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By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Olufunke Grace Bankole no longer lived there, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the West African market women she would see during her frequent strolls to the French Market. Bankole, who had moved to the States with her parents at age 8, then attended Harvard Law School on a prestigious scholarship, was aware of her unique privilege as she strolled these markets. But as she writes in her letter to the reader: “They, like me, had been far from home and working in the city’s margins. I needed to know: where had they sheltered during the storm…(and) who had they been back in Nigeria, long before?”
The Edge of Water (Tin House, 272 pages, $17.95) is Bankole’s attempt to answer that question through the story of Esther and her daughter Amina, a young woman who leaves her mother in Nigeria to pursue a bigger life in America. But soon into her stay with family friends in New Orleans, Amina’s struggles with self-doubt expand. She feels burdened by “the certainty that I would never be as happy as I hoped. Even [America] would not live up to my dreams.”
And what are Amina’s dreams? It’s a little unclear, even to her. Though she was a bright kid—reading by age 3, serving as her mother’s pseudo-therapist long before she was old enough to comprehend—Amina had never felt like she was enough. “If something in me still needed waking, America would do it, I hoped,” Amina says.
She knows she was lucky to have received a coveted visa, and luckier still to have a mother who helped pay for her plane ticket out (unlike her hindering, lying father Sani, whose story is never quite resolved). Despite tensions between mother and daughter, Amina knows she was fortunate to have such a strong mother whose history will never be known to her.
Esther’s story is given nearly equal time on the page. In one of the book’s opening scenes, a young adult Esther is sexually assaulted by Sani. Upon realizing she is pregnant, her family insists she marry her abuser. After all, he is a man who can provide for her and her child. And besides, if she didn’t listen to her parents, her culture, both entities that insisted she marry the father of her child, and word spread? “My marital future would be shattered,” Esther says. “For better or worse, a woman’s mate determines the course of her children’s lives. It will be the same for you,” she writes to her daughter years later.
Soon, Esther leaves him and takes Amina with her. We see how Esther’s fierce independence trickles down to her daughter, and Amina will later pass some semblance of that autonomy to her own daughter in America. As Hurricane Katrina’s threat looms, we see how three generations of women become shaped by both the catastrophic storm, and by the vastly different cultures they find themselves straddling.
Much of the story is omnisciently told through the eyes of Iyanifa, a prescient Ifa priestess. While some components of this future seeing provide intimate insights into other characters’ trajectories and perspectives, some of the story points’ deliveries at times deflate otherwise tense plotlines. Still, the structure of Water is intricately woven and allows multiple, complex perspectives to intersect.
The Edge of Water is about motherhood and daughterhood, romance and heartbreak. It shares a unique perspective on the Nigerian immigrant experience in America and tackles questions around reputation and belonging; around what one deserves and what one has the right to pursue.
SEE IT: Olufunke Grace Bankole in conversation with Marget Malone at Literary Arts, 716 SE Grand Ave., literary-arts.org. 7 pm Tuesday, Feb. 4. Free.