BOOK REVIEW: And So I Roar by Abi Dare

In And So I Roar, Abi Dare tells the story of Adunni and Tia, two women from different worlds whose lives have become intertwined by fate.

Adunni, who is the main protagonist, is a young girl fighting an uphill battle against the hand life has dealt her and is seemingly making headway. She has escaped from the village to Lagos and, after traumatic experiences, lands in the home of a woman who basically enslaves her. Adunni is determined to go to school, get a future, and make something of herself, but the mountains keep swelling.

Tia, her benefactor, who is also something of a co-protagonist, appears to have a beautiful life on the surface, but is dealing with the pains of lost love, betrayal, and the kind of adjustments that can ruin a person. For Tia, there are secrets everywhere; hers, her mother’s, and shared family secrets, too.

These two women, along with most of the others in the story, are battling courageously against culturally entrenched norms of both culture and gender.

In its entirety, And So I Roar explores themes of hope, love, destiny, faith, and even environmental conservation. I was a bit surprised by the last one, so much so that I did not notice it the few times it came up. Adunni was angry at illegal loggers and how they just took trees and did not replace them. Tia’s concerns were more from an educated standpoint of the effects of deforestation on climate change.

On one hand, it was a relief and surprise to see this theme occurring more than once in the story. On the other hand, in Adunni’s case, it seemed inconsistent with her exposure. A young, uneducated girl from an African village is usually not worried about trees being replanted after they are felled. Of course, there could be exceptions, but this is too much of an anomaly.

Abi Dare is a good storyteller who paced And So I Roar excellently. Everything progressed sensibly. Not necessarily in an expected manner, as there was suspense, but you could tell that the writer had a good grasp of the art. Even though it is not in that class, the book feels very coming-of-agey to me.

One thing that completely threw me about this book was its tone and language; it was a major distraction that made me struggle through an otherwise good story.

All of the people in the book who were unlettered in English or just plain illiterate were giving a stilted English voice that left the reader, me, somewhat dazed as they proceeded, and not in a good way.

At first, when I heard Adunni, I assumed she was speaking an oversimplification of the Nigerian pidgin for an audience who did not understand it. Considering she is uneducated, this made sense.

However, as the story proceeded, she spoke more, and I met more characters who spoke this weird bastardised English; it became clear to me that this was not pidgin at all. I wasn’t still sure what the author’s intent was.

As long as they were not educated in English or were just literate, they spoke with a translation of what seemed like a mashup of Yoruba and a plain smattering of unintelligent words.

“She say forgivement is like a door to a small corridor inside your heart where you can find healing. Forgive your mama so you can collect the key to that door of your heart, open it and free yourself from the cage of anger.”

What is forgivement? Why does it exist in this context? The person saying this, are they originally speaking in English, Yoruba, or pidgin? With this level of profundity, giving them this voice and grammatical incorrectness seemed like (un)intentional dumbing. Why?

Adunni, at some point, goes from explaining the modern process of making and drinking coffee to not knowing what Wi-Fi is or being able to pronounce it properly.

Too many instances of these things for me to count. Didn’t add up.

On some level, this manner of speaking feels like what people who have never lived in Africa believe Africans speak like, when translated to English, and I think that audience would not have a problem with it.

However, as someone who speaks all the languages supposedly represented here, it hurt my mind’s ear to listen and made it hard to get through the book. Very hard.

Apart from the language that almost ruined an otherwise good story for me, the characters are bubbly and evocative. Adunni felt like a kindred spirit, and I found myself rooting for her more times than I can count.

Go read it and share your thoughts.