The Marriage Whisperer: A Review

The Marriage Whisperer

A Review by Chijioke Azuawusiefe, SJ

          Marriage has been designated a number of things ranging from sacrament to business, with in-betweens like covenant, union, vocation, institution, partnership, social construct, and even horse race. It all depends on who does the classification and those involved in the relationship. But in all the cases, one factor remains certain: marriage is a work in progress. Those involved work at it and that work takes different forms for different couples. 

The Marriage Whisperer tells a fascinating story of six middle-aged women who, leveraging the support and the company of their friendship, navigate the challenges of their marriages and relationships. Tess Ajibosin, in this debut novella, paints a picture of strong characters who, nonetheless, are human enough to acknowledge their vulnerabilities when it comes to their associations with men, even though they do not allow their shortcomings to diminish them. Ajibosin leverages the experiences of these women to bring the broad strokes of her brush to bear on the gender and patriarchal conversations canvas in contemporary Nigeria. She then traces the contours of these discourses through the individual lives of the narrator, Camille, and her friends, as each confronts and comes to terms with the relationship blues that her life presents. 

The friends fortuitously started a Wives’ Prayer Meeting Group ten years earlier when they rallied around Amaka to pull her out of the depression that engulfed her, following the brutal murder of her colleague. The meeting quickly became a once-a-month, 90-minute “girl time” meant “to help them get away and re-calibrate.” Over the years, it has continued to provide the women the space and “time to speak freely without judgment, knowing [that they are] among sisters who understand.” So, they gather regularly to vent, share a drink, or just go to the beach, as they enjoy “a lot of laughs laced with tears and occasional fights.” This relationship that transcends friendship and bonds them into a sisterhood enables the ladies then to openly discuss their “cheating [and] lazy husbands, delinquent children, dwindling sex lives, and occupational troubles.”  Camille is a marriage counsellor and brings her expertise to bear on her conversations with her friends. She holds everything in balance for her friends; but like them, she too is not without her own demons. Her closet, the reader finds out much later, brims with intriguing secrets.

More than the challenges that Camille and her friends face, however, the presence of mind that they bring to bear on their men-troubles attests to their courage and strong characters. There is Bisola, for instance, a self-proclaimed “submissive wife … [who does] everything the bible says and more,” who wants her husband to pay dearly for the hurt his unfaithfulness causes her. Philandering Emmanuel is having an affair with his secretary, but not even Bisola’s “good wife material” disposition will stop her from wishing the worst comeuppance on him. While she desires the ultimate fate of impotence for the husband, Bisola yearns for wealth for herself. “I want to be rich,” she declares to Camille. Her aspiration signals a logical desire of a scorned wife for the ultimate reversal of fortunes between her and her cheating husband. A material empowerment will make her financially independent and place her above the status of any future exploitation. Bisola’s husband stopped her from working so she could stay home and raise their children. But, like she later rues, while she stayed home raising their children and holding the home front for the husband, he was busy with his secretary starting another home. The Nigeriana cyberspace-soji (woke) millennials would have created #menascum to drag Emmanuel; for as they often frame it: "Men are scum" and they will always “hembarrass” women.

Even Bisola’s mother, who never supported her stay-at-home-wife arrangement with Emmanuel, still does not think that Bisola’s efforts at “giving up [her] life … for husband and children” are worth it after all, given the short end of the stick that she now receives. Mrs. Awosika, who sacrificed two marriages in order to build herself a formidable investment banking career, expects much more than being a housewife from her daughter. The novella’s binary framing of this narrative might sound like women have to choose between being successful with either their career or their marriage, but never both. However, the Nigerian society is replete with instances that demonstrate that, no matter the challenges that society often stacks up against women, a number of them have not only continued to succeed, but also thrive at both their marriages and their careers—at the same time. But, unfortunately, as narrator Camille notes, ours is “a society that celebrates demure and obedient women over audacious and successful ones.”

Camille’s observation notwithstanding, The Marriage Whisperer still acknowledges the complexities of human nature and the multiple hues of individuality that impact relationship choices. Like Bisola’s mother, Gloria, the incurable romantic who refuses to be boxed in by society’s dictates of moral sexual relationships, dares to be different. Her insatiable desire for “tall, dark, and handsome men” always beclouds her judgment with regard to their overall qualities and suitability for her. Yet, the narrator tells the reader, Gloria’s friends love her fiercely and always rally behind her whenever she needs to overcome heartbreaks. Gloria and Mrs. Awosika bring to mind strong female characters like Lizzy (Ireti Doyle) and Maria (Omoni Oboli), for instance, in the critically acclaimed Niyi Bandele-directed Nollywood film, Fifty (2015). These women choose to engage their sexual relationships on their own terms, accepting the outcomes of their choices, warts and all. For them, it does not matter that they are still single while approaching the age of fifty, what matters is that they remain in charge of whatever relationship they enter into with any man.

Unlike the accommodating groups of friends in both Fifty and The Marriage Whisperer, the Nigerian society often punishes women that it perceives to exercise any form of sexual freedom. Like The Marriage Whisperer demonstrates, for example, one of the friends, Amaka, confronts the discrimination as well as the stigmatization that divorced women face in the society. Her boss, Mrs. Obele, though a woman herself, denies Amaka promotion on the basis that the new position “may be too much” for her, particularly, given that she just got divorced and as such “can’t handle [the] pressure.” While the unfairness of that decision as well as the flawed logic of Amaka’s boss will irk any individual genuinely concerned with equal gender opportunities in contemporary times, both Amaka and Mrs. Obele are victims of the same patriarchal society that assesses women, their worth, and their success based on their relationship with men. Here, it is not enough that Amaka has lost a spouse, she also has to be made to lose parts of herself and her professional advancement in order to sate a society socialized to hold women down, sometimes, and unfortunately, mindlessly.

The gender equality concerns that Ajibosin raises in her book connects to the ongoing gender discussions in Nigeria and across the world. In “Stiwanism,” one of the foundational theories for articulating African feminisms, for instance, foremost Nigerian feminist scholar Molara Ogundipe-Leslie makes the crucial point that women constitute an essential component of Africa’s development. The central argument of Stiwanism (STIWA: Social Transformation Including Women in Africa) might appear self-evident, but regrettably, the reality that the theory seeks to address still persists since its postulation in 1994. Ogundipe-Leslie contends that “the Nigerian woman suffers the most oppression,” more so, in marriage. First, she suffers the loss of her daughter/sister status as well as other rights in her birth lineage; then, as wife, she loses bits of her personal freedom, a chunk of which she can only regain at an expensive price to herself by accommodating the existence of her husband’s other women (wives and/or mistresses); and finally, she submits to the husband’s dominance or otherwise faces the animosity and condemnation of an entire community.

Ajibosin seems to argue that even beyond the death of a husband and outside the range of the influence of the husband’s family, women like Amaka continue to suffer losses in the Nigerian society, simply for being women. The irony, like Amaka says, is that society does not subject divorced men to the same discrimination as women. Godwin, her ex-husband, “is moving on with his life and career and I’m stuck because I’m divorced,” Amaka tells Camille. “Sadly,” she adds, “those who are hurting me the most are women themselves.” While Stiwanism articulates gender sentiments dating back to the 1980s and 1970s, the inclusion that it calls for has not yet been fully realized in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. More than three decades after its formulation, the world-renowned, best-selling Nigerian author and feminist icon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for one, continues to amplify that message through her brilliant writings and public speeches. “We should all be feminists,” she challenges the world in her 2012 TEDx talk, explaining that a feminist is anyone who acknowledges that gender in its present constructions is problematic and so commits to better ways of engaging it. Since equal opportunity is a key starting point for rethinking gender, Adichie, in Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, insists that the “feminist premise” of any woman (or anyone at that) should be: “I matter equally. Not ‘if only.’ Not ‘as long as.’ I matter equally. Full stop.”

While she might not be as vocal on the feminist ideals in this novella as Ogundipe-Leslie and Adichie are, Ajibosin nonetheless locates her treatment of women in marriages and relationships within the gender discourse that these two espouse. Like Ogundipe-Leslie and Adichie, Ajibosin acknowledges that women negotiate their gender and its challenges in a world ruled by men. In the most fascinating twist in the novella, the reader glimpses the “marriage whisperer,” the one who “whispers in the dark,” the unsuspecting, unheard, often unseen whisperer. However, the unmasking of the whisperer manifests the ultimate drawback that Ajibosin identifies at the heart of gender interactions, namely patriarchal interference in the lives of women who navigate the challenges of their everyday life, challenges that emanate, in the first instance, from the women’s relationships and associations with men.

The Marriage Whisperer tells an engaging story, but its structure and narrative could be improved with attention to the following observations. First, it could have benefitted a great deal from a more careful editing. The prevalent oversights with punctuations and the absence of quotations marks to delineate dialogues and to separate them from dialogue tags distract the reader, as do the occasional mixed tenses and verb agreement slips. Such painstaking editing could have also flagged the recurring use of “am” for “I’m” throughout the novella. Second, Camille holds the entire novella together with her narration, but she often wears her marriage counsellor hat even when she talks with her friends, making their conversations sound formal. That approach often presents a more of the telling than the showing in how the plot unfolds. Third, and on a lighter note, I found it intriguing that the author uses “bistro” to talk about a restaurant and/or canteen (even a buka, bar, or café). I am not sure, however, of how many Nigerians who will opt for that as their term of choice for naming an eatery.

The Marriage Whisperer will definitely appeal to a cross section of readers interested in the day-to-day experiences and articulations of marriage and relationship challenges. In this ten-chapter (nine plus an epilogue), sixty-plus page novella, Ajibosin packs enough punch that will require a lot more pages for its unpacking. She demonstrates that there is no such thing as a perfect marriage. Every couple carry their own baggage; but how they go about the secret in their cupboard makes all the difference.