1In her book Grief is Love: Living with Loss (2022), Marisa Renee Lee asserts that “[w]e can no longer afford to ignore grief, to relegate it to whispered conversations, to expect folks to navigate their broken-heartedness on their own. It is neither practical, nor possible, nor humane” (2). She calls for an intense appraisal of and reflection on grief and its devastating impact, particularly when it is caused by the sudden and tragic loss of a loved one. In The Materiality of Mourning: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (2019), Zahra Newby and Ruth E. Toulson argue that “[w]hile the study of death has been an enduring area of scholarly interest, such scholarship is frequently marked by a neglect of grief” (14) and, I want to add, (in)consolation. In South Africa-based Nigerian author Yewande Omotoso’s third novel An Unusual Grief (2022) and in British-Nigerian Onyi Nwabineli’s debut novel Someday, Maybe (2022), the two diasporic writers address head-on what the latter has called in her novel “the ugliness of grief” (Nwabineli 286) and in a recent interview the “untidiness of grief” (The Gloss n.p.), and question the possibility—or even the desire—to find any consolation after the sudden, unexpected death—by suicide—of a loved one.
2An Unusual Grief is a third-person narrative set in South Africa that navigates between the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Once she learns about her daughter Yinka’s suicide in her Johannesburg flat, Mojisola flies from Cape Town to Johannesburg to deal with the aftermath of this death. The novel features two seemingly inconsolable parents that attempt to come to terms with their daughter’s death, albeit in different ways. Someday, Maybe, published the same year, is a first-person narrative and also addresses suicide, that of Quentin, aged 33, who was married to the protagonist (Eve). The plot takes place in the UK and hinges on Eve’s attempt at recovering from this devastating piece of news. The plots are rather simple, if not simplistic, maybe to give more room to the treatment of grief through an intense focus on the attempts of the deceased’s relatives to cope with loss and the possibility (or not) for consolation. Both Omotoso or Nwabineli thus seem to answer Lee’s aforementioned call: grief takes centre stage in their two fictional pieces, as the titular “grief” in Omotoso’s novel indicates. In addition, both novels raise the question as to whether “closure is something [the characters] may […] obtain” (Nwabineli 308), closure possibly being a key feature of consolation, understood here as “a result (the fact of being consoled)” (Fœssel 39).
3In this paper, I wish to explore the modalities of grief in these two novels that share a common situation—the loss of a loved one to suicide—and ask whether any possibilities for consolation are offered. What shapes does the “untidiness of grief” take both thematically and formally in both novels? What can be said about the (traumatic) loss and the ensuing grief’s impact on language and form? I will first delve into the shattering grief of the unconsoled by addressing the formal elements that enable the writers to articulate, among other elements, desolation and the depth of trauma. I will then explore what Michaël Fœssel calls the “time of consolation” (2015) and the issues of repairing, caring and consoling in the two novels. I will finally explore the metaphor of excavation as the main characters, who are intimately linked to the deceased, search for meaning and, possibly, comfort.
4In Someday Maybe, the main character, Eve, ponders over the death of her husband and asks: “Who knew death could be so educational?” (Nwabineli 92). This educational dimension is also addressed by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2021 memoir Notes on Grief, written after the Covid-19 pandemic. In it, Adichie sheds light on both her physical and psychological states after her father, James Nwoye Adichie, passed away in Nigeria in 2020, while she was stuck in the US during lockdown:
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping of language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. […] This is affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. (6-7)
5Some of the elements emphasised by Adichie—the “cruel[ty]” of grief, the “anger” felt by those afflicted by grief, the relationship between the mourner and the people around them, the inexpressibility or inarticulacy of the pain felt, the “physicality” of grief, the mention of an “affliction,” i.e. a cause of constant pain or sorrow, from Latin afflictare, “to damage, harass, torment”—are also central to Omotoso’s and Nwabineli’s respective novels. Both explore the death of a loved one as an “event,” in the sense given by Slavoj Žižek, i.e. “the shattering encounter of an idea […] a moment of negativity, cut—the normal flow of things is interrupted, another dimension breaks in” (548). In this section, I propose to analyse the shapes the “untidiness of grief” takes both thematically and formally in novels that start in medias res and in medias dolor, and examine more particularly the link between disconsolation and inexpressibility.
- 1 Right from the start, vulnerability is central in Someday, Maybe (see p. 13).
6One of the main characteristics of Someday, Maybe, and An Unusual Grief, is that they ponder over the gut-wrenching—Eve notes that “God, it hurts” (Nwabineli 61, original emphasis)—impact of the sudden loss of a child and a spouse, what Joan Didion calls the “pains and furies of grieving” (90) in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) or what David James describes as the “maelstrom of grief” (163). In this regard, one could argue that “the bereaved” (Nwabineli 48) find themselves in a situation of vulnerability. In Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2004), Thomas Couser describes vulnerable people as “persons who are liable to exposure by someone with whom they are involved in an intimate or trust-based relationship” (xii). Moreover, in The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction (2019), Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg note that “modes of fragmentation and dislocation” (xii) are “associated with loss, lack and vulnerability” (xii).1 In Someday, Maybe, Eve describes the impact the suddenness and unexpectedness of death can have on the bereaved:
Suicide doesn’t work like terminal illness. You don’t always get to prepare, to say your goodbyes. The end sometimes arrives without warning. It swings for you and all you can do is accept the beating. [T]his is another lesson I never wanted to learn—not all losses are equal. Some feel bigger than others. Insurmountable. (Nwabineli 290)
- 2 This is reminiscent of the (five) stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance (...)
- 3 This emphasis on privative adjectives can be read as a sign of what Ruth A. Lanius et al. argue abo (...)
- 4 In this paper, all translations of Fœssel’s quotes are mine.
7In a similar manner, towards the beginning of Omotoso’s novel, the third-person narrator bluntly states: “Yinka gone, everything henceforth is mangled. [Mojisola] still hadn’t cried” (35). These two sentences can be read as a paradigm for how grief impacts the lives of the bereaved. The use of the euphemistic “gone” is echoed in Nwabineli’s novel (chapter 1), and shows that there is a difficulty—both psychological and linguistic—to express, admit, and accept the fact that the loved one (Mojisola’s own child in this case) is officially deceased, particularly so when this death is linked to a violent act, that of suicide.2 Indeed, Yinka killed herself by cutting her veins in her bathtub. The bluntness of the passage mimics the emptiness felt by Mojisola and the difficulty to “process” (Nwabineli 14), accommodate this loss, and “navigat[e] grief” (James 162). To mangle means “[t]o destroy something by twisting it with force or tearing it into pieces so that its original form is completely changed”. The process of “tearing into pieces,” a process of fragmentation—from the Latin frangere, to break—is central, as shown in this explanation given by Eve: “grief torches your capacity for both sympathy and empathy. I am nothing but a selfish collection of exposed nerve endings” (Nwabineli 24), where “exposed” clearly indicates a vulnerable state, and an example of what Didion calls “raw[ness]” regarding her own memoir (in James 162). The loss of a loved one has this traumatic aspect to it that can lead to the fragmentation and transformation of the bereaved’s selves. This is exemplified in Someday, Maybe by Eve’s description of her husband’s death as “the cruel, unannounced, unexplained bombshell of Quentin’s death” (Nwabineli 23). The accumulation of adjectives, two of them characterised by the privative prefix “un-”—also present in Adichie’s aforementioned passage with “ungentle”3—clearly conveys the impactful traumatic blow inflicted by the loss of a loved one. Eve makes it clear: “But grief destroys. A wrecking ball that crushes your ability to enjoy” (Nwabineli 21). This metaphorical allusion to grief as “wrecking ball”—whose sole purpose, therefore, is to demolish, crush, destroy—is key to understanding the impact of this type of loss on the bereaved’s self. For indeed, Eve explains that grief has the capacity to “destroy […] anyone” (Nwabineli 86), and further refers to the “cyclone that is [her] grief” (Nwabineli 196), yet another potent metaphor that could be linked to what James, Fœssel, and Nwabineli herself, call “desolation” (James 1; Fœssel 83; Nwabineli 101). All these terms—“mangled,” “bombshell,” “wrecking ball,” “cyclone”—added to the fact that Eve says that she is “[s]creaming like monsoon” (Nwabineli 327), point to the metaphorisation of grief and suffering that corresponds to what Fœssel describes: “Sufferings are metaphorized so as not to be abandoned to the state of untranslatable affects” (Fœssel 102).4 In Someday, Maybe, metaphors abound as indirect expressions of grief, as though there were a need to resort to this figure of speech, which echoes Fœssel’s argument according to which
[t]he relevance of a metaphor is linked to its ability to reveal a dimension of experience from which we are usually distanced. By displacing the literal meaning, it forges a figurative meaning which, by renaming the thing, enables us to experience it in a new way. (87)
8It seems, then, that in Someday, Maybe, grief can only be represented through metaphors, which, still to Fœssel’s mind, could be perceived as a consoling process: “[m]etaphors speak of the thing without taking it as its object. It is consoling insofar as it rewrites pain” (Fœssel 110-111). In this metaphorisation, there seems to be an attempt at putting in place a form of consoling process. Eve herself describes her way of talking about her loss as metaphorical:
I might say that your husband killing himself and having to remain upright while your world collapses around you is a great metaphor for how loss shapes you. I may allude to how the damage rearranges itself to allow or even compel moving forward — the putting of one foot in front of the other. (Nwabineli 87)
- 5 Eve also talks about “wounds [she is] unsure will ever heal” (Nwabineli 315). Jean-Michel Ganteau ( (...)
9Eve—“an emblem of vulnerability” (Ganteau 1)—admits that her “life is one excruciating open wound” (Nwabineli 19, emphasis mine),5 a “plight” (Nwabineli 20), “some form of trauma” (Nwabineli 174, emphasis mine) that could indeed prevent any consolation—understood here as “result (the fact of being consoled)” and not as “process (the act of consoling)” (Fœssel 40)—from taking place. In this regard, similarly to Adichie, Eve “touche[s] grief’s core” (Adichie 10). These elements echo Cathy Caruth’s remark in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (1996), according to which “traumatic events violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily integrity. The body is invaded, injured, defiled” (53).
10A vivid depiction of the physical impact of grief onto the bereaved appears in Someday, Maybe particularly:
Grief is not neat. Pain is not dignified. Both are ugly, visceral things. They rip holes through you and burst forth when they see fit. They are constant, controlling companions, and if they don’t destroy you or your relationships with others, they certainly go a long way to damaging you, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence. (Nwabineli 106-107)
- 6 Later on in the novel, Eve states that “Nobody tells you that irrational hope is a side effect of g (...)
- 7 Adichie notes: “In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, fin (...)
- 8 In this regard, one could say that Eve undergoes a form of infantilisation—from the Latin infans, t (...)
11The verbs used here all testify to the violence the bereaved go through. Grief and pain are gut-wrenching, and threaten the physical and psychological integrity of the self. We learn, for example, that “[Mojisola’s] recent weight loss is due to mourning. As a neighbour, coming round with a plate of condolence, put it, ‘You have dropped.’” (Omotoso 9). In Someday, Maybe, Eve is even more precise when she notes that “[t]he realization [of Quentin’s death to suicide] keeps hitting [her], clubbing [her] over the head, pounding away at the back of [her] skull” (Nwabineli 14), therefore recording the physical impact of grief, which could lead us to believe that consolation—as “result”—could be all the harder to reach or that the state of disconsolation is linked with this endless loop. The repetition of the [ING] form shows the enduring and maddening trauma of loss, an idea that is also present in the crescendo effect of the verbs indicating a physical violence targeted at Eve’s head, the seat of Reason.6 Like Adichie,7 Omotoso and Nwabineli bring to the fore the shattering and traumatic physical effects of grief on the unconsoled, i.e. the deceased’s relatives. Eve’s friend Bee adds that she has “every right to be broken by this, gutted by it […], to be consumed with missing Q” (Nwabineli 147). Petrification is one of the motifs that is explored by both authors in order to analyse the physical impact of grief. For example, Eve refuses to “eat, wash, move” (16, emphasis mine), and refers to grief and its “anchoring [her] to the spot” (23). It is echoed at the end of the novel when Eve notes that she is “pinioned by a grief so sour [she] can taste it” (282), the passive form—also present in the passage where Bee talks to Eve—, emphasising passiveness, probably the unconsoled’s physical and psychological state par excellence8. The impact is also on voice, linked with a form of animalisation of the bereaved. It is exemplified in Nwabineli’s novel where Eve reveals that “[Her] scream turns to a howl” (17); she also talks about “bawling” (21) so much that it risks “extinguish[ing] your own voice” (17), and adds that “[i]t’s hard to push words past the lump in [her] throat” (24).
12In this context, early on in the novel, Nwabineli showcases the link between movement/emotion—Sara Ahmed remarks that “[e]motions involve different movements towards and away from others, such that they shape the contours of social as well as bodily space” (The Cultural Politics 209)—and consolation, particularly in the following passage:
Since I ignore all the advice offered to me—to eat, wash, move—since this particular case of misery eschews company, and since Gloria pioneered Nigerian guile, she sends in my niece and nephew to hold my hands and stare at me with wide eyes until I am moved to sit up. (16, emphases mine)
13Eve’s sister Gloria starts a consoling process by sending her two children to move and blackmail Eve into sitting up, a first step indicating a movement upward. Fœssel explains that “[t]he consoler fills an absence experienced as a torment with words and gestures” (111): “[a] word, a gesture, a look are all attempts to re-establish a bond broken by suffering” (46) and “[a]nything will do to console. Faced with another’s suffering, the consoler uses arguments, gestures, tears and laughter to pull the other person out of desolation” (83).
14With grief qualified as “immeasurable” (Nwabineli 273), therefore excessive, is consolation—understood both as “result” and “process”—even possible? David James explains that
consolation isn’t always condoned by the bereaved or harrowed, for whom remedial stories might feel intolerable. It’s not difficult to imagine situations where the impulse to console would seem inappropriate and disrespectful, even insolent or obscene. (1)
15The sense of insuperability and discomfort is apparent in Someday, Maybe, when Bee visits Eve and, to some extent, blames her for keeping her husband’s ashes—“‘It doesn’t seem healthy, keeping all this stuff around. This place is like a shrine’” (Nwabineli 122)—and adds:
‘I understand that you’re in hell right now, but at some point, you’re going to have to start trying to move past this […]. He’s not coming back so there’s no point starving yourself to death or downing pills and booze or leaving everything exactly as it was when he was alive. It won’t help.’ (122-123)
- 9 Eve’s friend Luisa, that she met at an art class, says: “‘You’ll be happy again. [Quentin] wasn’t t (...)
16Fœssel is useful to understand this situation in which Bee, the consoler, “admits that there has been a loss, but […] she requalifies it to make it become the opportunity for a new beginning. It is this credence in the future that the melancholy person refuses” (Fœssel 34). The initial willingness to keep Quentin’s ashes—and not share them with her mother-in-law—is linked to a coping mechanism filled with lugubriousness (from Latin lugere, to mourn) and wistfulness, whereby Eve finds a form of comfort by keeping some of her husband’s energy in her home. Implicitly, Bee points to an anachronism suffered by the bereaved, something Fœssel mentions: “To console means to fight against the tendency of misfortune to encroach on the time of life” (56-57). Eve quickly realises that the people surrounding her show “impatience for [her] to get ‘better’” (Nwabineli 122). In this context, it is fruitful to reflect on the consoler’s desire for the bereaved “to be happy again” (Nwabineli 110)9 and to ponder over “the time of consolation” (Fœssel) by analysing the significance of the tears that are shed and the modalities of this time of and for consolation.
17Fœssel argues that “[f]ar from being merely private, human emotion is outward‑looking. As such, it is akin to a request for consolation. The ritualization of the act of consolation is rooted in this expressive dimension of pain” (134-135). In this regard, it is noteworthy that the “aggrieved” (Omotoso 129) Mojisola initially seems incapable of crying, as though she were not ready or willing to be consoled, as though she were facing an “impossible mourning” for fear of an “unjust betrayal” toward the deceased (Derrida 6). This could also point to an element brought to the fore by Fœssel when he explains that “[t]ears come in exchange for a pain that leaves no direct initiative to the subject” (58). Indeed, contrary to Eve, who is “pinioned here by grief”—the verb “pinion” is used for the clipping of a bird’s wings to prevent it from flying and “here” is to be understood as both an adverb of place and time—, Mojisola “has come further than her legs can carry her: she has flown” (Omotoso 3). Within the economy of An Unusual Grief this agency makes sense as Mojisola has a quest: she craves after answers regarding her daughter’s suicide and, to do so, she cannot remain passive. This initial incapacity or unwillingness to cry looks suspicious to the people surrounding her, among whom Zelda, Yinka’s South African landlady: “‘Have you cried yet?’ Zelda asks’” (92). To some extent, it is only when “she is finished with the two journals”—those written by her daughter and her husband—that she
cries for real. She cries until her ears pop and the muscles in her face ache. She cries, and the snot that comes out from her nose gets in her eyes when she wipes them, makes them sting. She cries and beats her chest […]. She cries until her eyes swell up. She punches a wall and the skin on her knuckles break. (215)
18This passage is clearly the novel’s climax characterised by excess, embodied by the seven occurrences of the verb “cry”. It seems here that “the emotional duct tape keeping [her] together finally gives way” (Nwabineli 14) and that she is “no longer suspended in that terrible limbo” (Nwabineli 14) and “stupor” (Nwabineli 21). To quote Fœssel, “[b]y occupying the entire field of the visible, excessive tears transform unhappiness into ostentatious misery” (57). One can also note the facial pain felt by Mojisola, as well as her violent gesture. This falls in line with Fœssel, once again, when he remarks:
As a general rule […] pain does not go without the production of signs which, like crying or tensing of the face, attenuate the emotion felt by moving it to another region of the body. Can’t we see in this bodily expression, in addition to a simple diversion of energy, a kind of call for consolation? (129)
19In Someday, Maybe, tears are even more present to the point that they can be said to saturate the novel. There are no fewer than 36 occurrences of the word “tears” in the novel and they testify to “the distance we travel from loss, consolation also map[ping] the affectively rocky ground we may need to cross” (James 1, emphasis mine). Moreover, according to Fœssel,
[h]aving become omnipresent, [tears] prevent the consoler from revealing a temporality other than that of the loss. It is not certain, however, that the first gesture of consolation is to dry the tears or demand that they stop. In many traditions, tears are themselves consoling. If they attest to the fragility of the afflicted person, they are also a substitute for articulate language made impossible by a sensation that is too intense. [...] Crying is ‘the manifestation of an excess’. This excess is that of experience over what can be said: tears replace the distraught mutism provoked by what exceeds the capacity to do and say. (57-58)
- 10 In Oser pleurer (2024), Guillaume Le Blanc writes: “To cry is always to dare to cry, to admit and a (...)
20These tears, as we are told by Eve, attest to her “guilt [which] manifests itself physically in [her] throat and [she] start[s] choking on it” (Nwabineli 48)10. In this context, the role of the consoler is arguably precise: “Unable to reverse the loss, [the consoler] tries to control its socially visible effects” (Fœssel 57), among which (the excessive and uncontrollable amount of) tears. Moreover, the power of being seen by others “can become an instrument of consolation, insofar as the exposure of the self is that of a vulnerability that is a call for comfort” (Fœssel 130). This vulnerability affects Eve’s father who declares that “‘in time, it will slowly start to be less difficult’” (Nwabineli 78), therefore already pointing to a possible state of consolation “as result,” which can be interpreted as wishful thinking.
21There are several examples of consolation attempts in both novels. Consolation comes from the Latin consolari (con- / sōlārī, to solace, to soothe), which points to a relational dimension: we “find solace together” (Ignatieff 1). Consolation entails a relationship between the individual and their community. We could also argue that the bereaved’s relatives demand that the harrowed find solace. It is particularly striking when Eve notes:
Since Q’s death, my life has become a series of events dictated by others and almost exclusively categorized as ‘Can’t.’ You can’t starve yourself, Eve. You can’t choose not to bathe, Eve. You can’t be sad forever, Eve. You can’t just up and leave, Eve. (Nwabineli 219)
22The anaphora of “You can’t” and the epiphora of “Eve” emphasize her relatives’ pressing and potentially stifling insistence that she should try and recover from her loss. This echoes what David James explains when he argues that “when we try to console, we also, however delicately, try to counsel and the advice we bestow can present an emotional feat—a virtual leap from what’s lost” (1). Eve’s attitude and feelings contrast with the way her own family behaves after Quentin’s death:
A week. My husband dies and seven days is all it takes for things to begin to shift. It manifests in the moods of the people around me. For outsiders, the atrocity is limited to knowing I am hurting. For them it ends there. And I can’t blame them. They have their own lives and for them the nightmare is already over. They are able to return to normality. There is a door they can close. (Nwabineli 25)
23Nwabineli depicts the impact of death as described by Bronislaw Malinowski: “[Death] is, therefore, much more than the removal of a member. By setting in motion one part of the deep forces of the instinct of preservation, it threatens the very coherence and solidarity of the group” (34-35). Some family members and friends become impatient: it is Bee’s case, who argues that Eve might benefit from a therapy: “‘You need to talk to someone. I mean, I’m here for you always, but there are, y’know, people who deal with this sort of thing’” (Nwabineli 52). Here, “this sort of thing” is a euphemism for what Eve is going through. Consolation also seems impossible as Eve is constantly reminded of her husband’s passing (Nwabineli 120). Her life is constantly interrupted by the thoughts of her deceased husband, as though linearity or teleology had become impossible. Eve and Mojisola are asked to appeal to their reason: Eve’s relatives tell her that she “can’t” behave the way she wants, or that she “should”—“The shoulds are already stacking up” (Nwabineli 20, original emphasis)—do things in a certain way. Yet, Omotoso and Nwabineli point to other ways of considering grief, and other ways of finding solace.
24In An Unusual Grief, once Mojisola, a Yoruba, is back in Cape Town, she faces an uncanny situation whereby she finds comfort in a woman’s voice that she hears:
A host of pigeons have settled on Edward VII. They are amusing, shitting all over the stone waistcoat of the playboy king. She stands to watch the birds for a moment and a sweet sound suddenly comes up. It’s a woman’s voice, seemingly from close by, but Mojisola can’t see where. She thinks she’s inventing it, she must be, but then, looking around, she realises that other people are hearing it too. She notices a few people staring at something on the ground. They are looking down a manhole. […]
The first sounds Mojisola catches make her think she is listening to Yoruba. […] There is someone down there, someone singing a lullaby at 4pm, her voice, from the depths, a reminder of the chambers below and invisible stories. […] The woman is still singing, and it’s good to hear the music […]. Mojisola closes her eyes. She feels buoyant but also tightly bundled. Swaddled. (Omotoso 232-234)
25The incongruous scene of pigeons “shitting” over the statue of King Edward VII in Cape Town may remind the reader that since 2015, the University of Cape Town has been known as the stronghold of the decolonial movement #RhodesMustFall. The reader may therefore be encouraged to disregard a certain western-centred legacy, including a western-centred approach to grief, whereby the living would be separated from the dead and a sense of closure would be expected and, to some extent, compulsory. In Au bonheur des morts : Récits de ceux qui restent (2015), Vinciane Despret writes that “the idea according to which the dead have no other destiny but that of non-existence attests to a very local and historically very recent conception of their status” and that “[d]eath as opening onto nothingness ‘is certainly the most minority conception in the world’” (12, translation mine). This is a point that is further elaborated on by Fœssel, who alludes to ontologies where the realm of the living and that of the dead are not separated:
An ontology opposed to the Christian scientist vision of the world, for which there is no middle ground between absence and presence. The problem is not whether we “believe” in this kind of ontology, in which the living and the dead continue to maintain relationships. It is only important to note that, by resorting to it, subjects protest against the rigidity of the boundaries imposed by a narrow rationalism. (30)
26A possible interpretation of the end of the novel is that the dead never leave the living, a belief that West African cultures, and many others across the globe, nourish. What is at stake here is a questioning of the coloniality of knowledge and being. Beyond the irreverence towards the colonial figure of King Edward or Cecil Rhodes, one feels a need to excavate a subterranean/underworld (or is it stifled?) formerly colonised voice that can be heard. It is a voice that speaks in Yoruba and, at the same time, not really in Yoruba. Is it Yinka’s voice? May that voice possibly bring solace as suggested by the term “buoyant,” or, if not solace, a comfortable and reassuring feeling (as indicated in the two adjectives “bundled” and “swaddled”)? There seems to be a willingness on the part of Omotoso to make her (non-western) readers (re-)engage with their own culture’s way of dealing with death as a means to find (or not) closure and solace.
27In Someday, Maybe, four occurrences of the word “closure” appear, with three of them in the last 35 pages of the novel (Nwabineli 249, 308, 325, 330). At some point, Eve admits that she does not “have the privilege […] of closure” (Nwabineli 249). The title itself is an invitation to reflect on (the absence of) closure. As she reaches a form of clarity, Eve remarks: “I understand that my questions for Quentin may never be answered, that closure is something I may never obtain” (Nwabineli 308). Even though, indeed, this closure—possibly linked to consolation as “result”—might be impossible to reach, the bereaved still try to find answers concerning their relatives’ suicide. One could argue that the four parts in Nwabineli’s novel—“Home,” “Work,” “Away,” “Home Again”—indicate a sense of closure linked to circularity. And yet, the last part—“Home Again”—is both similar and different as Eve has been drastically altered by her husband’s suicide.
28In one of the passages in which she is attempting to assess her situation, towards the end of the novel, Eve reflects:
I want to tell Luisa that it never occurred to me that I would have to learn to not want him, that this was going to be my life. I will sit before others and they will ask my story, and I will tell them my husband died, but this will become a footnote when right now it is the entire plot. (Nwabineli 318)
29A striking aspect in this quotation lies in the repetition of “will” that suggests a change in perspectives as far as Eve is concerned and resonates with Fœssel’s idea that the consoler expresses a “credence in the future that the melancholy person refuses” (34). Here, it is noteworthy that Eve is not only capable of picturing herself in the future, but also of wanting to do so. Moreover, the references to the “footnote” and “the entire plot” are metatextual in the sense that, in Omotoso’s and Nwabineli’s novels, the death of the loved one constitutes “the entire plot”. The two novels are indeed an exploration, an excavation, inside the pain felt by those left behind. Indeed, Mojisola and Eve seem to be trying to “find […] consolation in agonized retrospection” (James 2). The etymonline website defines the verb “to excavate” as: “to hollow out, make hollow by digging or scooping, or by removing extraneous matter,” from ex “out” and cavare “to hollow out,” from cavus = “cave” (vault, hole). Once Mojisola lands in Johannesburg, she immediately drives to her daughter’s flat in order to meet Yinka’s landlady and deal with the objects present in the flat. I would argue that Mojisola’s first steps illustrate the process of excavation and its link with (in)consolation:
This is what it is like for Mojisola to be standing in No. 81, standing in the home of her dead child, a space she has never been in, was never invited to. She is still for a moment. There is a coolness — perhaps a window is open somewhere. But then this reasoning is surpassed by a louder assessment. Mojisola feels, on entering the apartment and closing the door behind her, that she has entered a space of perverse quality. It feels subterranean, which is not logical since she is two floors up. She takes a few steps further in. Subterranean or interstellar, in defiance of ground rules. The place is a crypt or a rocket shuttle. (Omotoso 10)
- 11 Didion notes that she read studies about grief: “Dolphins […] had been observed refusing to eat aft (...)
30The fact that the omniscient narrator compares the flat to a “crypt” indicates that something is hidden, and needs, therefore, to be deciphered. The novel sheds light on the necessity to understand the reasons that led to Yinka’s suicide, a cryptic act to her parents. The issue of deciphering is important for Mojisola as explained just after this passage where the reader grasps why she is so obsessed with her deceased daughter’s objects: “She’d imagined that her personality, otherwise indecipherable, could be revealed through such choices” (Omotoso 11). To go back to the aforementioned passage, one cannot but perceive an uncanny (and frightening) atmosphere, as shown in the appeal to “logic,” the reference to the “crypt,” but also to the “subterranean” quality of the flat that can attest to what Freud calls Das Unheimliche. To some extent, Yinka’s presence can still be felt, in the same way as “Quentin’s ghost stalks [Eve] on these nights” (Nwabineli 22). Still on the same page, while Mojisola keeps exploring her daughter’s flat, she “bends to take off her shoes. She does so not because it is her habit but because there is a line of shoes at the entrance door. It is a clue to the laws of this home and Mojisola is obligated to comply” (Omotoso 10). The word “clue”—“clue” and “clueless” are repeated five times in Someday, Maybe, as well—is part of a lexical field in the novel that is related to “detective work” (Omotoso 35) as the narrator describes Mojisola’s excavating endeavour. Later, the narrator adds that “[a]s she drives to the venue Mojisola cannot shake the feeling, once again, of being in a crime movie” (Omotoso 108). She is also described in a process of “unravel[ing] the mystery” (Omotoso 223) of Yinka’s death. She can thus be compared to a sleuth or an archaeologist that excavates her daughter’s phone messages, hoping that whatever information/clue she will find will bring consolation; the same occurs in Someday, Maybe.11 In Omotoso’s novel, the narrator notes: “Mojisola reaches for her phone, sighing, thinking she’s operating more like a butcher than a detective or coroner. She’s hacked through Yinka’s life, hacked her computers, hacked through her friends and diaries and secrets” (185). This hacking process can be understood as an excavation which purports to find meaning behind a loss, a sort of “materiality of mourning” (Newby and Toulson). Newby and Toulson ask: “How much can we glean about past emotions through the physical objects which remain [?]” (197). The reader is given the opportunity to read some of the messages exchanged by Yinka on her phone and on a dating site, and Mojisola has access to a diary in which, once again, she is looking for clues, yet to no avail.
31This search for meaning is very much linked to what Viktor Frankl describes as “the quest for meaning [that] is the key to mental health and human flourishing” (157), especially when a person is grieving. Robert Neimeyer also explains that people who grieve aim to impose meaning on their experiences (2009). What Mojisola is involved in is nothing less than “meaning-making processes” when meaning has been challenged by loss. I would add that Omotoso works on generic expectations by using some of the codes of the detective novel in order to reflect on loss, grief and bereavement. Yet, can this “detective work” / excavation lead to any form of comfort, solace, closure? The use of “had” in “She’d imagined” in the aforementioned passage foreshadows Mojisola’s failure in accounting for her daughter’s suicide, in trying to make sense of the loss of her child. This is very much linked to a process of “restoration” that Fœssel mentions:
In a pattern akin to reminiscence, resilience is achieved through the reactivation of capacities already present in the subject, but so buried that they are unable to cope with the catastrophe. The imperative is clearly one of restoration: finding the strength within oneself to re-establish an order that erases the effects of the trauma. (Fœssel 25)
32As she excavates objects in her daughter’s flat to try and make sense of what her life was like until her death and why she committed suicide, she finds elements that do not offer any satisfying answer, and one may wonder whether finding answers is to be desired anyway, or whether it is the “gradual self-reformation” (James 163) that matters more?
33However, An Unusual Grief shows that there might be another way to know oneself, to “collect oneself” to try and find solace. It is the option chosen by Yinka’s father, as shown by his journal, transcribed in the third part of the novel over a 20-page section. What is central is how (traumatic) loss and the ensuing grief and mourning can impact language and the form of the novel itself or what James calls “structural solace” (163). James further adds:
My corpus suggests that we are in a historical moment when novelists and memoirists are confronting consolation’s contested legitimacy not by producing ‘just some mental simulacrum of affect’, as Attridge puts it, but by locating that contestation in the anatomy of form […]. (6)
- 12 In Someday, Maybe, Eve remarks that “[o]ne of the more horrific conventions of grief is its sneakin (...)
34I believe that An Unusual Grief reveals Omotoso’s willingness to work on “the anatomy of form”. In the journal section, entitled “Professor Titus Owolabi: Journal,” the death of the loved one resists meaning and possibly contributes to breaking chronology and linearity (which is very much linked to the effects of trauma) as the section interrupts the main narrative. The use of the first person in the journal while the third person is used in the rest of the novel, is just one example of what James explains when he is referring to “the anatomy of form”12. In order to make sense of his daughter’s death, the father decides to follow his psychologist’s advice to write a diary so as to possibly find a sense of closure. The father’s experimental and fragmented journaling experience through grief could be said to be, in some way, similar to Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, which points to the therapeutic and/or healing power of expressive writing. Both father and mother hope to find solace through what could be called “detective work” and writing a diary/journal can be said to be part of this excavating endeavour:
Soon after the funeral, Titus’s colleague, John, had sent them the number of a bereavement counsellor, Thembi Minyuku. Mojisola called once but didn’t show up for the appointment. And then they’d had one other conversation when Thembi called to follow up. Mojisola had said she could not use the counselling, that it was not for her. Minyuku had suggested that she write in a journal. ‘The memories,’ she’d said, ‘you might want writing them down.’ The idea had seemed absurd to Mojisola, fit for television programmes, but too romantic for real life. (Omotoso 37-38)
35What is at stake here is a solacing attempt to reconstruct a meaningful world that has been challenged by loss. Indeed, as James explains:
solace therefore shares some traits with what LaCapra and other trauma theorists have associated with ‘working through’: namely ‘an open, self-questioning process that never attains closure and counteracts acting-out (or the repetition compulsion) without entirely transcending it’. (18)
36This “repetition compulsion” can be found in the bereaved’s attitudes but also in three occurrences within the novel of Nwabineli’s title, which refers to the (im)possibility of finding solace. In the first third of the novel, Eve states: “What I choose to say to my little brother instead: ‘Someday. Maybe’” (Nwabineli 110). Later on, the text reads “Someday. Maybe” (Nwabineli 156, original emphasis). Finally, we can read “Someday. Maybe” and “Now someday is today and maybe is still maybe, but there is an infinity spreading out in front of me” (Nwabineli 157, original italics). The comma in the title of the novel hints at a stronger potential for closure than a full stop, yet still prevents complete closure from taking place. It is a slight yet significant change from “Someday. Maybe,” where the full stop seems to foreclose any possibility to find solace since consolation might be impossible to achieve. Indeed, Eve reveals that she is “being dashed against the rocks of husbandless pain. It doesn’t get better; it just doesn’t get any worse” (Nwabineli 90).
37By way of conclusion, it is worth taking a look at Yinka’s father’s journal, once again, particularly when he writes the following allegorical story about a hornbill:
Hornbill lived in the village with all the other animals, but he would not conform. He refused to follow the rituals of the village — particularly the death rituals. When a member of the community died Hornbill refused to join a funeral procession and, to the great annoyance of his fellow animals, he would not acknowledge the separate place for the dead, apart from the living. […] At the death of his own child, Hornbill was unable to observe the customs of his kind, simply put, he did not know them. Desperate, Hornbill wrapped the body of his child in the best way he knew how and, carrying the weight on his head, went wandering in search of the burial site. […] Eventually the corpse of his child began to decompose. So that’s the hornbill. With its dead. Buried on its head. (Omotoso 209)
38This allegorical narrative focuses on disobedience, the hornbill’s “willfulness” (Ahmed, Willful Subjects) not to conform to the death rituals imposed by the society of animals in which it evolves. What is interesting here is this idea that the hornbill refuses to separate the realm of the living and that of the dead. At stake here is the necessity to “care for the dead” (Despret 9, translation mine), to continue to live with them. Towards the end of the novel, the bereaved seem at peace, but are they consoled? There is no sense of closure for Mojisola after the death of her child and no sense of closure for Eve after the death of her husband: the wound remains open, but they seem to be on a path not towards consolation or inconsolation, but towards acceptance, as life carries on. With time, it is possible that their grief will become a “footnote” and not “the main plot,” but they will probably never be able to “close [the] door” (Nwabineli 25).
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