Title: Butter Honey Pig Bread Author: Francesca Ekwuyasi
Published: November 3, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 368
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.
Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact. She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won't be a good mother. Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women. She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.
But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos. It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.
Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread is a gorgeous, thoughtful book about family, trauma, and (eventually) healing. Portraying three generations of women, three continents, and three-plus decades, this is an engrossing character study of the Adejide women. Each in turn, these three characters share their perspective, tiptoeing around the Bad Thing that, in various ways, signaled the fracturing of their family unit.
Kambirinachi is a woman who has stolen happiness from fate, and she has paid for that crime ever since her husband was murdered. She is an obanje, a spirit that haunts a family by being born only to die, over and over again. Except Kambirinachi loved being alive too well, and she abandoned her Kin to live a human life. After her beloved husband’s death, her Kin come to reclaim her, but Kambirinachi’s love for her twin daughters tethers her to this world. (Alternatively, Kambirinachi’s story is a moving, culturally insightful depiction of schizophrenia and the intricate ways its inserts itself into family life.)
Kehinde fled Lagos (and the memories of the Bad Thing) at 18 and has never returned. She has purposefully cut herself off from her twin and formed a new life for herself. But underneath, she is bitter and resentful and achingly furious.
Taiye, the elder twin, is the character that shines most from these pages. Impetuous, vulnerable, lonely, and overcompensating. After her sister cuts off contact, Taiye throws herself into the distractions of lust and meaningless sex. Her days spent in London are reminiscent of a queer Nigerian take on Fleabag, and I think Ekwayusi’s best work is shown in her characterization of Taiye, her struggle to create a life without Kehinde, and the joy she studying at culinary school.
But though the separate histories of these women are shown, they are only what came before; in the present day, mother and daughters have converged on Lagos, together again for the first time in years.
This is a slow, deliberate novel. It’s not long, but the author doesn’t rush into things. She takes her time, peeling away at each narrator with careful knife-strokes. Butter Honey Pig Bread is almost suspenseful, in that way that a good exploration of personality can sometimes be. You keep reading because you’re desperate to learn the why and the how of the characters’ motivations and relationships. Ekwayusi’s talent is palpable here, in how she positions her characters, and how they react to things in such different, unique ways. And the text comments not only on the sticky, uncomfy nature of family, but also on postcolonialism, the Nigerian diaspora, being queer in conservative spaces, cooking as language unto itself, and on the line between insanity and faith.
It was nearly painful, how much I loved this book—up until the end. At the story’s climax, the moment the reader had been waiting for, the scene where Kehinde and Taiye confront each other and share their very private hurts…the emotion and depth of character fail. The conversation between the twins descends into sweet sentimentality, rather than poignancy. The most important scene unfolds in a saccharine, simplistic manner that doesn’t do the characters (or the author’s talent) justice.
Yet I wonder if the root of my dissatisfaction is my pessimistic belief that messy, deep-rooted hurts such as those present in Butter Honey Pig Bread are rarely resolvable. “In real life,” I say to myself, “these sisters could never be reconciled.” And so, perhaps, my cynicism betrays me.
In any case, I enjoyed this book more than almost any I’ve read in months. Francesca Ekwuyasi’s prose is intelligent and emotive, and the text unveils both its characters and larger subjects in pointed, insightful ways. Though I found this novel of sisterhood and forgiveness a bit rocky in the final act, overall, Butter Honey Pig Bread was thought-provoking and a true pleasure to read.
