Sade Adeniran tells this exceptional tale in an exceptional way.
As ungodly as Lola’s predicaments are, she manages to shower the pages with witty ironies and enduring humour. We are still able to smile, sometimes even laugh, with each turn of the page, despite the overbearing condition, the deprivation and adversities confronting our young protagonist.
Lola Ogunwole, the protagonist and narrator of this tale that sticks to the mind with its tough claws, let’s us into the events she recorded in her diary since she was nine and in the end, we are grateful to learn how to be human beings.
The events that marked her life from childhood through adulthood, are a series of tragedies orchestrated by fate with the hand of man. First, she and her brother Adebola were abandoned by their mother in London, when she was barely eighteen months old. Then their father in a bid not to lose his children to the government, returns back to Nigeria with them to begin life afresh. They miss the life they had in London, their friends, their play toys and the obvious ease of life over there. But it is not their retuning to Nigeria or their mother abandoning them at a time they needed her the most (though they would always link these two events to their circumstances), that would spark the doses of pain marked by an uneventful life; it is the choice their father makes of sending his young children to live with relatives. He sends Lola to live in Idogun with his relatives. Adebola to Ado-Ekiti, to live with his brother Joseph.
Adebola dies a few years after their return, owing to the negligence and maltreatment of an Uncle that was supposed to take care of him. Lola loses her power of speech and would go on to fast for forty days, so that God would restore her brother back to life. One would expect their father to hold dearly and even pamper, a child suffering from the loss of a brother that had meant everything to her, but no, not their father. She slips while trying to lay Ekundayo (her half-brother) in his cot, and he falls on his head. Her step-mother accuses her of trying to kill her son and she gets a severe beating from her father that not only sends her into coma for weeks, but sends her back to Idogun.
Years would pass redundantly, before another Uncle takes pity on her and brings her to Lagos. He soon hands her over to Uncle Niyi, as his wife was tired of having her around. It was in the charity of Uncle Niyi (not without him occasionally ravaging her breast), that she finds her way back into the hands of a father who seem to have forgotten not just his role, but that she existed.
Meanwhile, she is in love with Segun Baptiste, a guy she met at the lesson centre and had grown fond of, and even warmed up to his mother. Everything seems to be going well, after so many years of turbulence. She had even begin to warm up to her father and was savouring the wild hope of getting married to Segun Baptiste and giving him the gift of her virginity. It is no long before everything came tumbling down again. First, she discovers the love of her life has been having an affair for eight months. She lets him have her body and afterwards breaks up with him, even though she still loves him. Then, her father is killed by unknown assailants and her world comes crumbling for the umpteenth time.
In the end, she leaves for London, but not without first making Segun see what he would be missing and hearing the voice of the woman who abandoned her years ago.
One can say, Sade Adeniran has successfully explored a rare technique in telling this beautiful story. It is like a collection of a hundred stories, all running into each other to become a single story. It permeates, I dare say.
