The Middle Daughter

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Udodi’s death was the beginning of the raging storm but at that moment, we thought that the worst had already happened, and that life would treat us with more kindness. What Unigwe has done is express Igbo and Nigerian sensibilities with English words in ways that colonise the language in subliminal ways.

The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe | Review - Littafi Books The Middle Daughter by Chika Unigwe | Review - Littafi Books

She discovers she’s pregnant, and fearing her mother would blame her for the rape, she accepts Ephraim’s proposal. I also felt that the book wrapped up entirely too fast and the author needed an additional 75 pages to really end the book properly.But what drives the story is not whether Nani would leave her abuser or not (as Unigwe says in this interview, there was never a question about that) but how she leaves him. Mother sets up a business that would bring her enormous wealth, but ultimately puts her at odds with Nani. Nani, like Persephone, is like many women who are escape artists, and this book is a celebration of their triumph. The Middle Daughter reminds me of How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House due to the heart wrenching trauma endured and the fight that Nani has to claw her way back into her own life.

Chika Unigwe Chika Unigwe

The novel focuses on the middle daughter Nani, but is told from the perspective of the other daughter as well so you get a layered look into what is happening with the family. Living with her widowed mother in their home city of Enugu, Nigeria, Nani is preyed upon by Ephraim, an impoverished “itinerant preacher” from nearby Obiagu, who rapes her before asking her to marry him. She experiences debilitating levels of scarcity, deprivation, and violence till she shatters like a clay pot left to burn in the kiln for too long.In a different world where women are not brought up to fear for their reputation, their image, their lives, to fear what their mothers, friends, and society think of them, Ephraim would have had no power over Nani.

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Partially it was so hard because there were so many times where I really wished that she would just leave. This was a cultural issue, and there were many things that went into why it all happened the way it did. I know there are so many people who face these same situations, and it is really difficult to read about it and feel that close to what the character is feeling and facing. Chika says the novel was triggered by a true life story “where a young woman gets into the kind of relationship Nani does with Ephraim; and for similar reasons, I’m still rooting for that girl. With dead circling the family, Nani grieves and thinks her mother and sister is not hurting because of how they decide to “move on with life”.Chika Unigwe’s fifth novel, ‘The Middle Daughter’, plies a trajectory of binaries; good and bad, ugliness and beauty, right and wrong, but boundaries are not delineated.