By Kehinde Folorunsho
Ayo Deforge’s ‘Tearless’ is a gripping narrative of a rehabilitated, broken family bridge. In the novel, the reader encounters Lami (Olamide) Davies, who becomes crippled by the anxiety of finding her ‘lost’ siblings following the recollection of a lingering trauma from twelve years ago. This trauma continues to haunt her in the present and she realises the only way to end it is to address it.
The protagonist sets out to fulfill the promise she makes at her mother’s tombstone: to find and reunite with her siblings – Lara, Fola, Wale and Tutu – before she visits again and travels to France to pursue a Masters’ degree in French. In this endeavour, she makes a relentless effort at locating Mama Ola, her paternal aunt, who might know her father’s whereabouts and in the same breath provide useful information about her sibling. But her hope nosedives into despair.
‘Tearless’ is set in contemporary Nigerian society where nuclear family relationships are embroiled in disputes between both parents, culminating in distressed upbringing for their poor children. The narrative opens with the anniversary of Papa’s birthday and Mama’s death. Both events are worth remembering. But while the former fills Lami with nostalgia, the latter engulfs her with an overwhelming trauma. Mama, the matriarch of the Davies, had died twelve years before. Papa, the patriarch, had been unbearably savage, vindictive and inhospitable before and since Mama died.
Told from the perspective of Lami as a child and as an adult, the story alternates between the past and present times. With the use of flashbacks, Lami delves into her childhood and teenage years deluged with fatherly hostility. She recounts her mother’s experience in the hands of her brutal father. Their several fights and reconciliations create for the children a climate of fear. But not to be discouraged, Mama always returns or endures the situation for the sake of her children. She abhors the imagination of her daughters’ suitors repelled by the fact of their mother’s separation from the family. This establishes the myth and delusion for which many Nigerian women in Mama’s shoes suffer untold hardship even to the point of death. Socio-religious inhibitions.
Ayo Deforge indirectly condemns this paradigm as awfully unbearable since the women, in most cases, eventually lose their children to a world of isolation almost nearly predatory. There is a mixed reaction from the family members Lami and her siblings were apportioned to. While Uncle Kay is accommodative, Mama Ola is simply inhospitable to Lami. Fola is sent to a boarding school where her father’s friend becomes his guardian . But he soon tires of the burdensome responsibility, plunging the poor boy into a harsh survival tact. Tutu’s relocation to the UK with Mama Jide is quite promising. But in all, their dispersal marks the depth of Lami’s contempt for the social milieu. This foregrounds the fact that no extent of attention from members of the extended family equals a mother’s love and presence. She finds herself in a present fascinated with the sweet memory of love and friendship with her mother and siblings, even though Ada and Nico’s emotional support boasts a new family environment.
What arguably strikes the reader as most remarkable in this book is the technique and style. Told in the first person point of view, there could not have been a better way to internalise the sense of trauma that runs throughout Lami and her siblings’ childhood years. As an active participant in the unfortunate event, she is very much central to the impressionable course of transition in the story. Of course, the telling of her story slides seamlessly on a bildungsroman spectacle. We see how she is only able to develop through those antipathetic years by holding on to her mother’s dream of having unbroken blood ties. This very fact highlights a pricking reality about women like Mama who would rather remain in an abusive marriage for their children’s sake than quit. What judgement then could we draw about Mama’s suicidal audacity? It is tenable to factor in the children’s future; but to what end is such a future without the mother’s presence – the same burden bearer of patriarchal turpitude.
Read Also: Aliu shares life lessons in new book
This and related questions are subconsciously raised when we explore the unspoken facts about Mama’s kind of ‘courage’ under such African circumstances. Hinged on this note is Lara’s counter decision. Her defiance and outright flouting of Papa’s order whereupon she is evicted from the house screams the ideal of the modern woman. In other words, Lara’s towering consciousness of Papa’s unjustified wickedness goads her into humanising Mama’s alter ego. Had Mama been right in enduring the sizzling marital conditioning?
Lami’s story also serves as a satire that urgently addresses a trenchant social problem – how patriarchy is a two-ended misfortune. The social structure that arrogates ‘power’ to the male hands them a venom that defies antidote. It is not speculation too far to subvert for our argument Achebe’s submission in his Arrow of God: “we cannot trample on the humanity of others without devaluing our own.” Many a narrative with such horrible detail of the father’s extremity usually terminates on a crippling self exile whereupon the head figure is hardly able to reconcile himself with the family. Factually, Mama’s death is second to Papa’s pernicious dying from the twin force of destructive ego, and separation from their family. Papa’s disappearance is a vivid portrait of masculine incapacitation to create a healthy growth environment for their children upon separation from their wives – divorce and death being two iconic instances.
Another propellant of Lami’s story is the rich deployment of certain devices of psychoanalysis. These begin to assume an indubitable prominence with Nico’s coming to her life. We know Nico has come to stay. This is a symbolic depiction of the immersive nature of their chemistry. In the same vein, the inviting sight of the beautiful bridge at Paris symbolises the reunion to come. Similarly, in one of her childhood events, Lami and her siblings enjoy the sight of the baboon frolicking in its cage. But towards the end of the story, after thirteen full years, upon visiting the same site with Nico, Lami finds the cage still present but uninhabited. This is a vivid portrait of her condition: she has now been liberated from the trauma of thirteen years ago by the love Nico rains on her.
But most importantly is the motif of dreams throughout the story. Deforge profoundly marries the conscious, unconscious and the subconscious in portraying Lami as a character enmeshed in inner conflict. She is engulfed by anxieties, distrust, doubts, and a distorted view of reality. All these results from her searing purgatory experience as a tearless girl beclouded by nyctophobia and the haunting shadow of an abortive dream.
On the whole, Deforge rivets the reader to the story. Themed majorly on hope, love and ambition, the techniques and formal elements deployed advance the narrative as a must read text for any scholar seeking a delectable story on the subject of family relationship in a world of patriarchy.