Tomorrow I Become a Woman

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Then he said the words I’d imagined but never thought possible. ‘Sister Uju would you be free on Tuesday after mid-week service? I’d like to take you out.’ She’ll keep coming,’ Chinelo jumped in enthusiastically before I could utter a word. ‘She’s our good friend and a really nice girl…’ Church members would approach me with timid smiles to say, ‘I saw you in so-and-so magazine,’ and compliment my expensive wrapper and head-tie, my designer shoes. And I would smile with just the right blend of pleasure, humility and satisfaction, tilt my head elegantly and say, ‘Thank you.’

On a Sunday in 1978, Obianuju meets Chigozie at church – the perfect place for an upstanding girl to find a husband. Uju is in her last months studying economics at the University of Lagos; Gozie is a journalist ten years her senior. Crucially, he is Igbo and meets her mother’s approval. Months later, they are married, and Uju’s life is set on a new course.Sister Chinasa giggled nervously. ‘Of course, of course,’ she said pushing at my shoulder a bit too forcefully. Chinelo winked at me as I slowly got to my feet, stunned. Instrumentals blared from the side of the pulpit and out through the building and its open doors and windows as the service started. Men and women danced and shouted and waved their hands above their heads in rhythm with the music, a strikingly different form of worship from the solemn assemblies of the orthodox churches we’d been raised in. I watched in surprise as my friends joined in, dancing and screaming like everyone else, encouraging me to do so as well. But the session ended abruptly, before I could fully absorb the goings-on around me.

Let’s talk about the hunt for a male child. It’s real even in today’s world. Men still find their family incomplete without a boy, I cannot grasp the concept of that because the message it sends is that girls are half human beings who don’t belong their families but rather that are raised to marry and give birth to children. This narrative is very harmful to families and even children because a lot of burden is placed on the boy and the girl is made to feel like nothing. A bond was formed that day – he a twenty-three-year-old genius with a PhD and well on his way to becoming a professor, and me a nineteen-year-old student in need of affirmation and direction. ‘You’re always welcome to stop by my office for anything you need,’ he said that day and I took those words seriously, partly because I was really and truly fascinated – I’d never met anyone like him.

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By the time I was a teenager, Mama had thrown away all her amulets and other relics of pagan worship she’d been brought up with, and dedicated herself fully to the church. Aiwanose Odafen’s novel has entered popular feminist discourse, calling our attention once again to the travails of women. One realises that this is a topic that can never be truly exhausted. The concerns of women in modern society is valid, as this novel makes us see. We realise that the point of womanhood is not a one-dimensional attachment to a man, but a complex network of cultural and societal abuses that must become subject to change. Womanhood thus becomes that moment of change.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Tomorrow_I_Become_A_Woman_-_Aiwa_Odafen.pdf, Tomorrow_I_Become_A_Woman_-_Aiwa_Odafen.epub Mama never got tired of telling me the story. She’d been married for many years to Papa, and her position was safe: she’d had sons, three strong boys. But Mama had wanted a daughter; she’d prayed and begged for one. Someone to share her stories with, to pass on the recipes her mother and grandmother had given her, to teach all that she knew about life, to take trips to the salon with and gossip about the things only girls cared about.

When Gozie and Obianuju meet in August 1978, it is nothing short of fate. He is the perfect man: charismatic, handsome, Christian, and – most importantly – Igbo. He reminds her of her beloved Uncle Ikenna, her mother’s brother who disappeared fighting in the Civil War that devastated Nigeria less than a decade before. It is why, when Gozie asks her to marry him within months of meeting, she says yes, despite her lingering and uncertain feelings for Akin – a man her mother would never accept, as his tribe fought on the other side of the war. Akin makes her feel heard, understood, intelligent; Gozie makes her heart flutter. Told in short chapters, the story does not exactly paint men as angels. Where they appear to be, there’s always a less-than-desirable monstrosity lurking. But there are good men such as Akin, who redeems the image of men in the novel. The title of each chapter highlights different expectations and requirements expected to be a woman: the harsh treatment towards being unmarried or giving birth to just female children; giving birth to two children of mixed genders and still expected to bear more against your preference; being the sole provider of your family as the wife and still getting abused physically by your spouse. Read Also: A Call to Greater Understanding: A Review of Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadimma, or Everything Will be Alright) Questo libro non mi é dispiaciuto e si lascia anche leggere piuttosto in fretta perché é scritto in modo scorrevole, nonostante le frequenti incursioni in lingua yoruba o qualche altro dialetto nigeriano a me completamente sconosciuto.

Tomorrow I Become a Woman is a story set in 1970s Nigeria just after the civil war between Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra. Aiwanose Odafen wrote a spellbinding and unapologetically Nigerian book that explores the reality of women in Nigeria. Split into three parts, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, we are immersed in the lives of three friends and their travails to becoming acceptable women in society. Uju, Chinelo and Ada are childhood friends who grow to become sisters joined at the hip. Out of the circle, Uju is constantly pressured by her mum to get married. She meets Gozie, a God-fearing man with an angelic voice, and decides this is the man for her, but is he truly the one?Tomorrow I Become a Woman’s infusion of Igbo words is commendable. Though the words are italicised, they are, for most parts, left unexplained. The context explains the words in some cases. But, otherwise, the uninformed reader must make use of their Internet search engine. The author deftly captures Igbo culture in the novel. It is also heartening to observe that the Igbo words and phrases in the novel are spelt correctly. The church was alive that Sunday, the air electric with fate. The atmosphere bubbled with music and people. Smiling women in floor-length skirts and colourful headscarves stood at the entrance distributing flyers, and men in oversized trousers directed us to our seats. where you can't have an intellectual conversation with a man because it might reduce your chances as a woman for marriage. A culture that (currently) still thinks that a woman is not a woman if she doesn't birth any sons for her husband. This book might have been written based on what our mothers experienced in the 80s and 90s but the sad truth is a lot of women still fight these battles in our current society.