You’ve probably heard of Hades and Persephone, the rulers of the underworld in Greek mythology.
You probably also know that their story is not the conventional love story—not like retellings and animations will have you believe. Hades ‘fell in love’ with Persephone, and one day while she was picking flowers, he abducted her and made her his queen in the underworld, away from her mother and away from the light and beauty she had been used to all her life.
The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe is a beautiful retelling of this myth from Persephone/Nani’s point of view, full of twists and turns that leave you reeling.
Nani is the middle daughter of an upper-middle class household in Enugu, whose happy life takes a downward turn when, only two years after her older sister’s sudden death, her father dies. These losses, fast on the heels of one another, are too much for Nani to take, especially as these two people were her people in the family.
Nani likens her grief to madness when she says ‘She had a wild look in her eyes. But I was the one that ran mad’. Deep in the mire of this grief and struggling to find her footing, Nani meets Ephraim. Fitting that this ill encounter happens when she is picking roses outside her gate.
Ephraim has a ‘strong’ character and though he is not the kind of person Nani usually befriends, what with his grandiose vocabulary, his irrational anger and his worn shoes, she finds herself trusting him. What harm could this bible-carrying, ridiculous man who knew much about roses possibly do? The answer? Too much.
Nani’s complete trust in Ephraim and her anger towards her mother leads her into an abusive marriage that threatens to break her until there is nothing left of her.
But alas, unlike with Persephone and Hades, Nani owns her story and will see the light of spring even if she has to fight tooth and nail for it. This is the foundation of the story: Nani’s fight for everything. For a reprieve from grief, for acknowledgement from her mother and sister, for freedom from Ephraim, for her children, for her self.
The book tells this story in three timelines: the present, the past and the beginning; from different points of view: Nani’s, Ugo’s, Udodi’s, Ephraim’s; and different dimensions: the living world and the world of spirits where Udodi resides. It’s not confusing once you get the hang of it, and by ‘get the hang of it’, I mean once you successfully go through the first few pages. Yes, those pages are my grouse with the novel.
I almost didn’t read it. Again, yes, I can be quite impatient with novels, but that is because I have a huge TBR pile I must conquer. I instantly disliked the opening sentence and thought it was trying too hard. I mean, why say ‘I fear the man that is my husband’ when you could say ‘I fear my husband’ or ‘I’m scared of my husband’, like a normal human being?
Well, when towards the end of the novel, the author takes us back to the beginning, I realised that was the perfect opening sentence, and she couldn’t have constructed that sentence better. Ephraim was not her husband in the way wives lay claim to their husbands but was a man who was her husband. When I read the sentence for the first time, though, I didn’t know this, so I thought it was pretentious and this dislike seeped into the first few pages.
I liked the chorus that introduced the story, and Nani’s memories about her Doda and his stance on marriage, but somehow, when I read the second chorus, I lost every desire to keep reading and dropped the book for days.
Then, I remembered I promised to write a review, so I read the book thinking I’d have to force myself through it, until I met Nani through Udo’s eyes. Nani, the girl whose mischief was well hidden beneath her quiet exterior. I enjoyed reading about this person whose hardness was ‘so well concealed in the soft folds of her body she forgot sometimes that it belonged to her’. And from that moment, the book did not let me go until I’d read every name in the Acknowledgements.
So, rough start, but an amazing ride.
MOTHER
In this story, Nani’s mother does not supplicate for her daughter like Persephone’s did, and Nani had to endure being abused and the knowledge that no one was coming to save her. Set in her ways and very proud, Nani’s mother failed Nani.
How can you be so angry at your child that you don’t even try to see her after you hear that she’s gone to live with a man? How is it that the first thing that comes to your mind is that she is no longer your child, instead of how to kick the man’s door down and grab your baby from his filthy grasp? How could you let things get so bad that your daughter would rather return to her rapist than confide in you??
Nani’s mother did not feel like a mother—at least, not like any mother I know, and her inaction and anger towards her daughter was the chain that bound Nani to Ephraim for so long.
NANI (Our hero)
Now, Nani’s decisions. Many times I felt like flinging my phone away or grabbing Nani and shaking some sense into her head. Of course, she did not know better, but I believe she had no right to be angry at Ugo when Ugo did not discern immediately that she needed help. She never told her: never opened her mouth to tell her sister what she expected of her, kept assuming things until it was too late to untangle her mind from the quagmire of abandonment and self-pity. How did she expect Ugo to know what Ephraim had done, or know what she wanted the day Ugo found them and did not rush to hug the kids?
Even as I thought that, I pitied her because I know firsthand how painful that can be: to be locked in your head, hoping someone sees you thoroughly without needing you to say anything, and getting your hopes crushed because people really aren’t magicians and everyone is in their own little bubble of life.
UGO (The last born)
Then, Ugo was just a child, and she loved her sister so much, but there is only so much you can do when the other person has formed opinions and has judged you based on them, so much so that their actions are a stark contrast to whatever it is that they are pleading for.
Yes, maybe she could’ve fought a lot harder, maybe she should’ve pushed in that annoying way of last borns, but she didn’t and that is not a sin. She was not as rebellious as Nani, she had dreams of going to America, and she had her own emotions driving her—one of which was anger at Nani for abandoning them.
And reality is no good when you already have your preconceived ideas. Each of us filters reality through our own trauma, hurt, and state of mind, and for these women who refused to communicate, there was enough grounds for distorted realities. Too many chances to escape and to bridge that gap between them were lost because they all chose to run with their assumptions rather than communicate.
I’m not even going to dignify Ephraim with a section!
Too many things to unpack, too little space in which to do it. One thing is for sure, though: Nani’s walk to freedom was as sweet as her descent into hell was horrible. And however you choose to interpret the story, as a cautionary tale for trusting too easily, as a torch on the reality of abuse victims, as a retelling of the Greek mythology, the author did a superb job of creating Nani: human, flawed, scared, but capable of so much love and possessing of so great a strength she almost seems superhuman.
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