In Sour Honey, novelist Lola Akinmade Åkerström explores the emotional undercurrents of motherhood and daughterhood. The radical displays on how the previous bears down at the provide. How moms elevate their histories into their daughters’ lives – ceaselessly uninvited, every now and then unrecognised.
My analysis is curious about narratives that crack open the center of African motherhood, tales that attempt now not most effective to reveal ache, however to realize it. Sour Honey gestures against this emotional terrain.
One explicit line is emblematic of this exploration: “‘When I was your age, I moved to Sweden without my mother. With nobody.’ Tina has heard this story a million times.” It captures each the weariness of inherited trauma and the fragility of the will for working out that threads in the course of the novel.
Sour Honey starts with the promise of protagonist Tina’s emerging stardom. By myself in a dressing room, navigating status and the surprising reappearance of her absentee father, Tina’s tale has the entire markings of a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel formed through mental and ethical expansion). However the novel’s emotional nucleus isn’t status, nor even fatherhood – it’s Tina’s mom, Nancy. Or no less than, it desires to be.
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Nancy’s tale is certainly one of deep and curdled feel sorry about. Akinmade crafts a portrait of a lady who as soon as stood on the cusp of a glamorous new global, having fallen in love with Malik, an envoy’s son who gives her get right of entry to to elite circles, state dinners and the Swedish top minister. However it’s Lars, her white Swedish professor, who slowly unpicks the seams of her lifestyles.
The radical guarantees a way of romantic pressure, inviting the reader to really feel torn between Malik’s authentic heat and Lars’s sophistication. However no such ambivalence materialises.
Lars isn’t captivating. He’s jealous, controlling and in the long run predatory. Akinmade’s portrayal of Lars makes it transparent: he isn’t a romantic predicament, he’s a colonising power. Nancy’s lifestyles with him is certainly one of sluggish suffocation, and her daughter Tina is born of that rupture.
During the unconventional, there are delicate allusions and now and then extra overt depictions of Tina’s battle along with her combined heritage. Then again, those moments really feel overwritten, specifically in traces comparable to Tina’s need to “fully wear her mixed skin”.
Whilst the phraseology would possibly intention for poetic resonance, for me, it comes throughout as reductive. The metaphor inadvertently simplifies a fancy and embodied enjoy, elevating uneasy questions. Can id be worn? Is it one thing that may be embellished, got rid of or selected at will?
Akinmade seems to be attractive with the constructedness of race and the semblance of company inside African diasporic id. However Tina’s exploration of those topics lacks intensity. There stays a hanging incongruity between how she understands herself and the way the sector perceives her.
From time to time her loss of vital self-awareness is jarring. In particular when set towards the extra richly advanced and emotionally layered portrayal of Nancy.
Love and feel sorry about
The place Akinmade excels is in her rendering of Nancy. Her persona is extra vividly drawn, extra emotionally available than Tina’s. We see her fed on through grief and worry, mothering from a spot of survival reasonably than nurture.
“She would have resisted him. Even if it meant Tobias and Tina vanishing into thin air, never existing.” That is the agonising fact of Nancy’s lifetime: that her kids are reminders of her personal lack of company. Her love is knotted with feel sorry about.
There’s an pressing query working thru Sour Honey. What does it imply to dad or mum when your lifestyles has been violently derailed through constructions past your regulate?
Writer Lola Akinmade Åkerström.
Head of Zeus Ltd
This legacy of cultural dislocation is a theme Akinmade touches on however stops in need of absolutely exploring. Nancy, as an immigrant mom, carries a type of preemptive grief. Her selections are formed now not simply by non-public trauma however through a relentless anticipation of injury. The immigrant mom ceaselessly exists in survival mode, the place care is expressed now not thru softness, however vigilance.
“You figured I have no agency without him?” A line Tina delivers in a second of disagreement typifies the unconventional’s asymmetric discussion. Akinmade now and then stumbles into phraseology that feels stilted or overwrought, decreasing what may well be moments of actual emotional intensity into awkward exchanges. But her broader ambition, to map generational wounds and diasporic complexity, is apparent.
The radical’s scope is broad. We transfer between Sweden and the USA, from the 70s to 2006, witnessing how each and every locale produces other sunglasses of diasporic id.
Akinmade is especially attuned to how Gambian communities shift throughout contexts – Gambians in Sweden don’t seem to be like the ones in London or in New York. This specificity highlights that position informs now not most effective enjoy however the belief of self.
In the long run, Sour Honey is at its maximum compelling when it slows down, when it permits Nancy’s grief to talk it seems that. One of the vital novel’s maximum poignant traces arrives when Nancy warns Tina ahead of she indicators with an American label that manufacturers her the “Swedish siren”.
“The world gives you your heart’s desires, then violently rips it away from your hands when you’re most vulnerable. Please stay vigilant.” Right here, Akinmade captures the harsh irony of diasporic ambition, the best way luck can echo colonial exploitation, providing visibility at the price of protection.
Via Tina, the reader is saved at a take away from the uncooked fact of Nancy. The moments the place we start to glimpse the real texture of her lifestyles, her feel sorry about, her protectiveness, her survival, are all too fleeting.
What would their lives appear to be with out this worry? That is the unconventional’s quiet, unanswered query. Are those maternal guardrails coverage or shackles? Sour Honey doesn’t be offering a answer. However in asking, it finds the aching legacy that moms like Nancy go down: now not simply trauma, however the inconceivable process of surviving with out softness.
