{"id":113661,"date":"2017-08-08T11:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T15:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=113661"},"modified":"2017-08-08T17:37:24","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T21:37:24","slug":"great-expectations-interview-ayobami-adebayo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/08\/great-expectations-interview-ayobami-adebayo\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Photo: Pixels Digital<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stay with Me<\/a>, the debut novel by Nigerian Ayobami Adebayo, explores a contemporary marriage in a Yoruba community stubbornly tied to tradition. Despite suspicious in-laws, scheming second wives, and secretive spouses, Yejide and Akin try to break from their obstinate middle-class neighbors\u2019 outdated views on matrimony. Akin, an accountant and the eldest son in an influential family, initially rejects the notion of polygamy; Yejide takes pride in her successful beauty salon and her forward-thinking views on life and motherhood. Yejide\u2019s inability to get pregnant, however, tests the couple\u2019s values, and their\u00a0future.<\/i><\/p>\n

In her last review for the <\/i>New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described <\/i>Stay with Me\u00a0as being\u00a0\u201c<\/i>at once, a gothic parable about pride and betrayal; a thoroughly contemporary\u2014and deeply moving\u2014portrait of a marriage; and a novel, in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.\u201d\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i>In a nearly hour-long telephone conversation from Brooklyn to Nigeria (with a three-second delay and an interviewer just discovering voice recording via cell phone), Adebayo reflected on the characters she had a difficult time getting to know and whom she subsequently couldn\u2019t let go.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Yejide will join a pantheon of unforgettable literary heroines. How did you find her?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

I got to know her over five to seven years. I started thinking about the book two years before writing it. What was peculiar about her\u2014and even her husband\u2014was they felt very real. I created them, but I felt like there were things I discovered that, throughout the process, felt very real. When I didn\u2019t understand what was going on or I didn\u2019t know what would happen next, I felt that I needed to just wait and listen to Yejide and understand things about her. One of the ways I got to know her better and to start writing her was that sometimes I would sit down in my room and have all these conversations, which is weird now that I think about it. I basically talked to myself and talked to this person and asked her about things. A lot of it didn\u2019t make it into the book, but \u2026 it\u2019s bizarre, but she felt fully formed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of my concerns was to make sure that I stayed faithful to these characters because it\u2019s almost like I was writing something that wasn\u2019t quite fiction, that I had an ethical responsibility\u2014as if I was writing about people who might read the book and then say, No, actually, that didn\u2019t happen, or, I would never do that. That\u2019s how I felt about these people. I was living with them, and Yejide in particular, for about seven years, talking to her and trying to see everything that happened around me through her perspective.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So do her various in-laws and other folks who become her kin.<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it\u2019s good. But what if you don\u2019t fit into what is expected of you? If you\u2019re a man, there\u2019s support. If you\u2019re a woman, like Yejide, there\u2019s the expectation that you marry into a family and after a couple of years you have children, and you have a measure of power. I wanted to look at what would happen if you could choose to be what you\u2019re supposed to be, and how the community, in trying to help you become what you think you should be, turns on you.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the themes that looms large in the novel is judgment\u2014not only the ways we judge others but the way we use our judgment to make life-altering decisions.<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

Yejide grows up without her mother, and because of that, she comes against judgment from the start. It\u2019s not just that her mother has passed away\u2014her mother is from another ethnic community, and Yejide doesn\u2019t really know who her mother\u2019s people are. So there are all these assumptions about who she is and what she\u2019s going to become. She internalizes some of those things and comes to interpret her own self in the light of much of what she\u2019s received, such that by the time she gets married, it\u2019s something she has to cope with while negotiating with the new challenges that come with a marriage. And it\u2019s something that I always wanted to look at. Yejide\u2019s been married for about four years and doesn\u2019t have any children. What I\u2019d always found peculiar is that, when I heard about such things, the judgment would more often than not be that there was something the woman wasn\u2019t doing or that there was something she had done that somehow created the situation. And it just doesn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n

I wanted to explore expectations we have of people\u2014what a woman should be, what a man should be. And if they don\u2019t meet our own interpretation of who they should be because of their gender, their background, their ethnic group, we then come to conclusions about them that are not accurate.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did you draw on any personal reflections?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

My life couldn\u2019t be further from Yejide\u2019s. My mother has a lot of sisters. They had very, very interesting conversations. Because I was a quiet child, I would sit in the room and listen to these stories. I think I developed a curiosity about the life of other people from that, and an interest in looking at what was lying beneath the layer of what people present in public.<\/p>\n

Akin is the first son, and there are very specific expectations for\u00a0a first child\u2014and not just the first child\u00a0but especially the first son. Both of my parents are first children. While it never got as tragic as it does here, I could observe the living up to these expectations and the demand it placed on them as individuals, the idea that they were, for instance, responsible for their siblings in different ways. I wanted to look at what might happen if you have a first son who can\u2019t be all these things\u2014the standard bearer of the family, the dignity of the family resting on this one person. It\u2019s quite a burden.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Without giving anything away for the reader, I was thinking that, with Yejide, a blessing can sometimes become a curse, and a curse can sometimes be a blessing.<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

Yes. I definitely wanted to look at that, and this might sound a little bleak, but the sheer loneliness that accompanies being human and how we try to mitigate that and all the wonderful connections and relationships we get into, to connect with other people. For Yejide, the gold standard for her is to become a mother and then have a child. She feels that this relationship cannot be changed. She\u2019s going to always be this child\u2019s mother, and she\u2019s going to always have somebody in her life. But it\u2019s not that simple, is it?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You tell the story from both Yejide and her husband\u2019s point of view. How did you settle on that narrative structure?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

I was going back and forth between first person and second person. Initially we would get Yejide\u2019s perspective for the first half of the book. The second half of the book would be Akin\u2019s story. I worked on that for a couple of years and then realized that by the time the reader got to Akin, they just hated him. They\u2019d think, We\u2019re not ready to listen to whatever he has to say. That wasn\u2019t my vision for this book. I wanted the reader, even if they didn\u2019t like him, to understand him.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you solve that problem?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

One of the first things I did was to sort of take it apart. I knew that I would need to have the narratives going on side by side throughout the book. Then there was the second person\u2014for about three years, I wrote Akin in second person. It was to distance him from this narrative, in that he has very high expectations for\u00a0himself, he\u2019s disappointed in himself, and he hasn\u2019t quite come to terms with the fact that this is who he is. He\u2019s trying to justify the choices he\u2019s made. And for a very long time, I felt that the second person would capture that. But it just wasn\u2019t working. I tried the third person for him, too, and the problem of empathy came up again, that distance that I didn\u2019t want there. And then I tried the first person, and I remember when I found his voice. I remember the chapter\u2014it\u2019s about halfway through the book, and it starts with, \u201cI\u2019m digging my father\u2019s grave.\u201d When I wrote that chapter, I knew, Oh, I have his voice now. This is the way he would talk about all the things that have happened.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You deal with Nigeria\u2019s political turmoil in the eighties as rather matter of fact, and you also balance the ensuing darkness of that time with humor. Was that deliberate?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

I wanted to look at the subtle ways that Nigerians interacted with the Nigerian state. One of the ways we survive darkness\u2014and there\u2019s a lot of darkness in this book\u2014is to find reasons to laugh. Laughter in those kinds of situations becomes essential. It\u2019s not a luxury. It\u2019s not just something you do because you feel like laughing. It\u2019s been one of the ways I\u2019ve coped myself. I wanted to bring that to this book because it would be miserable if there was no humor. While writing, I also started thinking about the middle class in Nigeria. When Yejide visits her mother-in-law, there\u2019s a very low fence in front of their house. It\u2019s barely a fence. When\u00a0Yejide and Akin build their own house in the early nineties, they erect a fence that\u2019s higher than the house. You can\u2019t see inside. That was something I observed about architecture in Nigeria\u2014that at some point, probably in the eighties and nineties, when things became quite turbulent and there was all of this insecurity, one of the ways the people who could afford to insulate themselves against what was going on did was to build higher fences, to use money as a shield in a sense. I wanted that political turbulence to play in the background.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You studied with Chimamanda Adichie and Margaret Atwood. Who are other writers that influenced you?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

Buchi Emecheta, who passed on last year. She wrote The Joys of Motherhood<\/em>, which is not a very joyful book. It got me thinking more about the sacrifices that are expected of mothers\u2014the expectations, the demands, and how a person might disappear under all of that. It\u2019s not something we often want to discuss, but that book goes at it head on. It did have quite an impact on me.<\/p>\n

Wole Soyinka\u2019s Death and the King\u2019s Horseman<\/em> is a play I go back to and I read often. There was something about the language that I recognized. It was so universal, but at the same time it was so rooted in a particular place and a particular people. And I felt also that anybody anywhere could connect with this, and it was like magic to me. Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Junot Diaz\u2014who I think was partly responsible for me trying to write through that half of the book in second person, because I was enchanted by the way he did it in his own books. It\u2019s a long list, and I\u2019m sure that once I stop talking I\u2019ll remember other people.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not yet thirty and already your debut novel has become one of the most talked about books of the year. How are you handling the attention?<\/p>\n

ADEBAYO<\/p>\n

Stay with Me<\/em> came out in March in England, and about a week after, it got long-listed for the Baileys Prize. I don\u2019t think anybody expects that much attention for a first book, you know? The way I\u2019ve handled it is to focus on what I\u2019m working on right now. And that\u2019s it. That\u2019s just it. There\u2019s a safety in the work for me that I really don\u2019t find in anything else. It\u2019s a good place for me when I\u2019m writing. It\u2019s not always wonderful, but it\u2019s familiar territory. I\u2019ve been writing for a while, but being an author is new. It\u2019s something I\u2019m starting to understand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patrik Henry Bass is books editor at <\/em>Essence magazine and the author of a children\u2019s book and several nonfiction titles, including a forthcoming study of the postwar African American working class.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Stay with Me, the debut novel by Nigerian Ayobami Adebayo, explores a contemporary marriage in a Yoruba community stubbornly tied to tradition. Despite suspicious in-laws, scheming second wives, and secretive spouses, Yejide and Akin try to break from their obstinate middle-class neighbors\u2019 outdated views on matrimony. Akin, an accountant and the eldest son in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[4702,29978,29980,189,7758,3870,8226,71,6128,18650,714,5504,1572,14324,20910,2426,29982,11597,3829,29979],"class_list":["post-113661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-arundhati-roy","tag-ayobami-adebayo","tag-buchi-emecheta","tag-children","tag-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie","tag-chinua-achebe","tag-family","tag-fiction","tag-junot-diaz","tag-lagos","tag-margaret-atwood","tag-michiko-kakutani","tag-motherhood","tag-nigeria","tag-parables","tag-politics","tag-polygamy","tag-pregnancy","tag-toni-morrison","tag-woke-soyinka"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGreat Expectations: An Interview with Ayobami Adebayo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Lagos native 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