The shortlist for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction was released on Monday, April 29, 2019 and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s satire slashfest debut novel made the list of six!
In honour of the recognition she’s been getting since My Sister, The Serial Killer was released in November 2018, here’s a brillant review by
Jennifer Malec of theJohannesburg Review of Books.
My Sister, the Serial Killer
Oyinkan Braithwaite
Penguin Random House, 2018
As the African literary community discovered anew this week, writing about the taboo is a fine art. In the hands of an inexperienced or unskilled author, purportedly literary explorations of murder, incest, sex or death can quickly turn sensationalist, mawkish, or just plain offensive.
In her 1967 essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’,
Susan Sontag wrote that people, in their daily lives, have a moral and
pragmatic obligation not to ‘venture into the far reaches of
consciousness’, as in doing so they risk jeopardising the social order.
However, she added that the ‘humanistic standard proper to ordinary life
and conduct’ should not be applied to art: ‘It oversimplifies.’ At the
same time, Sontag believed that what separated trashy or pornographic
writing from literature was that the former possesses ‘only one
“intention”’—to shock, to induce sexual excitement—while ‘any genuinely
valuable work of literature has many’.
While Sontag was writing
specifically about pornography, her observations can usefully be
extended to other types of ‘trashy’ fiction. Which bring us to My Sister, the Serial Killer,
the slim debut novel of Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite, which,
contrary to what the title and pulpy cover suggest, happily demonstrates
the multifarious intentions of Sontag’s ‘genuinely valuable work of
literature’.
My Sister, the Serial Killer opens with our protagonist, Korede, scrubbing a bathroom floor. Her sister, Ayoola is watching:
I
soaked up the blood with a towel and wrung it out in the sink. I
repeated the motions until the floor was dry. Ayoola hovered, leaning on
one foot and then the other. I ignored her impatience. It takes a whole
lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul.
We
discover this is not the first time Ayoola has called on her sister to
help her clean up a bloody scene, or get rid of a body. In fact, it is
the third time, and as Korede has learnt from concerned late-night
internet searches, ‘Three, and they label you a serial killer.’
The
setup may be outlandish, but within it Braithwaite constructs an
affecting and uncannily accurate portrait of a sibling relationship.
Korede, the elder sister, a nurse, is sensible, responsible, and plain.
Ayoola, the younger, a fashion designer and Instagram entrepreneur, is
spoilt, self-centred and beautiful. In a scene any responsible elder
sibling will relate to, when Ayoola telephones Korede to help her clean
up crime scene number three, Korede has just settled down to a
comfortable night in:
I was about to eat when she
called me. I had laid everything out on the tray in preparation—the fork
was to the left of the plate, the knife to the right. I folded the
napkin into the shape of a crown and placed it at the centre of the
plate. The movie was paused at the beginning credits and the oven timer
had just rung, when my phone began to vibrate violently on my table.
But
she doesn’t get angry—neither at her sister’s behaviour, nor her
post-manslaughter indolence. She feels exasperation, especially when
Ayoola thoughtlessly invades her personal space in her bedroom, or
forgets to play the part of the ‘concerned girlfriend of a missing
person’ on social media, or when her mother blatantly favours her
younger child, but in her loyalty to her sister she is resolute.
At
the same time, Korede knows to keep her distance. Partly because she
knows her sister is trouble, and partly because she is secretly in love
with a handsome doctor, Tade, and she knows that if he lays eyes on
Ayoola it will dash her chances with him conclusively. Of course, Tade
does meet Ayoola, and within a short period of time is determined to
propose to her. By this time Ayoola has added to her homicidal tally,
and her solipsism, flightiness and lack of remorse have not endeared her
to us. (‘Only the guilty go to jail,’ she blithely tells her sister
when evidence that incriminates both of them is discovered in a missing
man’s flat.) But her beauty has blinded Tade, a usually intelligent and
sensible person, to the extent that when Korede bluntly asks him ‘what
makes her special?’, he replies:
‘She is just so … I mean, she is beautiful and perfect. I’ve never wanted to be with someone this much.’
I
rub my forehead with my fingers. He fails to point out the fact that
she laughs at the silliest things and never holds a grudge. He hasn’t
mentioned how quick she is to cheat at games or that she can hemstitch a
skirt without even looking at her fingers. He doesn’t know her best
features or her … darkest secrets. And he doesn’t seem to care.
And
just like that, despite her broken heart Korede reminds us of the depth
and span of her love for and intimate knowledge of her sister.
Similarly, in one of the final scenes of the book it emerges that when
it really matters Ayoola, despite what we may think of her, reflexively
protects Korede, with little concern for her own safety. These moments
underpin the delicate and pleasantly surprising depth of character in
the novel.
Relievedly, Braithwaite has resisted any pious urge to position My Sister, the Serial Killer
within a troubled political history or ‘vibrant’ cultural context,
although Lagos peeps in here and there, temperamentally, with its
‘never-ending car horns, the shouts of hawkers and tires screeching on
the road’, or its ‘rain that wrecks umbrellas and renders a raincoat
useless’. Braithwaite does, however, allow herself full use of the
tragicomic opportunities afforded to a crime novel set in Africa. The
police are humorously—and usefully—inefficient and corrupt; at one
point, while driving the car she used to transport a body, Korede is
able to talk herself out of a ticket with some wheedling pidgin, even
though it strikes a false note on her middle class tongue—‘Oga abeg,
let’s sort am between ourselves’—and a medium-sized bribe. And when the
wealth and status of one of the Ayoola’s victims makes his death too
high profile to ignore and her car is finally impounded, Korede is
confident that her homely cleaning skills will defeat the lax arm of the
law:
Some of the blood has seeped into the lining of
the boot. Ayoola offers to clean it, out of guilt, but I take my
homemade mixture of one spoon of ammonia to two cups of water from her
and pour it over the stain. I don’t know whether or not they have the
tech for a thorough crime scene investigation in Lagos, but Ayoola could
never clean up as efficiently as I can.
Importantly,
whether Ayoola is guilty or not is left to our judicious imagination.
After five deaths we strongly suspect she is, but in all but one she
claims to have been attacked by the men in question, and that she killed
in self-defence (the other, she says, was mere coincidence). Ayoola’s
beauty is of the sort that encourages irrational behaviour from rational
men—the femme fatale that should be confined to fantasy, but
that is very much evident in the world’s everyday reality—and leaves us
wondering, ‘Could she? … Did he?’ By not providing any evidence for or
against, Braithwaite almost seems to be testing out a fable for the
#MeToo movement.
With its short chapters, each with an edgy, one- or two-word title—’Instagram’, ‘Knife’, ‘Mascara’, ‘Blood’—My Sister, the Serial Killer
skips along breezily, even as the body count rises. But through
glimpses into the past we begin to learn more about the women’s late
father, and a darkness emerges at the edge of the story. It turns out
that Ayoola did learn at least one lesson from her big sister, and the
novel neatly, and grimly, turns the tables on the idea that beauty is
always a blessing.
To return to ‘The Pornographic Imagination’:
interestingly, Sontag disagreed with the idea, still commonly held
today, that in order for a work to be considered ‘good literature’ the
author should have ‘the proper “distance” from his obsessions’. Instead,
she asserted:
What makes a work part of the history
of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a
consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the
‘deranged consciousness’ of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the
originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged
consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.
Fifty years later, an effervescent story about a glamorous serial killer is, thankfully, no longer considered an indication of a ‘deranged consciousness’. But we needn’t fear in any case, as the value of My Sister, the Serial Killer is demonstrated by its narrative originality, the gentle power of its examination of family dynamics and the harrowing legacy of abuse, and the understated authenticity and strength of its women characters.
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