Say you’re two weeks away from finally leaving the country, and your only, most beloved brother makes a suicide attempt after his deportation from Norway. Do you stay and take care of him, or do you leave anyway, aware of the futility of your presence?
This is the dilemma that propels The Tiny Things Are Heavier, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s crystalline debut novel. For Sommy, 24, new to America for graduate study in literature, there will be no pictures taken at the airport and uploaded on Twitter captioned “Goodbye Nigeria, the evil you’ve done is enough.” The moment she lands, she’s calculating time zones, wracked with guilt and pain. She’d considered deferring her admission, but her best friend, Amara, convinced her otherwise: “Just think to yourself if this thing you just said makes one bit of sense. There’s nothing here for you. Nothing here for anyone except you are Dangote’s son.”
Mezie is “the force holding her life, her center”, and for shrouded reasons, perhaps betrayal or envy, he refuses to speak to Sommy after her departure. She has no choice but to give him space. After all, she’s in Iowa, thousands of miles away. In their estrangement, she takes to eating copiously; she develops a rapport with her boisterous roommate, Bayo; she hangs out at the Black Students Organization; the semester begins with its flurry of activity; and yet Sommy finds herself “unrenewed, filled with mold and cobwebs.”
Much comparison has been made between this novel and Adichie’s 2013 supernova, Americanah. But unlike that novel, and several other immigrant narratives where disillusionment begins in the new land, Sommy is disillusioned from the get-go. She’s aware of racism and micro-aggressions. She’s flush with the language of social critique. She doesn’t even want to be in America. “This wave she’s riding is not one she created or craved. She’d absorbed the panic of everyone around her, her brother, her friends, her former co-workers. Everyone so bewilderedly frustrated by the country’s economy.” Throughout the novel, Sommy declares a desire for an existential completion far beyond the ravages of money and capitalism: a desire to be filled by someone else. Lifelong, this ennui eclipses America.
Enter the men. The longer Mezie ignores Sommy, and the longer America fails to renew her, “to wash away her former self, her lazy self, her waiting-around-for-magic self”, the more she finds desirable qualities in Bayo. Like Mezie, he’s madly ambitious and social, a guy with innumerable friends and the weight of familial responsibility on his head. Like her father, his physical gestures communicate leagues of wise meaning.
Then there’s Bryan, an MFA student, biracial, gentle. Sommy meets both men in the context of rescue: Bayo at the airport, bringing her to America; Brian outside a restaurant, witnessing and validating her first experience of racism. But if this is a love triangle, it’s ridiculously scalene. Bryan is shiny and unpredictable, whereas the progression and outcomes with Bayo is familiar, “a slow, often complicated formation of a relationship, where she’s cynical about a man’s intentions for her, and he, too, sensing her resistance, remains unserious and teasing, until months, maybe even years pass, and they both realize that they are enmeshed in something profound and undefined.” We get no physical descriptions of Bayo in the book other than his “hairy and stumpy” legs, and that he’s insecurely short, whereas Bryan is “attractive in the conventional sense, devastatingly square-jawed, a restfulness in his face”, and when he’s not, Sommy “is drawn, too, to his unconventionality, the roundness of his nose, his pert ears, the almost imperceptible way his eyeballs misalign when he squints.”
While at first glance this might seem to be only a clash of beauty, it’s something deeper. The first time Sommy meets Bryan, she makes a tally of his physical attributes – perhaps because he’s a stranger, and Bayo has a history of engagement – but the verdict is merely “anxious-looking.” It’s the second time around that he gains all these beatific graces. What then has happened to solicit this transformation? Is it his Americanness and the possibilities his passport holds? The declaration of his wealth and his squeamishness about it? Or perhaps has he, in revealing his estrangement from his Nigerian father, shown a gaping hole in the centre of him?
Whatever it is, Sommy has found a twin spirit, both of them “standing now at the bottom of something deep, waiting to be pulled out.” With them pulling each other, now her life can fervently begin. The novel, too, with its central inquiry into exile, flexes its knuckles at this collision between two different kinds of Nigerians in America, each with an aching need for home, roaring into tumbling life, pages gliding by in bad decisions, self-gnawing, and the thrill of new love. By virtue of his anxieties and his class, Bryan could not be farther from Bayo, could not be more deliciously picturesque. But Sommy finds that loving Bryan doesn’t extirpate her feelings for Bayo. If Bryan presents an opportunity for the novel to examine different sides of homesickness, Bayo returns the characters to their specific, human selves. Sommy will have to do the thing she’s always found most difficult in her life: making a decision. She’ll have to decide between them, between the unique safeties they provide. She’ll have to forge a self with which to make a revealing choice.
Or maybe not. Maybe, again, Sommy can remain in the passenger seat of her life and watch the pieces move around and fall into perfect place, Bayo and Brian fighting till the last man stands. It’s a triumph of the novel that we can watch its heroine repetitively fumble with such patience and even goodwill. More: we are rooting for her. We want her to get her heart’s desires. How can’t we, when she is so downtrodden and so deadly astute about her psychological patterns? When on nearly every page is a brilliantly observed human action, profound and wryly funny?
But this precise acuity that powers the novel’s engines is the means by which it falters. We want Sommy to attain her desires – but within their circumscribed limits; as it turns out, the thing she desires the most is the one thing she is glaringly oblivious to: money.
Early in the novel, Sommy declares to Bayo a desire to return to Nigeria for the summer, despite having no material means to do so. In response, Bayo laughs and calls her a “rich woman”. This is the expected response of a man his class; a man like Bryan would simply buy the tickets. What’s really subtle and brilliant is the way in this conversation, and at other points in the novel when money comes up, the content of Sommy’s interior monologue diverges; she begins thinking entirely of someone else’s relationship to scarcity. One can’t help but wonder: to what extent is the narrative merely reproducing her worldview, limiting itself to what she’s conscious of, or enabling it?
This question is never more cogent than in the one year Sommy and Brian spend cohabiting with each other. We’ll have to get numerical: the novel spends ninety-six pages on Sommy’s first year in America, and only four pages on the second year, the most psychologically rich era of her relationship. We learn that at the top of this second year, she’s begun harbouring doubts about her relationship with Bryan: one of her relatable fatal flaws is her wariness of anyone who likes her more than she likes them. But then she goes on to spend months abiding this irritating doubt. One can’t help but wonder: is she biding her time? For what, is the next natural question. An answer comes in the fall, when the couple are having an argument about Sommy’s emotional reticence.
“Is your brother the reason you don’t talk about going home?” [Bryan] says, pulling her into an embrace, as if to soften the impact of his question.
“You know I don’t have three thousand dollars for a flight ticket.”
“And you know I’m willing to pay for the tickets.”
She releases him from her embrace. “You’ve never offered to pay for the tickets.”
He squints, “You’ve never asked.”
Note the utter lack of interiority in Sommy in this scene. By the time it comes, in the next paragraph, it’s about everything but money; the argument they go on to have again strays. Under the guise of Mezie’s suffering, Sommy has successfully made her longheld desire known. And now that Brian has said he’d pay for the tickets, the two can take a long route towards making up, and Sommy can tell herself a different emotional resolution has been reached. The section ends. Sommy doesn’t get her wish when she wants it – that summer is a haze of pain and confusion – but she gets it a year later. The gods in charge of her manifestation might be late, but only marginally so. She acknowledges that “a year ago, she wanted nothing more [than to return to Nigeria], but that reality feels now like a furnace, burning wildly in wait for her.” She might convince herself of this, but everyone knows: the best way to relish the satisfaction of a desire is to not desire consciously in the first place.
In America, Nigeria is whatever Sommy recalls. She is an immigrant who can do no wrong. But back home, the cracks in her worldview become glaringly evident, its actors pressing insistently with the force of their reality. Against her mother, who wears her conservative positions loudly, Sommy appears revolutionary. But they have great overlap, especially when it comes to money. “Drawn as she was to the conventional,” Sommy explains, she cannot accept that Mezie is in love with a poor girl (as opposed to a white girlfriend), however durable this love, which began when they were all poor.
The city is unchanging in its continual descent (the novel, in this longest movement, reads like a love letter to Lagos), but no one is as she remembers them, and perhaps the greatest amnesia has occurred in Sommy’s own self-perception. But this strange desire to not engage with her materialistic impulses isn’t accounted for by her cultural or educational background. It’s one thing not to aspire to America, and another to be indifferent to Nigeria. Before emigrating, Sommy could not fully feel the country’s “unconquerable enigma of a decayed system”, but she was working a job she disliked, under a boss whose morals she did not respect. Her family is only recently middle-class; growing up, she had been part of “the almost kids, the kids who had just enough to escape the categorization of poor street kids… the chameleon kids. They did not reek of poverty. You had to come a little closer to smell it.” Her house’s walls crawled with rats and cockroaches. In university, she experienced days of hunger, when she went on dates with men just to find something to eat.
It is difficult to imagine a person who went on dates out of hunger, to meet a man like Bryan so vastly wealthier than any of the men encountered in Nigeria, and not contemplate the role of his money. It is difficult to imagine a person who had to draw water from a well, who slept without electricity, be so indifferent to the idea of constantly running water and electricity in America. If this is supposedly Sommy’s quirk, the mother’s attitude to class is perhaps more inconsistent. She can afford a three-bedroom apartment for her one son, complete with a car and a hundred thousand naira salary, but remains in the same dilapidated apartment with dirty curtains. We are told this is because “her mother could not stop being a poor person”, but unlike Sommy, the mother is clear in her desire for social triumph, full of anxiety over upward mobility, capable of bribing DPOs and showing off abroad children and throwing lavish thanksgiving parties.
Rather than Americanah, the Adichie novel closer to Tiny Things is Purple Hibiscus, with its rovingly observant yet passive Kambili. And beyond Adichie’s oeuvre, the closer siblings might be the novels of Sally Rooney, for their studies in love and contemporary female passivity, notably the first, Conversations with Friends. The difference between Tiny Things and these novels is that no matter the depths of the heroines’ passivity, they are relentless in pursuit of intellectual liberation. Lurking underneath their good manners is a patient furor: until they can beat the man at his game, they will sharpen the swords of their intellect. But right from her undergraduate days, Sommy is dispassionate about literature, teaching, schoolwork. We are told over and over that she’s only doing things because people told her to, and never with a sense of how good she is at these things, and what satisfaction (or lack thereof) her performance brings her.
The novel presents her as the average Nigerian girl, the consequence of female socialisation, and at the same time wiser than the average Nigerian girl. This juxtaposition of the uncommon and the normal is Rooney’s project too, but part of the effects of poverty of the kind no Rooney or Adichie heroine ever suffers is its limitations on language. Constructions of the kind Sommy utilises do not come ready-made in the average Nigerian vocabulary. When did she strive for this? How does she gain the psychological astuteness that is a gem throughout Tiny Things? Is she such a genius that she doesn’t need to study to grasp and articulate complex social mores?
Over and over in this novel, especially as we churn towards the ending, Sommy’s narcissism is revealed as such: she deflects arguments when they don’t favour her, she couches prejudices in dainty language. One startling moment is when Mezie, confronting her about her guilt at abandoning him, says, “What I would rather you do now is stop acting like the kind of person who would [stay for me]. Stop acting like we have that type of relationship.” Wonderfully startling because, throughout the novel, Sommy tells us Mezie is the centre of her life, the reason she didn’t date any boys, the source of all her actions.
If Mezie is not the centre of her life, her machinery then has been powered by a scheming desire for something else, a desire so subliminal she can’t even articulate it to herself, until it’s right in front of her.
The trouble with being human, and thus with any novel which investigates human identity at its multiple intersections, is that it is impossible to come to a moral conclusion that is not at loggerheads with some other vital aspect. Isn’t that why we’re always so shocked when a public figure, so articulate about one ill, turns out to be flagrant about another? In many ways, Sommy emerges at the end of the novel internally unchanged. The most fascinating claim is made on the relationship between time and transformation, the whole plot taking place in under three years, refracting the concept of “happily ever after” through the lens of gender, nationality, and class, though differently than in Americanah or the Rooney books.
Sommy and Bryan give each other the greatest, most redemptive gifts, making the novel a great modern love story if you think of the greatest loves as those after which your life is forever changed. Yet at the same time, one wishes things were slightly less settled. For a character long tutored and so brilliant at sublimating herself so that she appears to have no inner desires, one can’t help imagining an ending that forces her to confront the true sources of her being, and arrive at a more difficult victory.