunmolasuyi’s A Woman’s Valour to the reading list.
