Sefi Atta’s Swallow wakes up in dusty, hazy Lagos and sets its sights on Rose and Tolani, a pair of young women whose intertwined fates argue the power of matrilineal ties in modern Africa. Old enough to be village spinsters but young enough to suffer the daily torments of a misogynist boss, the girls live the slim privileges of the employed—bus fare, rent money—in a city whose poverty, government crackdowns, and quick, senseless losses lend the novel an apocalyptic air.
Against this stark backdrop, Rose and narrator Tolani emerge as two halves of a butter-flied Rorschach blot: nearly identical, but with one side webbed and shadowed, the other precise, distinct. What sets them apart is their people—more particularly, the women who buoy them up: Rose’s hedging, prostituting, city-clinging mother and half-sisters, and Tolani’s village-tied mother, the last of a matriarchal adire-dying, husband-defying line.
As the novel’s tragic action draws both young women into desperate attempts to evade poverty, this familial distinction grows all the more significant. Rose flounders and falls even as Tolani attempts to save her, while Tolani herself rises up on the memories of her mother’s stories, and from there glimpses long-dead Aunt Iya Alaro, the outspoken adire dyer who took Tolani’s mother as her prot&ecute;g&ecute;.
A feisty, childless Christian widow so feared by menfolk that they deemed her a witch, Iya’s spirited dispute with village elders saved Tolani’s young mother from forced marriage to a tribal chief. Even so, Iya insisted that the girl marry and have children. These and other interspersed remembrances, offered in Tolani’s mother’s voice, are some of the novel’s most magnetic sections; they are stark and elegant, almost archetypal, but warmly humorous and lively so that the reader, too, receives the succor the stories bring to Tolani’s shattering city life.
The matter of the mother holds more than symbolic significance for both young women. While Rose has always known and even flaunted the fact that she is a forgotten daughter of “Daddy Adamson,” one of her mother’s many unfaithful lovers, it is only as the novel unfolds that Tolani acknowledges family rumors that she was the child of her mother’s secret love affair. Born after years of barrenness, and in the months just after Aunt Iya Alaro’s death, there is a sense that Tolani not only carries Iya’s spirit—as family and tribal traditions deem—but that even the circumstances of Tolani’s conception were one of her mother’s final, obedient gifts to Iya.
“‘Marriage is optional for a woman, motherhood is not,’ ” Tolani’s widowed mother counsels her daughter in the novel’s final, tender section, which finds Tolani returned home to the village in shame and fatigue, with little money to show for her years in Lagos. Atta takes pains to contrast the politics of communal village poverty and dog-eat-dog urban poverty, and to delicately illustrate how the odd economics of globalization affect even the mother’s struggling adire business in this rural outpost, where cheap imports flood markets and no one “grows food … we are all traders now, or businesspeople in town.”
Men remain the inconstant outsiders of this story. They struggle for money, spend too much, marry late, and take women on the side; when their wives revolt, they are encouraged to raise their hands or belts in punishment. And yet the story shows that this strength is perverted fragility, as each man’s heart is deeply tied to the children who may or may not be bound to his body.
For both women, it seems, the greatest fear is the loss of the other, which would equal a loss of the self. As they hover near the secret regarding Tolani’s true father, Atta’s skillful handling is a relief and a gift. It allows readers to forgive some of the narrative’s clunky thematic work and superfluous storylines, and to watch how mother and daughter finally, tenderly trade places, as Tolani’s aggrieved, broken spirit lays itself down as a homeplace for her mother’s wearied one.
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