Hurricane Katrina looms in the background, casting its long, chaotic shadow over every page of Olufunke Grace Bankole’s debut novel, ‘The Edge of Water’, an emotionally resonant exploration of the delicate interplay of fate and agency, which also explores the intersections of Nigerian, African, Christian and Yoruba cultures.
Till this day, not everyone declared missing in the hurricane has been accounted for. It has taken advancement in science to identify one or two dead victims and hundreds still live with the trauma of this catastrophic event that led to questions being raised about black and white privileges in America.
The story Bankole tells unfolds through a stunning range of perspectives, each voice adding depth to a narrative shaped by forces beyond anyone’s control, fate bending lives towards unforeseen outcomes. At its heart is a narrator who teases, withholding crucial information until the story has drawn us in completely. And running beneath it all, like a quiet undercurrent, is the presence of Ifa Olokun, mystical, ancient, and guiding.
The novel introduces us to Amina, her mother Esther, her half-sister Oyin and a constellation of others intricately connected to their lives. Men like Sani, George the liar and Niyi also play significant roles, but their stories are filtered through the third-person perspective of a woman: the Iyanifa, a conduit between worlds, whose overarching voice brings together all the threads. In near equal measures, the men and the women in this book are saint-sinners.
From the outset, we sense that Amina bears the scars of the hurricane because the imagery of the dome where she is sheltered keeps coming up. Through a series of letters from her mother, Amina’s own fragmented recollections, and the mystical insights of the Iyanifa, we are drawn into a world that feels familiar, yet thrums with the presence of the otherworldly. Esther’s letters bring to mind Mariam Ba’s ‘So Long A Letter’, a book the author admits as influencing the presentation of that point of view. The intense letters reflect the physical and emotional distances between a mother and her daughter.
We learn that Esther’s true love is a man named Joseph, whom we meet later in the novel in distant New Orleans. But fate takes a cruel turn: she ends up with Sani, a man who rapes her and is then compelled by his parents to marry her as restitution. The marriage eventually crumbles, but not before Sani fathers another child Oyin with Esther’s best friend.
After Oyin’s mother dies, she moves in with Sani, only to be driven out by his new wife. She eventually finds refuge with Esther and Amina in their Ibadan apartment where Amina discovers, to her heartbreak, that Niyi, the man she has fallen for, has also been romantically involved with her mother.
In a moment of soul-searching, Amina concludes that Nigeria is too small to contain her dreams. America, with its promise of possibility, beckons. She applies for the visa lottery and wins. Sani attempts to sabotage her relocation, but with Esther’s help, she prevails. Unbeknownst to Amina, Esther is silently carrying a troubling prophecy from the Iyanifa: that Amina’s destiny is bound to her motherland, and that it is Oyin, not Amina, who should journey to the so-called God’s own country.
Bankole presents Amina’s story as a reflective journey, seemingly unfolding, largely, during her time at the Dome without power or adequate food or medical care. It reads like an intimate attempt to answer the question: Who was I before I came to New Orleans? What were my dreams and desires and how far have I come in realising or relinquishing them?
The author occasionally departs from the strict historical details of Hurricane Katrina, treating them with a degree of narrative looseness. This allows the novel to focus more intimately on the hurricane’s impact on Amina, and on the choices she and her family made before, during, and after the storm. In doing so, Bankole does not diminish the magnitude of the disaster or its profound effect on people’s lives; rather, she deepens our understanding of its emotional and personal toll.
The novel also explores the question of what it means to be Nigerian. Through the lens of Laila, Amina’s daughter, we witness the identity struggles faced by children born or raised abroad. In her case, the tension lies in navigating what it truly means to be Nigerian or even African in a world that often demands clear definitions.
The plot of this novel is driven by deliberate withholding of information. A reader can tell that the narrator is keeping something vital and the desire to find out what is being hidden ensures the pages are continually flipped. Instances like this add to the book’s allure. For instance, later in Esther’s letters to Amina, when things have fallen apart, we gain more clarity, a clarity well-fleshened out in Iyanifa’s perspective.
Esther’s latter letters are beautiful but sad, they are reflective but painful to read. They bear a mother’s regrets and induce the desire to turn back the hands of time, hands so stubborn no one has ever been able to turn back.
The Iyanifa’s perspective, which provides the missing links in Esther’s and Amina’s narratives, comes out as so ingenious and it gives the novel a feel so literary and creative. Reading Iyanifa’s parts gives the heavenly joy associated with eating the slightly-burnt part of Jollof rice.
Bankole has written a layered novel filled with characters that are not just complex but dynamic. She has given us a beautiful work of art that will for a long time set us thinking and questioning many of the things we have always believed.
***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.
