What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

“And Godwin is a better provider than Bibi’s father, now a modest trader. He rents her a flat. He lends her a car. He blinds her with a constellation of gifts, things she’s never had before, like spending money and orgasms.”

Bibi stays in her relationship with Godwin not despite her mother’s warning but because of it, illustrating how parents’ influence on their children extends even to their children’s resistance. Her decision to move in with him and her willingness to overlook his controlling personality lead to tragedy.

“My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he’d been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.”

In playing chess with her father, Nwando fills the role of her father’s friend Emmanuel. He tells her war stories—ostensibly as lessons after she has done something bad, but she realizes he is largely caught in the trauma of war.

“What I hadn’t expected were the boys who ran behind her during recess and lifted up her skirt, as though my actions had given them permission, as though because they had seen her bare breast they were entitled to the rest. It was a boyish expectation most would not outgrow even after they became men.”

This is the repercussion of Nwando’s seeking out the truth about her classmate Anita. Although she only intended to catch Anita in a lie, Nwando inadvertently feeds the boys’ patriarchal sense of entitlement to Anita’s body. Anita’s spirit breaks under the constant harassment—a motif that repeats with many of the headstrong girls and women in the collection.

“When my mother found out, she screamed at me for an hour about responsibility and dedication and all the responsible and dedicated people who had made it possible for me to be here, starting with my great-grandfather, a mere goat herder, who no doubt was curled in his grave, weeping, and ending with my father, God rest his soul.”

Ada’s mother is enraged when Ada just barely misses out on being made valedictorian, so she sends her to live with her aunt in Nigeria for the summer before college. Ada’s mother’s reaction demonstrates her high expectations for her daughter, while Ada’s response shows how such intense pressure can backfire.

“I’d always believed that any secrets between my mother and me were mostly mine, indiscretions I might confess long after they lost the power to draw her ire.”

In Nigeria, Ada learns that her father was engaged to another woman before her mother and that her mother has a tarnished reputation in some circles. Preoccupied with her own issues, Ada never considered that her parents had complex lives with secrets and indiscretions; the episode serves as an example of How Privilege and Suffering Shape Perception, as Ada’s mother sheltered her teenage daughter from her own struggles.

“When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.”

Enebeli has to send his 14-year-old daughter off to live with her mother in the United States after three years of caring for her alone. He senses but does not yet understand that the girl’s spark is something that patriarchal society, including her own mother, will try to extinguish.

“And he should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed.”

Enebeli is aware that people expect him to discipline his daughter, but he cherishes her too dearly to punish her for doing things that are part of her self-expression. This causes a rift between Enebeli and his wife over how to raise the girl. Notably, it is Enebeli’s wife who insists on molding the girl to traditional gender norms—a pattern that recurs throughout the collection.

“Before she grows cautious under the mothering of a woman who loves but cannot comprehend her. Before she quiets in a country that rewards her brand of boldness, in her black of body, with an incredulous fascination that makes her put it away. Before all that, she is eleven and Enebeli and the girl sit on the steps to the house watching people walk by their ramshackle gate. They are playing azigo and whenever the girl makes a good move she crows in a very unladylike way and yells, In your face! and he laughs every time. He does not yet wonder where she gets this, this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at bay and he must never let it die out.”

The repetition of “before” creates a rhythm that unwinds the story to the early days of Enebeli’s solo parenting of his daughter. He appreciates her fiery personality, though eventually society and her mother will dampen her spirits and cause the girl to doubt herself.

“Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I’m old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn’t ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows up with my mother, who looks like she’s stepped out of a photograph, and she tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow works this time and he takes off 20 percent. […] Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.”

The repetition of “ignore” at the start of the story introduces a series of issues that embarrass Uche, the narrator. She then explains the story’s fantastical premise: that her mother is back from the dead. The word choice and structure anticipate Uche’s decision to ignore the past and the current context to focus on the improbability of her mother’s return, missing her second chance to mend the relationship.

“My father and I have never spoken of the state he found me in, Alabama, to which I had run away, home to The Ex I’d promised never to see again. Nor have we spoken of the state he found me in, catatonic after a handful of pills, curled in a moon of vomit.”

In keeping with her broader tendency toward denial and avoidance, Uche tempers the seriousness of her self-destructive behavior after her mother’s death by punning on the phrase “the state he found me in.” Nevertheless, this disclosure reveals the depths of grief and guilt Uche felt, which remain unaddressed throughout the story.

“You learned to fall out of self-preservation as your mother pushed too hard, dropped from too high a height. You have been living off these falls for years, sometimes hers, but mostly yours. A sobbing child garners more sympathy than a pretty but aging mother of one.”

The second-person narration in this story serves two purposes: It puts the reader in the position of the unfortunate daughter, and it establishes a detached tone that suggests that the girl, now 15, has long since been resigned to her life. This first paragraph also reveals that the mother is willing to put her child in harm’s way to get money.

“Was she a bad mother? You were fifteen years old and pregnant because she wanted a price cut on a battered green Toyota.”

The girl’s pregnancy opens her eyes to just how unstable their lifestyle is and how little her mother cares about her beyond her ability to garner them more money. It is only after reading books on parenting that the girl realizes what she has been missing and what she hopes to provide for her baby.

“If she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself, the child had to be perfect.”

Ogechi wants to create a baby with better prospects than her own, but her desire is also selfish: She is only willing to accept the sacrifices of motherhood in exchange for a “perfect” child. Her mother destroys many of her attempts at creating such a baby, so Ogechi pays Mama in joy and empathy to get the life-giving blessing, exacerbating her own worst qualities.

“Women like her had to form their children out of sturdier, more practical material if they were to withstand the dents and scrapes that came with a life like hers.”

Ogechi’s attempts to create a baby out of yarn, paper, and cotton tufts have failed. She realizes that her working-class life poses too many hazards for such delicate babies. This understanding doesn’t stop her from trying to make a special one, however.

“My daughter needs help, not to be help, Buchi thought, but that was unfair, and the words stayed in her throat.”

Buchi considers her friend Ijeoma’s offer to have Buchi’s elder daughter, Louisa, live with Ijeoma to help care for her six children. Buchi initially rejects the offer, knowing that sending her grieving daughter away to be a caretaker will only add to the girl’s pain, but Louisa’s confrontation with Dickson forces Buchi to make the hard decision to preserve what’s left of her daughters’ dignity and opportunity.

“There was only so much a mother could ask a daughter to bear before that bond became bondage.”

Louisa is upset with Buchi for giving in to Dickson’s demand to kill Damaris’s favorite chicken. Buchi knows that Louisa is still too young to realize that men like Dickson will make their lives harder just to make sure they recognize his power and to make up for his wounded pride. At this point, however, Louisa just feels her mother’s actions as a betrayal.

“Your father and those people protesting outside have no concept of what real pain is. As far as I’m concerned, their feelings on this matter are invalid. I would never ask a person who hasn’t tasted a dish whether it needs more salt.”

Nneoma says this to an upper-class student who says that her work subtracting grief from people is wrong. He believes that grief is part of what makes people human, but she counters that he doesn’t really know what suffering is. Ironically, she also doesn’t understand the depths of pain that millions in the world around her bear.

“Ten thousand traumas in her psyche, squeezing past each other, vying for the attention of their host. What would happen if you couldn’t forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you’d eaten came back up?”

Nneoma’s ex-partner, Kioni, works with refugees who have experienced great trauma. When Kioni shows up with many self-inflected bites and scratches, Nneoma realizes that there is a problem with griefwork: The grief they eat doesn’t disappear but eventually consumes the worker. The story functions partly as a critique of patchwork “solutions” to suffering that leave the societal roots of much trauma—colonialism, patriarchy, economic exploitation, etc.—unaddressed.

“She knew her birth story and what her grandfather had said, but it never made a difference when the time came to make the right choice. She was always drawn to the wrong one, like a dog curious to taste its own vomit.”

Despite her parents’ naming her Glorybetogod, Glory feels she was born under an unlucky star. Her grandfather also believes there’s something wrong in her chi. However, the things that make her unlucky are often the consequence of her own bad choices, which complicates the distinction between fate and free will.

“She held out hope that one day all her missteps would stumble her into accomplishments she could hold up as her own, that the seeming chaos of her life would coalesce into an intricate puzzle whose shape one could see only when it was complete.”

When Thomas proposes to Glory, she feels that her life is turning around and that perhaps she can balance out her bad luck with his good fortune. On the other hand, she is disappointed that she has not been able to make that change on her own and that her deliverance comes in the form of traditional marriage.

“No one asked Ant what he thought of River, but someone should have known that you do not take small things from small men.”

Where River sees only a game or annoyance, Ant sees insult, disrespect, and warfare. Therefore, he enacts his centuries-long revenge against the more powerful goddess. Ant’s pride motivates his single-minded obsession with getting vengeance against River, as he perceives (correctly) that she considers him beneath her notice. The story therefore warns of the violent consequences of power imbalances.

“Guilt crushed every milestone in her life to dust so that she knew only Before and After. And Before seemed like the unfathomable dream of a foolish woman.”

Long after River gives up the search for her daughters and Ant, her sister keeps hunting. Guilt drives her because she was taking care of the twins when Ant kidnapped them. Such all-consuming guilt renders her life before the event frivolous.

“She wasn’t the sort of girl who could sit and listen to old women and their problems. In fact, she seemed like the sort of girl who would hide an old woman’s medication and watch the trembling in the woman’s hands increase till she was too incapacitated to stop Mayowa from cleaning out her purse. I liked her a lot.”

The narrator is attracted to Mayowa’s defiance of the narrator’s mother and her seemingly tough attitude. The narrator feels powerless in her own life and thus desires the strength and feistiness she thinks Mayowa has.