And So I Roar: A Novel
“a rich and important novel with unforgettable characters who spell out a critical message.”
And So I Roar is the sequel to Abi Daré’s acclaimed debut novel The Girl with the Louding Voice, but it also reads well as a standalone.
Adunni is a young girl with a past. She fled Ikati, her home village in Nigeria, after being accused of the murder of a woman, Khadija, and has been working as a servant in Lagos ever since. She is a truly remarkable character. Although she’s never attended a formal school and so she speaks imperfect English, she thinks deeply and her ideas sparkle in her head and on the page.
An older, married woman, Tia, has discovered and supported her, and when the story starts Adunni has won a scholarship to a local boarding school. She says this is the highlight of her young life—her escape from the drudgery of housework and the first step on a road to fulfill her dream of being a teacher, helping to alleviate the ignorance and poverty of her village. However, things don’t work out that way. As Adunni comments: “Funny how life just like to push his tongue in your face and laugh ha-ha at your stupid plans.”
A chief of Ikati discovers that Adunni is now with Tia, and arrives at the house to take her back to the village for a sacrifice and to be judged for the murder. Adunni must now decide whether she will return to the village to try to clear her name, or to try to escape from the men with Tia’s aid. Although petrified about what will happen to her, she chooses to stand up for herself.
“‘I must . . .’ My voice playing hide-and-seek with my tongue. ‘I must fight for my innocent. To be freely free.’” Later she notes: “A good education can never be good enough when you have a bad name.”
Tia insists on going with her, hoping she can protect Adunni from whatever the chief and the priests are planning in Ikati. Up to this point, we see Adunni as smart but naïve and Tia as the sophisticated western-educated and capable woman with an important job fighting climate change, but now the tables are turned. It is Tia who is way out of her depth. She must rely on Adunni’s young brother and her best friend to lead her to the heart of the story around Adunni’s past.
The author brilliantly brings Adunni to life. Her age, naivety, and depth are all displayed by the way she writes and speaks English as she tells her story, yet the prose is easy to read and flows. Daré smoothly avoids the trap of taking her readers out of the story by forcing them to struggle with the language.
When they reach Ikati, Adunni finds it changed.
“Dawn peeps from the orange bed of the sky, and all around me is the picture of empty houses which the feet of fire have trampled on. Everything looks burned. Thirsty. The tall coconut and palm trees, which use to have a tent of leaves, like a cap perching high on top of it, is now looking dull, the once shining green leaves now dry and crusty and dropping, landing on the floor with the cracking sound of crunching eggshells. The ground under my feet feels like hard bread, and if I raise my leg and stamp on it, I am sure the floor will crack open, vomit a tiny earthquake. There is silence too, a quiet, afraid kind of silence . . .”
Tia also has problems. Her marriage is shaky, damaged by her husband’s infertility and her forced separation from the man she really loved. The book opens with her confronting her dying mother, and we soon realize that Tia is also captured by issues from her past. When she leaves with Adunni, her husband finds her old love letters and jumps to the obvious conclusion.
We know that the sacrifice and judgement will take place at midnight, and the tension ramps up as the time counts down chapter by chapter. Like Tia, we are unsure exactly what the sacrifice will entail, but it’s likely that Adunni will be stoned to death if her supporters can’t bring a witness to Khadija’s death and Tia can’t find a male blood relative to “carry the sacrifice” for her.
As she waits, Adunni comes to know the other girls who will share the judgment and sacrifice with her for their own supposed sins, and we hear their stories. By this stage we care very deeply about Adunni and the girls she has befriended. We wait for the rescuers to arrive as the clock ticks to midnight, but in the end, it is the lion who must roar.
Daré’s book draws a colorful picture of a small rural village, but makes clear that the rejection of women as full partners in human life holds in a much broader context than poor, rural settings. This is a page turner, but also a rich and important novel with unforgettable characters who spell out a critical message.