The first thing you’ll likely notice on opening Damilare Kuku’s debut novel, Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow, is that it’s one of those literary works that favour the less-used second-person narration.
But, the 246-page work isn’t told entirely in the second person. Rather it uses three voices: first, second, and third.
Temi Toyebi’s perspective is in the second person format while Ladun Toyebi, her elder sister, their mother (Hassana Toyebi), Big Mummy, the cantankerous aunt to Ladun and Temi, and Jummai, Hassana’s sister all use the first person to render their accounts.
The version of Barrister, the Toyebi family lawyer, is rendered in the third person.
These alternating points of view offer unique insights that help make sense of many a scenario in the book that follows Temi, a girl schooling and living on the university campus in Ílé-Ife, who is displeased with her buttocks and decides to change the situation after seeing an interesting advert of a firm in Lagos offering to ‘sell’ her her dream ‘yansh’.
Temi faces the dilemma of not just raising the millions for the procedure but how to tell her close-knit family members who are clearly conservative and will query her sanity for nurturing such a thought. The gathering of the family members as a result of Temi’s Professor-father’s death and courage from an extraordinary source, provides her the opportunity to detonate the bomb leading them to forget that they were supposed to be grieving the death of Professor Tito Toyebi!
More pages in, it will dawn on you that this novel from the author of the phenomenally-successful Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad, though built around Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL), is about more; issues that make our world go right and wrong, issues that make us cry and make us laugh, issues we can’t avoid.
One of such issues, you will discover, is how deceitful friends can sometimes be as shown by Boboola, Temi’s friend who reneges on an agreement she reached with Temi.
Temi’s big-yansh-quest announcement, you will discover, is a tool the author uses to get the other women in the book to reflect on their own lives and following these reflections, scandals and secrets leap off their cupboards, regrets cloud their faces and remorse dons modest apparels.
Self-esteem, you’re likely to decipher, is a sub-theme and the novel sheds light on how it makes us take decisions we either end up being proud of or regretting.
You’ll see that this novel also examines the complexity of being a woman in Nigeria and its intergenerational ramifications; what emerges is a vivid and well-realised portrait. Ladun’s pains, which she keeps away from her big bumbum-seeking sister and grieving mother, help to make the picture whole. Big Mummy’s and Jummai’s experiences also give crucial insights into what it takes to be a woman in a patriarchal society like Nigeria. You’ll also see how their bodies and their looks affect their journeys and make them warped. While one person is sad that she has no big bumbum, another is sad that her near perfect physical features are the source of too much masculine attention.
Religion, you’ll realise, is subtly tackled, especially through Big Mummy, the one who orders fasts as if she is ordering an uber and who says eating meat is akin to “eating your husband’s penis”.
The book will bring Ílé-Ife, the acclaimed cradle of Yoruba civilisation, and the Obafemi Awolowo University to life in ways no recent novel has done. You’ll see the good, the bad and the ugly of the university town.
There is more; the reason why doctor’s japa and work on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is lasting for ever.
Told in standard English with a bit of Nigerian English, familial politics, drug use, COVID-19 and more are other thematic concerns Kuku touches.
Humour is a tool that drives this novel. Funny lines such as “you are too young to be carrying slippers on your chest” enliven the pages.
With this book, you’re likely to feel that Damilare Kuku has used a very topical and controversial issue like butt enlargement to deliver an easy read that is warm and devoid of sermonising.
*** Olukorede S Yishau is the author of In The Name of Our Father, Vaults of Secrets and After The End. Catch him on X @YishauOlukorede
