by Tara E. Friedman
November 16, 2021
Tara E. Friedman currently resides in Eastern Pennsylvania with her husband and family. When not writing or teaching, she is happily immersed in a variety of outdoor activities. She proudly serves as English faculty at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. While she presented and published on critical thinking and writing center theory and pedagogy, her current research focuses on resilience in children and young adults, literature and the environment, and American humor.
Teller of Secrets by Bisi Adjapon; HarperVia; 352 pages; $26.99
Bisi Adjapon’s analytic artistry is poised to set the U.S. literary world ablaze. Her debut novel The Teller of Secrets reads like a fire in the night: dangerous, unforgiving, at times frenetic. Witty and sharp, Adjapon’s voice expertly entwines humor and history from the perspective of the novel’s young protagonist, Esi Agyekum, a Nigerian-Ghanaian girl coming of age during political unrest in 1960-70s postcolonial Ghana. The subtle explorations of complexity – in character, style, and choice – will resonate globally as the torch to keep women’s autonomy and ownership of our bodies and our futures electrifies the world’s stage.
At the helm of this stunning novel are examinations of familial loyalty and social belonging, as well as deep devotionals of self-exploration and identity formation. Adjapon shines in her careful consideration of the father/daughter relationship, and the subtle complexities of father as tether and catalyst, forever amplifying the fraught obligation of dutiful daughter. A smart and loquacious nine-year-old girl, Esi lives within a blended family in Kibi, Ghana, after the disappearance of her Nigerian mother at the age of four. She challenges gender inequalities found first in her home, especially the preferential treatment of her younger brother, Kwabena, and later in her educational institutions and relationships. Her father’s traditional adage “a woman’s glory is her husband” always rings false, especially after Esi bears witness to his own shortcomings, the mistreatment of his wife and multiple, adulterous transgressions from a young age.
Adjapon’s narrative strategy of stream of conscious questioning punctuates the young girl’s journey. Esi asks, “Why do we women act as if men are so frail we need to hurt ourselves to make them look strong?” Here, the fire of hypocrisy ignites, and the heat is palpable, as Adjapon masterfully maneuvers Esi from childhood to young adulthood on a voyage all her own. Stylistically, Adjapon successfully transitions from questioning to wonder to revelation; readers being privy to the maturation process unfolding through carefully crafted scenes of a disappearing innocence. In this vein, Esi laments, “I wonder if this is what happens when your childhood disappears. A child howls and protests every indignity, but as she grows, her voice hushes. I’m not sure how to retain the strength of my own voice.”
The intellectual development of Adjapon’s protagonist rejects pedantic and didactic tropes often found in coming-of-age stories, and her success here places her in limited literary company. The arc of Esi’s development toward self-discovery is vivid, the sounds, tastes, and landscapes of Ghana and Nigeria meticulously well-documented, yet it’s her vulnerability that is most striking: “Being a woman means being the one who is wrong. That simple. No matter how educated I get, my womanhood will always be the veil he [her father] looks through to see me.” Even in the waning pages of the novel, womanhood continues to scorch everything it touches. Who, what, and how women love and in what capacity they value themselves, their sexuality, education, and families continue to be scrutinized. As the title suggests, finding one’s voice is synonymous with the necessary betrayal of outdated social milieu. In possibly her most salient revelation, Esi declares, “It’s time to stop the self-punishment.” The teller of secrets sheds her reactionary life hidden behind clandestine pasts for a future in favor of forgiveness.
While Adjapon’s linguistic control displays an attention to detail often unseen in new novelists—triggering topics such as abortion, genital trauma, domestic violence, and execution are at times eclipsed, left in italics, no longer than a few paragraphs, sometimes less. The pacing here seems noticeably rushed, perhaps in an effort to avoid mincing words around the predicament of false choices. Esi’s quandary between motherhood and education perpetuates decades of learned pressure and stereotypes for women. During a terse conversation about her future, Esi realizes she is “disappearing. Each shaving of my womb is a violent wave that rips off a piece of my body and washes it away in a red-blood ocean.” The continual dilemmas pitting limited outcomes that are neither satisfactory nor fulfilling frustrate Esi and many other women throughout the course of the novel. Adjapon often leaves us wondering: when a woman’s right to choose leaves her leaping out of a proverbial frying pan and into the fire, was there ever even a choice?
Adjapon’s resilient debut novel harnesses the power of foresight and proactivity: the fire always burns, smolders. Driven by purpose and mattering, The Teller of Secrets inflames the fight over women’s rights. Readers will be left eager to see if Adjapon can continue the battle for self-actualization in her second novel, Daughter in Exile, set to be released in 2022.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Fire in the Night: A Woman’s Right to Choose in Bisi Adjapon’s The Teller of Secrets
FICTION REVIEW
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