Chika Unigwe’s The Middle Daughter Fails to Hit The Mark
In writing fiction, especially when the story is born from imagination, the writer is tasked to write as though by creating characters, they were drawing, and by writing them to life, they were painting. And to the reader, the art can only be seen after the painting was complete. This was my thought as I read Chika Unigwe’s third novel, “The Middle Daughter,” especially in its impeccably written beginning.
The book begins with grief; a kind of heart-searing grief. First we see a woman unhappy in her marriage confessing grief of her union. Then came the death of Udodi, the eldest daughter in the family of three daughters shattered the family. The description of that phone call, the reaction of her parents, her two sisters — the disbelief, anger, grief and indeed all five stages of grief. The picture was nothing short of gorgeous, and heart wrenching. As a reader you are all convinced that you are in for a treat.
For a reader like me wholly in love with culture and its peculiar poetry, I am so in love with the beginning chapters of this book. How it incorporates the philosophy of the middle child. And how it takes advantage of the poetry of the Igbo language.
Indeed Unigwe’s attempt to incorporate the Igbo worldview of life through the Igbo poetry and proverb does it for me especially at the beginning of the book and this is, I am sure, the case for many readers.
From the beginning of the book we know a woman is in a marriage in which she is not just unhappy but terrified of her husband. The opening sentence of the book reads, “I fear the man who is my husband.” And one gets the inkling that this is a novel about domestic violence, a predominant theme in literature which never gets old because of the endless perspectives through which it can be explored. And this is one of Nigeria’s most successful contemporary novelists bringing in her perspective to it. She immediately switches back in time to tell us about the death of her elder sister which shatters the family in great measure, and also the preceding happy days when she and her two sisters, Udodi the elder and Nani the younger and her middle daughter grew up with their comfortable middle-class parents, their posh kids dream, some of which their parents couldn’t afford at the time. Delving into the backstory gives you the conviction that you are being immersed in the backdrop of an enjoyable novel, until the character, Ephraim enters the story and the dissatisfaction in the narrative begins.
But a little before that comes the lack of proper development of the voice(s) in which the story is told. Written in first person and third person, both voices are so similar that the immersive reader sometimes forgets that the story has switched from first person to third person. And then the Ephraim character comes in and things get a bit more ugly.
Being the first time reading a novel by Unigwe, I have no knowledge of how well she has done in her characterizations in previous works, but the biggest flaw of this book is in the characterization. Many aspects of the story are, for a lack of better word, not believable, and this is because the characters are not well psychologically placed, many of their actions are hardly believable. From Ephraim (except for his religious fanaticism which is stereotypical) to Aunty Enuka, to Nani and the character of their mother, the characters hardly came alive in a spectacular way, and in many cases, in their action, they seemed like they were tools in the hands of the author for her own purposes. And with a stick she was poking them to do what she wanted them to do, instead of breathing life into them.
Even good novelists sometimes make this mistake of failing to properly connect with some of their characters and in the story it shows. Unigwe did not seem to connect properly with the character, Ephraim and he did not feel real to me. He felt more like a tool used by the novelist to torture Nani in her marriage. We have seen spectacular and cruel characters from writers created from these parts, and Ephraim doesn’t seem like it. One gets the notion that Unigwe was infuriated by him and so she dealt with him sparingly the way she would keep her distance from such a person in reality. But a novelist has no job treating their characters that way. In great novels we can feel shortcomings of great characters and even the antagonists have their great moments where they are truly human. And after Ephraim deceive Nani and rapes her, everything which happened afterwards seemed contrived. The reaction of her mother, how Nani ran away from home, her many years of suffering and how none of her family members came to visit her at that time is questionable.
In fiction, it is true that if it can be imagined, it is true. But even the actions of the characters don’t feel authentic. Whether they are being kind or being cruel, it often feels orchestrated. In fiction, it is said that a novelist can do anything, including write about flying elephants. The task is to make it believable. And the lack of proper character development and proper story architecture in the novel makes it fall short of this. The job of the fiction writer is to trick the mind into believing the story without remembering that it is fiction.
In Ikhide Ikheloa’s review of “On Black Sisters’ Street,” he points out that Unigwe was guilty of an over-analysis of the characters’ motives. In “The Middle Daughter” Unigwe is guilty of over analyzing the protagonist’s grief so much that at some point, the book seems like grief porn. The obsession to make the book evoke deep emotion takes away from the story in certain respects. But this is not the only problem; Nani herself has such an unhealthy view of her problems and for a woman who spent eight years under an oppressive man, the narrative does not do justice to her relationship with her children — which were the main reason she stayed in the marriage that long compared to a story like Buchi Emecheta’s “Second Class Citizen” though Emecheta’s writing may not have been as stellar as Unigwe’s. Unigwe also over analyzes the characters’ poverty that she fails to pay deeper attention to their humanity. When Nani swings in between both worlds, the comparison between her memories of Number 47 and Obiagu reminds you of poverty porn and why it is such an unsatisfactory school of storytelling because it relegated its characters to their poverty.
“The Middle Daughter” is not the masterpiece we expect from a writer of Unigwe’s reputation. Her writing will benefit from proper critical feedback of insightful beta readers and a proper study of the psychology of kindness and cruelty. Many Nigerian Writers are guilty of lacking the psychological nuance in telling their stories. One thing which I have learnt from reading this novel by Unigwe is that in serious literary fiction character development can’t be traded for anything.
