Decorated novelist Chika Unigwe’s latest novel, Grace, raises several questions: Is survival ever morally neutral?
When circumstances corner a young woman, is giving up a child an act of cruelty or desperate self-preservation?
Do teenage mothers truly choose abandonment, or are those choices scripted by fear, shame and social pressure?
Can a good life be built on a buried truth and is a life built on silence whole or is it always waiting to fracture?
Does intention absolve action and where does compassion end and complicity begin?
At what point does helping vulnerable girls become complicit in a system that commodifies children?
Why are women mostly the custodians of shame and Is motherhood biology, responsibility or memory?
Can the past ever truly be abandoned and are some moral choices only visible in hindsight?
Is silence a form of protection or a slow violence and what does society owe its most vulnerable women?
Then, can redemption exist without confrontation?
On the periphery, the novel seems to be about a mother troubled by a decision circumstances forced her to take decades earlier, but it is much more. It is about many other women, and the flawed decisions circumstances have forced them to take.
The first and most visible of these women is Grace, a midwife running a clinic in Enugu. When Unigwe introduces Grace to us, she is eating cake, but we soon find out that the cake she is eating is not just a mere piece of cake. It is a ritual; one she performs on a particular date each year. The date commemorates the day she let a baby born because of teenage pregnancy go!
When she leaves the baby on the road, she never envisages that decades later, this decision will haunt her and disturb the excellent life she has built with her husband and their two children, who are unaware of the teenage pregnancy and the baby it produced.
The other women include those who find themselves pregnant with babies they do not need, babies that will upend their lives if they keep them, babies that will make their parents probably disown them, babies that can make life hell on earth for them. One of them walks up to Grace one day and declares: “I cannot keep this baby, please. Dash it to somebody else.”
In Grace, these women, mostly teenagers, find succour. She treats them well while pregnant, shelters them and helps them find homes for their babies when they are born. Wealthy but childless couples take these babies and give the parents enough money to start afresh. Grace, of course, gets part of the money, but the bulk goes to the young mothers and Grace feels good helping to meet a need, rescuing babies from being dumped on the road and saving the women from the shame of being mothers when they are not ready.
Ben’s mother is another of the mothers the novel focuses on. Ben was sixteen when he got Grace pregnant in the early 90s. This woman verbally assaulted Grace, called her a prostitute and outrightly rejected the pregnancy, making it easy for her son to escape responsibility for a joint transgression.
There is also Grace’s mother who felt it was her responsibility to save her family and her child the shame of having an unwanted pregnancy as a teenager. She personally leads her to abandon the baby, a decision that will haunt her child decades after and make her curse Ben, the lover who scarred her emotionally for life.
The author’s treatment of these women is commendable. By see-sawing from the present to the past, she makes us see their rationale and leaves us to decide whether to root for them or to give them the middle finger.
Unigwe delivers this powerful and important novel about motherhood in a language and style that are simple, yet far from simplistic.
In the end, Grace lingers not because it offers answers, but because it refuses to. It asks whether survival can ever be morally clean, whether intention can redeem action and whether a life built on silence can ever be whole. It forces us to confront why women so often bear the weight of shame, and whether society has the right to judge choices it helped to create. It blurs the line between compassion and complicity, between motherhood as biology and motherhood as memory.
Above all, it leaves us with an unsettling truth: that the past and the present are intertwined and trying to separate them can be difficult, if not impossible. We discover that a lot of the time the past refuses to stay in the past because that is not where it belongs, and we see that the past can make the present a living hell because the choices made in moments of fear and desperation do not disappear; they wait, quietly, for their reckoning.
***Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of two novels: In The Name of Our Father and After The End; a collection of short stories: Vaults of Secrets; and a travel book: United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales. He is concluding work on his third novel. He lives In Houston, Texas.
