Title: Hearts and Homes
Author: Tomi Adesina
Year of publication: 2015
Number of pages: 34
Reviewer: Blessing Olisa
One year after the Chibok situation, Tomi Adesina in her book Hearts and Homes takes you through a summary of the 365-day travail since abduction of the Chibok girls. She takes different turns with her characters in the book, but synchronizes their experiences and sums it up as one.
The book opens with Major General Michael Silva waking up to the aftermath of confronting the insurgents. He was sure he saw a B61 nuclear bomb which caused the explosion that took the lives of every member of his battle troop. Amid the rubble, flying choppers and stench from bodies that littered the road, he found solace in that familiar on-air-personality’s voice, Diana Silva. She wanted him back home very quickly.
Leaving the distant lovers, the 34-page book takes you on to feel every ounce of pain the Chibok girls went through, the depressions they were confronted with, the sexual violation of their bodies, and the eventual violation of their lives through the ‘drill’.
Aisha was the strongest of the abducted girls, but after her best friend was ‘drilled’, she promised to get help for the other girls. She escaped from the den and led Michael’s troop to rescue the girls, but lost her brother, father and Michael in the process.
After sanity returned to Chibok, that familiar radio voice said, “The last one year has been hard on us all as we searched and prayed for the Chibok girls. Finally, the girls have been rescued…but not all of them and definitely not the way they were…a lot has changed….Things will never be the same again…we will finally say NEVER AGAIN to the insurgents that plagued our land.”
She concluded by saying, “My name is Diana Silva and I lost a loved one in this war.”
Aisha had an opportunity to tell her story when she took a trip and handed Michael’s rusty radio to Diana.
Adesina, a fiction writer who has mastered the incredible art of storytelling gives a clear picture of emotion and family, leaving you teary eyed even if your tear ducts dried up a long time ago.
She dedicates the book to the memories of force men and civilians who have died in the cause of the battle against Boko Haram, and the missing girls from Chibok, that no child should live in fear.