The Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist, in partnership with Exclusive Books | Yewande Omotoso on the genesis of 'An Unusual Grief'

THE BACKSTORY

Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief (Jonathan Ball Publishers/Cassava Republic Press) is shortlisted for the Sunday Times fiction prize, in partnership with Exclusive Books.

CRITERIA 

The winner should be a novel of rare imagination and style; evocative, textured and a tale so compelling as to become an enduring landmark of contemporary fiction.

Our judges said: A brave and vivid story of a mother's grief and attempts to uncover who her daughter was and what happened to her. Omotoso’s writing about trauma, loss and imperfection is outstanding. 

Yewande Omotoso on the genesis of her book:

Just over 20 years ago, when I was 23, my mother, at age 57, died of cancer. Barring the birth of my twins and the recent loss of my father, this remains the most impactful experience of my life. I wanted to write about “mothers” and “death”, but I switched the scenario. I recall going through my mother’s things, finding her wedding dress, a bag she’d hidden away of her hair that had fallen out during chemo and a sparsely populated diary. If I died and my mother grieved, what would she find and what would it reveal of me?

The story I went on to write, a fictional one, became an exploration of that question. Death is ubiquitous and, while we all grieve differently, one thing we know about grief is it’s sad. What if it could also be triumphant and sexy? I wanted the project of writing to be an exploration of questions, such as is it possible to know our loved ones better in death than in life? And can grief not only sadden but titillate and repair us.

I spent time trying to understand what made Mojisola into the adult she is. I did the same with her husband Titus, and of course Yinka, their daughter, who is dead at the start of the novel. I’m obsessed with the ways in which our personhood turns this way or that based on our experiences, what sticks on us and what washes off, and why.

In terms of setting, I almost instinctively honed in on Midrand. I’d lived in Centurion for a year and the time remains vivid in my memory — this expanse of on-the-surface cookie-cutter suburbia and office parks sprung up between Joburg and Pretoria. An in-between space that mimics the nowhereland of grief where you hang between the familiar life with your loved ones and the unknown life without them. Midrand felt like the perfect container for the strange fetish turn Mojisola’s grief takes.

I wrote and rewrote (and wrote and rewrote) An Unusual Grief over about three to four years, searching deeply for the shape of a story where a woman can lose her daughter but find her life.

EXTRACT:

When the day of Yinka’s birth arrived, Mojisola had experienced a miserable 41 weeks. She’d imagined she’d be relieved to bear down, to surrender to the ripping of her tender passage but just when the midwife ordered that she push, Mojisola, with every intention to do as commanded (at this dark point in the process of birth no other action would be logical), discovered a resistance within her bones that seemed not of this world. Something stronger than her was at work. 

‘Push, now!’ the midwife repeated, a touch of panic in her voice. She repeated it three times, louder and louder, until Mojisola once more mastered her bones. Holding her new sticky child, she’d felt ashamed for having possessed this will (greater than her will to mother) to resist, to fight and hold the child in limbo, rather than push it out into motion. And yet it was undeniable. Lying there, the nurse screeching, ‘Push,’ on the sidelines, Mojisola had had brief seconds of hope and ecstasy. She would experience the very same, but in reverse, many years later when she heard of the death of her child but in that moment on the birthing bed Mojisola fantasised that she somehow had the ability to reverse time. The fantasy that the child would go unborn, that she could reverse the irreversible and return to a simple existence that had gradually, over the many weeks, disappeared. 

For all the prayers Yinka turned out to be a queer baby. Crumpled up somehow and creased. Her eyes seemed to take up most of her face which was unsettling, the staring child. Mojisola knew it was a bizarre thing to do but if they were alone and Yinka was staring she looked away, broke the gaze. Hers, in the end, was a serious face. None of the cuteness babies require as armour for their most vulnerable years. A serious, staring face. Her cheeks were round but her lips were straight; she didn’t gurgle. She seemed to be conserving all her energies for some later time when she knew she would need power and would have to draw it from within. What a strange child, Mojisola thought. What a strange, strange child.

            As if hearing her thoughts: ‘This one. This one sha,’ Auntie Modupe kept saying.

            ‘This one what?’ Titus once shouted. It was a tired household. He later apologised.

            ‘This one,’ Auntie Modupe whispered, as she collected Yinka from her mother after the day’s first feed. ‘She will make you suffer.’ She laid the baby between her jaw and shoulder, rubbing her back. ‘Moji,’ she snapped at Mojisola, who was already dozing.

            ‘Hmm?’

            ‘This one will make you suffer. Wait and see.’

The child was a wonder, an endless crying, eating, pooping creature held together with skin and seams. Sometimes Auntie Modupe would catch Mojisola and say, ‘Be careful. Don’t love her too much.’ Was it love, though? It felt more like being overrun, being colonised, at once complete and irreversible.

Yinka had come out baying and wouldn’t stop. She bayed and bayed and bayed and bayed. Soon after the incessant crying ended, she developed colic and a new kind of crying began. Mojisola could not sleep for three uninterrupted hours. Titus was at work most of the time: he was being encouraged to publish his doctoral thesis and it meant long hours in the office. He would come home and ask his wife why she looked so haggard: what was the matter? And then she’d scream at him. This was new. Up to that point in their relationship there had been no shouting. It took the birthing of a child for Mojisola to discover that there were things about her husband she didn’t like. He tagged the word ‘understand’ behind almost all of his sentences. It had been endearing and a not unfamiliar word twitch, until one evening a colleague of his stopped by. Mojisola was breastfeeding, unwilling to be gracious with unexpected company so she sat in the adjoining room. After the colleague left, she approached Titus, Yinka asleep but firmly attached to the teat.

            ‘How come you didn’t ask him if he understands anything?’

            ‘Moji, what are you talking about now?’

            ‘How come you didn’t ask him if he understands anything?’

            Titus had developed a frown for such interactions with his wife.

            ‘How come? How come you ask me all the time if I understand? Do you think I’m stupid, Titus?’

            ‘Where is all this coming from, Moji?’

She hated the fact that his breasts were not the size of cushions, his nipples were not cracking. His bowels didn’t oscillate between two available modes, constipated and diarrhoeic. Regular and solid, well formed was Titus. To be fair, he slept almost as little as she did, but it didn’t result in black welts beneath his eyes.

She breastfed till Yinka was two. Nothing else agreed with the child so, while the paediatrician looked for alternatives, Mojisola’s breasts worked.  ‘Second child,’ Titus whispered, one night, after some rare coitus. 

‘What?’ Mojisola said, pulling herself away while Titus was still anticipating more sex. ‘I need another two lives to recover from the first.’

*

The memories are a drug. Mojisola moves through the house, doped. On occasions when she doesn’t come forth Mojisola finds herself looking for Innana the cat, under the couch, in the cupboards. Despite herself she wants to lay the cat in her lap and stroke it. Yinka’s cat. Yinka’s laptop. Yinka’s cellphone. Yinka’s clothes. Yinka’s drawings. It’s a bizarre inventory, the belongings of the departed beloved. The ordinary that would warrant no second glance suddenly heavy with meaning. Mojisola finds herself trying on her daughter’s clothing. There is a towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door. It is bone dry but still Mojisola intends to take it to bed with her. Half bottles of cold cream, unpaired earrings, a box of tissues, one tablet left in a blister of Panado, an empty suitcase, the one Yinka had left Cape Town with (full). Amidst her things the absence – complete, absolute – of the person herself is so unfathomable. Mojisola glances at the front door, she cannot help it. She imagines Yinka walking through any moment: Hello Mummy, sorry I’m late. 

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