Miracle, in all senses, is a happenstance outside the abilities of human nature that is utterly extraordinary in its effectuation. In the making of a miracle, despite the involvement of humans as recipients of miracles, the constellation of powers that make it is exclusively supernatural. Ayọ́bāmị’s Stay With Me ushers in a new kind of miracle, which is, however, uncommon and slightly dissenting to the above assertion: one that is human-orchestrated. Yejide, in this case, is the god, the being extraordinaire who charts a belief for herself in the face of stringent antagonism. In Yejide, a miracle becomes a human affair, evident in her adorning herself with delusions, blatant as they are. It then follows that miracles are what humans call them, what the mind chooses to call miracles. To some, the breath of a new day’s air is an inestimable miracle. To others, the safety of lives and the evasion of malevolent occurrences that militate against this cherished safeness is a miracle. A clear explanation of the persistence of Iya Bolu in her idea that zobo-drenched sanitary pads can save women from the attacks of rape by armed robbers is another uncommon setting in which miracles can exist. In another uncommon setting, miracles can exist when horrendous secrets are safely piled away from public gaze, and when the dignities of humans are still intact. Perhaps this final instance of a miracle is interestingly transient, as the popular philosophy, “nothing is hidden under the bare sun”, also combats it. Little wonder the secrets of Akin, which are kept away from his wife, Yejide, are exposed in a rather unwholesome circumstance.
When we hope for a miracle, we do so with two expectations: one of total upliftment from the present scalding situation, and the other of temporary salvation, understanding that our problem can only be overcome by compromise, drawing the borderline between supernaturally-originating miracles and human-engineered miracles. Compromise indicates the limit of human abilities; it is the point where all possibilities have been exerted, and it is the point of understanding the incapacities of humans in making consequence-free miracles. Akin understands that only the other form of miracle, the supernatural form, can occur for pregnancy to happen in his home. Sometimes, these supernatural miracles are, at first, subjected to skepticism before they morph into belief. And upon testing, Akin realizes the bleakness of this Yejide-manufactured miracle, the belief in a pregnancy that never existed, the burnished hope of cradling a baby, and shaming all the people around her who doubted her. Akin understands the influence of compromise whenever we want to effectuate possibilities, which explains his arrangement of sexual incidences between his brother, Dotun, and his wife to further caress the piggy bank where he stows away his secrets.
Ayọ́bāmị tells the story of women, their perpetuity of desire and infinite longing, as well as the fragility of a man’s ego, protected as it is. The author presents women as yearning for a wholesome world, one that brings completeness and unblemished familial happiness, which is often not readily available and therefore must be created. The novel is replete with women who construct miraculous worlds of ideas, traditions, and hopes and live in them. And when they discover the bleakness of one world, they embark on creating another.
It also tells the story of men who are often recipients of the miracles that women offer. It’s no wonder that Akin is unperturbed while Yejide takes the blame for a sterile marriage and why he excels at hiding the truth from her until the destructive moment. This is because Akin’s society sees a man’s effort in procreation only as a complement to an already existing miracle in the woman’s body. This is why, when Akin malfunctions and realizes that he cannot afford sexual pleasures for his wife, he does not speak of it but goes to arrange sexual encounters between his wife and his brother, to create the miracles. This is to say that such worries are not his responsibility and that a man’s role in procreation is expected to be devoid of defects.
Like all other phenomena that occur in the human realm, miracles, despite being supernaturally fixed, are not without cause and effect. Miracles usually occur as a result of an urgent need; they do not occur in a vacuum. In man-made miracles, for instance, culture is often the leading influencer. Culture makes a people want certain things, and it can make them creative in manipulating natural processes to achieve comfort. It is the same culture that makes Yejide see nothing wrong with herself when she experiences all the signs of pregnancy, yet the scan result gives her a blank sheet indicating the current state of her womb, and in the end, she is diagnosed with pseudocyesis. Culture puts her in competition in her home; it makes her an alternative if she fails to produce her own babies, whichever way. Culture makes her find her value and worth in pregnancy, to find life in it, such that when she eventually gets pregnant, she feels as though “new life kicked within me, and soon I would have someone that I could call my own. Not a stepmother or half-brother. Not a father shared with two dozen other children or a husband shared with Funmi, but a child, my child.”
One can understand the existence of an intuitive kind of miracle in the way Iya Bolu distrusts the efficiency of “the sight of policemen with automatic pistols and hunters with Dane guns patrolling the estate” when an armed gang dispatches letters of notification of a planned robbery in the neighborhood. Iya Bolu is a step ahead of the other women in protecting not just the physical property, but also their emotional well-being. Even though the estate occupants have made hunters and police officers available to guard the area, Iya Bolu is skeptical about their ability to protect them from personal harm, such as rape. She understands that safety is a luxury that humans enjoy and when this is tampered with, she hustles to patch the leaking valve by thinking of ways to protect herself, her daughters, and other women who may need protection. She is a practical woman who takes into account the possible failings of several protective structures, exemplified in her question to the women, “How many of your husbands will take a bullet rather than have a group of robbers rape you?” She also takes note of the generally observed fractured police system, as Iya Bolu makes the readers wonder with her, “Tell me, did the police help Dele Giwa?” Iya Bolu opts for prevention, requesting that Yejide tell her the wordings of the letters she received from the armed robbers, playing the role of detective and anticipating the coming of the robbers.
The author blends unusual incidents in the novel, which are testaments to the power of humans in managing their destiny. Nigerian singer and songwriter Simisola once sang: “If woman get confidence o/then she no be woman.” This captures the definition of womanhood from a normative point of view. A confident woman is not an ideal woman. A woman who discovers something she does not want and flees from it is not an ideal woman. The novel then takes an unusual path with Yejide’s departure from her home and from her daughter’s life, which she speaks of as: “…while my last child was dying in Lagos and the country was unravelling, I was not afraid….” From then on, roles are reversed, and the miracle of Akin alternating between fatherhood and motherhood begins to unfurl.
The book is divided into four parts, each consisting of forty-two chapters that chronicle the fears, courage, misery, secrets, and shame of a people who are experts in inventing their world in their fantastic minds. The author illustrates the different plights and redemptions of the characters with folktales and proverbs, which further buttress the fact that humans have always attempted, in the face of desperation, to invent their own miracles. Such is the adventure of Ijapa in finding a child for his wife, and the heroic quest of Olunrobi in finding her family’s whereabouts, leading her to make a vow with the Iroko tree to offer it her first child in exchange for her family.
Ayobami employs an immersive narrative voice by telling the story in the third-person point of view. This feeds the novel with full objectivity and allows the story to flourish in an unbiased arch. It bequeaths the reader the full liberty to empathize with each character who is brought under view, so much that one does not immediately find a character culpable without first understanding their motives. The novel alternates between a distant past where most actions take place and the present (told in the present tense), where the consequences breathe themselves on the characters.
The book questions the assumed progressiveness of norms with respect to the diversity of the human body. It is an adventure to perceive the circle society has roped her people in – this circle of stringent, indisputable patterns. Such that when the people liberate their minds, it is regarded with awe and wonder, such wonder as we attribute to the performance of miracles.
Divine Okorie hails from Imo State, Nigeria. A fiction writer who reads, writes, and argues. His works can be found on Brittle Paper, Fiction Niche, Writers Space Africa, African Writer, and elsewhere. He is the prose reader for Fiery Scribe Review and is currently an associate prose editor for The Muse Journal.
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