Review: 'Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions,' by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi

The novel in stories — not quite a novel, more often resembling a linked collection — can successfully capture the immigrant experience. Think Edwidge Danticat's compelling "The Dew Breaker," or most recently, the much lauded "If I Survive You" by Jamaican-American writer Jonathan Escoffery. In these books, immigration means a pronounced in-between-ness, a state of flux, and a string of interconnected personal events across countries and cultures that collide, sometimes adversely, to make a new life.

Nigerian writer Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi also embraces the genre in her debut novel, "Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions." Her stories, however, are "interlocking," suggesting that each story stands and falls on the existence of another story. This is indeed true except for the first story, "Fodo's Better Half," which begins in 1897 when the Nigerian city of Benin is attacked by British forces. Around that time, a woman, known as Mongo's wife, gives birth to a beautiful girl named Adaoma and then drifts off to sleep, never to wake again.

Little Adaoma grows up, marries and attains chieftaincy. But she remains childless and deeply unhappy because of it. What follows is an arrangement with a younger woman named Fodo that subverts our expectations of gendered roles and endears the story to us. But like Adaoma and Fodo, the story, with its ever-shifting points of view and moralistic bent, soon disappears and never really reappears again.

The titular second story, "Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions," is the engine that drives the remaining nine stories. Here we meet three main characters, Remi, Nonso and Aisha, as feisty young Nigerian girls in full riot mode against their boarding school principal. In the chaos, something tragic happens. Asthmatic Solape, one of their close classmates, is somehow hauled away by the police without her inhaler and dies.

A capable and assured writer, Ogunyemi uses this tragedy by thoughtfully weaving it into new stories. In "Goody Goody," we hear from Solape's mother who, through her grief and aspirations, brings Solape to life for us again. In "Czekolada," an older Aisha visits Krakow, Poland, for a wedding and rethinks her life goals, driven in part by the memory of Solape. Imagery of Solape will come up in the last story, "messenger RNA," a roving, futuristic tale set in Nigeria and America. Remi and Nonso reappear here too, each of them, like Aisha, having immigrated to America from Nigeria.

In earlier stories, "Guardian Angel of Elmina," "Last Stop, Jibowu" and "Start Your Savings Account Today," Remi and Nonso are nearly defeated characters, striving to make sense of that fraught space between the past and the present, between the life left behind in Nigeria and the one in a new country. How they negotiate this space is what makes for some of the more memorable moments in the book, along with the tangential stories, "Reflections From the Hood of a Car" and "Area Boy Rescue," in which humor and grit come up against humiliation.

Is "Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions" a riveting, blazing work of fiction? Not exactly. But it does some heavy lifting by shining a spotlight on transatlantic immigrant themes that should resonate today and into the future.

Angela Ajayi is a Minneapolis-based writer and critic.

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions

By: Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi.

Publisher: Amistad, 256 pages, $27.99.