BOOK REVIEW - DELE WEDS DESTINY

Dele Weds Destiny by Tomi Obaro

Format: Hardback

Publisher: Hachette

Published: 28 June 2022

Setting: Nigeria (and partly New York)

Rating: 3.8/5 Stars

Synopsis:

Three women. Three decades. The friendship of a lifetime.

Zainab, Funmi and Enitan first meet at University in northern Nigeria, all learning how to become themselves. It’s an experience that binds the three very different women together. When Enitan moves to New York to elope with a white man, Zainab and Funmi are left behind, with drastically different fortunes.

Over the course of thirty years, their lives and friendships diverge and change. Enitan is separating from her husband, trying to understand her daughter Remi. Zainab finds herself the sole breadwinner for her husband and their four sons. And Funmi is living a life of confined luxury, as the wife of a successful, shady businessman.

But theirs is a friendship that can endure decades of distance. And in 2015, they are reunited for the first time for the wedding of Funmi’s daughter, Destiny.

Here they will reflect on their pasts, the things they loved and lost – but the present brings unexpected surprises too, because their daughters, Remi and Destiny, might just be as rebellious and open-hearted as they once were.

My Thoughts:

It’s taken me a minute to figure out how I felt about this book but my current read ‘Tomorrow I Become a Woman’ by Aiwanose Odafen has given me the clarity I needed to espouse my experience with this book that I set out to love.

‘Dele Weds Destiny’ tells the story of three women who meet in Uni in Nigeria and form a life-long kinship. Their lives diverge after college and one of the women, Enitan elopes and marries an American Peace Corps staffer while the other two remain in Nigeria. Funmi marries a rich man and Zainab, an academic battling health issues. The three friends reunite in Lagos after 30 years for Funmi’s daughter’s Destiny Wedding to Dele. The story moves back and forth from the 1980s to the present (2015), and in the lead up to the grand wedding. As and as it does so, we get the backstory of these women, the evolution of their friendship and relationships, and different mother-daughter dynamics.

These three women are essentially sisters, though Funmi would chafe at the sickly sweetness of such a term. Their love has the makings of an ancient habit; it is automatic and unyielding.

Obaro can tell a story, that is undisputed. I loved her command of language and the easy way she tells this story. She brings the setting to life so vividly it wasn’t hard to immerse myself fully in the lives of these women. She also very skilfully explores this complex mother-daughter relationship from two angles: Enitan and her American daughter, Remi, and Funmi and her daughter, Destiny. By contrasting these two relationships and with the benefit of the backstories, it’s easy to see how differently these two women approach motherhood and how past traumas and their own upbringing influence how they parent.

The crux of the story which is the friendship between these three women is where I felt the story became unconvincing. Obaro set out to tell us a successful story of female friendships that weathers the storm against cultures, religion, distance, traumas, betrayals and time and there was no derailing her from this course. This meant that the complexities of these friendships became periphery to the story. Significant events that would ordinarily become points of conflict or change the course of these friendship, such as the elopement of Enitan or Funmi starting up with Zainab’s boyfriend were glossed over and not given depth. I was keen on seeing how these women overcame adversity together (not separately), the effect of time and separation (30 years) on this friendship and how they dealt with their own complex dynamic of betrayal within the group.

The title of the book also (which I cannot fault the author for) is also not only misleading but irrelevant. Dele and Destiny are secondary who do very little to move the story forward. Their own story was very predictable and whereas I felt Destiny’s story would have benefited from further exploration – issues of mental health are prominent in this storyline – it wasn’t given adequate space in the book.

That said, this is a good debut. It has it’s own ‘debut shortcomings’ but they don’t take away from the story itself. It is one I would definitely recommend.