You get a good flavour of the writing in The Girl with the Louding Voice from its opening paragraphs:
This morning, Papa call me inside the parlour.
He was sitting inside the sofa with no cushion and looking me. Papa have this way of looking me one kind. As if he wants to be flogging me for no reason, as if I am carrying shit inside my cheeks and when I open mouth to talk, the whole place be smelling of it.
Abi Daré is a writer who not only knows how to create a powerful sensory impression, but also one who can really work the rhythm, texture and music of language. The words jump off the page.
The Girl with the Louding Voice opens in a small Nigerian village called Ikati. Adunni, our narrator, is barely a teenager, who has had to drop out of school because her father can no longer pay the fees. He’s decided to marry her off to the local taxi driver for a dowry of four he-goats, alongside: “Agric fowl, very costly. Bag of rice, two of it. And money.”
Predictably enough, this marriage doesn’t work out and Adunni has to flee. She ends up being sold into domestic service in Lagos, where she does at least have access to the books in the house, including “the Collins” - a dictionary that helps her form ever more complex word formulations. We get to see her experimenting with language in real time and helps make the novel’s linguistic exuberance an important, and very appealing factor in the story:
Her face is looking like one devil-child vex with her and paint it with his feets. On top the orange powder on her face, there is a red line on the two both eyebrows which she is drawing all the way to her hears. Green powder on the eyelids. Lips with gold lipstick, two cheeks full of red powder.
This remarkable physiognomy belongs to Big Madam, Adunni’s employer in Lagos – or rather, as Adunni comes to think of her, her “slave” driver. Big Madam doesn’t actually pay Adunni, or even properly feed her, although she expects Adunni to work punishingly long hours and beats her on an almost daily basis.
Big Madam’s “idiot” husband, Big Daddy is just as grotesque: “The man is reminding me of when a balloon have just burst; the shape of it when the air inside is coming out. Big Daddy look like he is having air in the top half of his body, and no air in the rest bottom half.” Which isn’t to say that his bottom half isn’t active: Big Daddy is intent on raping Adunni, so she has to guard against him, on top of all her other problems.
Such a plight is familiar in fiction, but The Girl with the Louding Voice never feels like standard fare. It’s lifted not only by the verve of its prose, but also its touching explorations of friendship and solidarity. It has an emotional connection that remains strong even in the final pages, when the story occasionally pushes over into melodrama, in moments like:
“I stop my sweeping, stand myself up to his level and look him in the eyes.
‘Not his-story,’ I say. ‘My own will be called her-story. Adunni’s story.’”
Perhaps it is too much to expect that Adunni’s Collins would have explained to her the Ancient Greek etymology of the “history” (and that it has no more to do with masculinity than “herbivore” has to do with femininity). But moment like this one highlight a wider tendency in the book to preach down to its readers. Still, the whiff of sanctimony never gets strong enough to crowd out the book’s more powerful flavours. The Girl with the Louding Voice remains vibrant.
Next time: Akin by Emma Donoghue
Shortlist reviews so far:
Underdogs: Tooth and Nail by Chris Bonnello – admirably unusual
Hashim & Family by Shahnaz Ahsan – an important tale of migration
