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language: Hausa (English tr. Aliyu Kamal)
country: Nigeria
year: 1990
form: novel
genre(s): literary, romance
dates read: 26.5.24-28.5.24
Balaraba Ramat Yakubu’s Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home (translated by Aliyu Kamal) is an engagingly written example of the body of Hausa popular fiction known as “love literature” (littattafan soyayya). published in 1990, the publisher’s blurb describes it as “an Islamic soap opera complete with polygamous households, virtuous women, scheming harlots, and black magic”, and this is reasonably accurate, with all the deep sexism this phrasing implies.
the story follows the family of Rabi, a woman unhappily married to a man who refuses to provide her with the resources to care four their nine (nine!) children, or, for that matter, the tenth child left behind by his former second wife (who left him because he wouldn’t stop pursuing other women). when her husband, Alhaji Abdu, decides to marry again — a (sort-of-)ex-prostitute named Delu, and yes, the book is aggressively anti-sex worker — he eventually divorces Rabi and disowns their nine children, leaving her to make her way in the world on her own, which is to say, with the support of her in-laws (who like her better than their brother) and her own siblings.
the bulk of the novel revolves around the preparation for and early married life of Rabi’s eldest daughter, Saudatu, who marries an older and already-married man named Alhaji Abubakar (they fall in love at first glance in the market; Saudatu hasn’t yet finished secondary school at that point, though the first time they actually speak is, thankfully, just after her graduation). his other wife (actually his second; he divorced his first wife before marrying Saudatu) hates Saudatu, so eventually Abubakar divorces her, too. Abdu gets his divinely ordained comeuppance, loses his fortune, discovers Delu has been having an affair with an electrician (among others), and ends up depressed and destitute. finally, Rabi’s relatives coerce her into remarrying him. the ending is bizarre: Rabi takes charge of the household but mostly it seems to be even more work than she was already doing (just with more financial agency than she had previously), and Abdu lives “the life of a dog in paradise: no trouble, but not much joy”.
Yakubu was herself forced out of school and into marriage at age 13, and in her preface to this edition she criticizes men who mistreat their wives, but the takeaway from the body of the novel is in fact that beating your wife is the correct response to disagreement or disobedience — even the virtuous Abubakar hits his disagreeable second wife. the trick is that wives should never disagree with their husbands (so they won’t be hit) and also co-wives should never disagree with each other. the novel doesn’t actually show us any examples of co-wives who get along, but it seems to believe that this is possible, provided the wives are all Good Women™. (as everyone knows, all women are either Good™ or Bad™.) also the one time Saudatu even briefly raises the possibility that she might continue on to university this is immediately shut down by her relatives, who imply that she must be joking; she doesn’t press the point, so perhaps she was.
I’m glad I read this, and the tone is engaging and the narration brisk, but it is…not good. I can see, to some extent, what the appeal of this narrative would be: virtue and patience are rewarded, the unworthy are punished (by their husbands and/or by god), the long-suffering wife reverses her fortunes and takes control of the household, the deserving daughter finds — apparently — love. I appreciate that it validates Rabi’s and Saudatu’s (as the main characters through whom the novel is focalized) negative emotions about Abdu: they are allowed (until the very end) to be bitter, angry, and even vengeful: when Rabi finds out that her husband’s wealth has been destroyed in a fire and he’s in a hospital, her reaction is:
It took a moment for the news to sink in, and then Rabi jumped suddenly to her feet and began dancing, cheering, and shouting for joy. She stomped her foot on the ground before resuming her seat. “Allahu Akbar! You don’t know how I prayed—”
“Hear me out before you say too much,” said Alhaji Ado. “While he was at the fire, his car was stolen. To tell a long story short, he’s left with nothing: no shop and no car. Right now he’s in a hospital bed. He hardly even knows where he is.”
“Oh, God is great,” said Rabi. “Thanks be to Allah! O God, today I can die happy! You have interceded on my behalf. I was abandoned and forgotten, but now I no longer hold anything against anybody!”
if she had been allowed to continue feeling this, rather than being disciplined by those around her — primarily her male relatives, but also the women — back into remarrying Abdu, I would have left the book feeling better about it overall (though still with some significant reservations).
instead, I found it deeply sad, and it doesn’t seem like that was the intention.
moods: lighthearted, sad (not intentionally)