There is no denying the fact that childlessness is perhaps the most devastating predicament for the African woman.
This is not to say that the condition is easy to bear elsewhere (Europe and the Americas); but the substance of the attendant sorrow has a different colouration. This results largely from cultural dispositions. And there has been growing tension to either evade or refute that accusatory traditional viewpoint.
However, there is that unmistakable nudge to address life in its entirety of the same socio-cultural definition. Paradoxical as it may be, that is the starting point of the conflicts that encircle women’s life within the margins of their existence.
Point?
There is a unique attention to novels that address this struggle from one temporal setting to another. In reading Angel Patricks Amegbe’s No Pink In A Rainbow therefore, a flood of emotions runs through one’s essence. It is a novel whose style is another accomplishment in the radar of narratives raising the volume about the cancerous nature of the attendant grief of childlessness.
Naomi and Jan meet on Facebook. After several months of consistent correspondence, the love that has grown between them is much too insistent to deny the ultimate outcome: marriage. Naomi moves to Belgium to live with her love, Jan. There, this new phase of her life witnesses a fatal experience – a miscarriage.
Added to that is something very much like racial prejudice at her workplace, doubling the blades of her experience. But Jan is a loving husband. He tries to help her up from the deep emotional agony that swallows her up but almost to no avail.
Naomi’s grief stretches along the encounters she has with every human condition, while in Belgium. She loses herself entirely in indescribable deep grief. The world is dark around her even though she finds escape in her usual human indulgences. It is this futility of resuscitation that excites a memory from her teenage encounter within a family circle. The sedulous story ends in a resolve that will stir the reader to reconcile with societal expectations.
No Pink In A Rainbow is a work of pure human tribulation. The reader will be particularly excited by the brilliance invested in carrying the protagonist through such a very compact narrative. Besides the impactful deployment of certain devices, the past and the present are strung in an effective tapestry of mental, psychological, and emotional responses. This is evident in Naomi’s taciturnity which only succumbs to the relief of pleasures. The implication here is that it is almost impossible for a woman to recover from the abyss of a life broken apart by the overreaching sense of failure from the cultural disposition of her utilitarian womanhood. It is twice the agony today.
The availability of ultra-modern solutions does not prove a panacea to the guilt and disillusionment. The same failure persists with traditional and modern interventions. The privileges of civilisation only deepen the crevice created by the expectations about marriage and the joy of motherhood.
Amegbe can show this with a coherent sequence. Every element of the story, as the reader will discover, coheres with another to underscore the thematic concerns.
Still, a momentous pull about the narrative is the atmospheric grasp of an artistic presence. While the incidents are not a novel condition, they are portrayed through an unequalled exactitude of emotional chaos so that the inner conflict is finely interspersed with the enormity of scarred memories.
Where the reader may be used to experiencing such a trajectory; they most likely have yet to feel the intensity with which No Pink In A Rainbow sweeps them through the defining conflict(s) of a devastated womanhood. It foregrounds the premise that there is no pigment in our socio-cultural institutions which offers women the urgent relief from the intertwined and entwining compulsion to prove their position. It is a monologue on the memorials that traverse childhood and adulthood put together, prising open the bottled-up compartments of the politics (sex and relationship) that qualifies female representation.
Of course, there has never been pink in the rainbow. But we keep hatching creative conditions to escape the known fact. Amegbe’s narrative prowess is enriched with images and symbols purposed to facilitate judgements from a cult of readers whose acumen for the ideal hero is an organised process of signification.
The thematisation of the chapters into a framework of astrological components achieves an accompaniment with elements of literariness. Littering the text are profound tools for an analytic reading. That is, beyond the immediacy of pleasure, No Pink In A Rainbow is a heavyweight text on the emotional, mental and psychological balance of life that operates as a circus of failed expectations.
True, No Pink In A Rainbow is preoccupied with the theme of grief, but grief in this telling becomes a motley of a past that cannot be changed, a present that cannot be accepted and a future that cannot be defined. Angel Patricks Amegbe suggests that grief is an aftertaste of social and cultural predicaments that have sabotaged the will to survive. The victim does not weep so much for what is lost as for what will never assume its primeval meaning. Notable still are the themes of migration, love and affection, sexual abuse, racial prejudice, friendship, homecoming, disillusionment, trauma and survival, motherhood, etc. They are ideas suggested with the outstanding elements that undergird the coherent plot.
***Kehinde Folorunsho is a literary critic and a scholar of literature. He is the recipient of the 2025 Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize for book review.
