I write women who keep things. Private names. Private vows. Private cosmologies. Things that the household cannot see.

Basma Gidado enters a contractual marriage in Kaduna, 2002, a city still exhaling the smoke of its own violence. Her husband Faruk has made a vow never to love. She has made one in return — to make him love her, Insha’Allah — and she keeps it the way you keep a coal beneath ash: present, warm, invisible to anyone standing in the room. This is the premise of my novel, Love, Insha’Allah, which I admit I’m still writing, still inside. After over two years, still learning.

And my second novel in development, Second Wife Season, which I started after a long break from writing, follows Marziya, a second wife in an Abuja household that has already decided what she is. But she moves through it as Bint Zakariya — daughter of her father, named by herself, known to no one inside the walls that claim her.

These women are not just interior in the way we sometimes mean when we say interior fiction. They are not simply introspective. They are entire systems operating beneath the surface of the institution that seeks to contain them. Women. Black women. African women. Nigerian women. Northern Nigerian women specifically represent a category the literary world has not always known what to do with, a category the world at large has often preferred to speak about rather than listen to. And yet for generations, Northern Nigerian women have organised, pursued education, written poetry, exercised agency, built lives and networks and counter-cosmologies within structures — cultural, religious, political — that were never designed to accommodate the full weight of their inner lives. From Nana Asma’u, the nineteenth-century Islamic scholar-poet who ran a women’s education network across the Sokoto Caliphate, to the women today writing erotic fiction in Hausa on WhatsApp, the tradition has always been there. It has simply never had a critical language to name it.

I found some of that language in an unexpected place. Forest Imaginaries.

I want to confess that this book sat on my shelf longer than I’d have liked to admit. It was bigger than I expected, denser than I was prepared for, and leaned heavily academic — not what I would have picked for a pleasant evening read. So, I delayed and delayed and delayed. But after tuning into the Radical Books Collective chat with Dr Ainehi Edoro, my brain suddenly perked up. Hearing her explain the book’s central argument directly — in her own voice, with her own examples — was a different experience from reading the jacket copy. Listening to her talk about her investment in African literature, about what she found in the novels she spent years thinking through, about what the forests in those books are actually doing, had me rethinking so many books I’d previously read. And incidentally, the books I was writing.

I didn’t need any more convincing to pick the book up that same night. Contrary to my initial reservations, Forest Imaginaries did in fact turn out to be a very pleasant evening read, that then became a late night read, and an early morning read, and a stolen afternoon read. I could not put it down. It opened me up to worlds and arguments and possibilities I’d not before considered — even within books I’d already read. And introduced me to a genre I’d long since avoided: speculative African fiction. One I’m now determined to get into.

Edoro’s argument, as I understand it, is this: the African novel generates its own logic, its own intelligence, its own way of thinking about the world. And we have largely failed to read it on those terms. African novels are read overwhelmingly anthropologically — as documents of what Africa is, as representative data about cultures and peoples, as windows onto an elsewhere. She argues that African novels are also something else entirely: intelligent objects in their own right, with their own formal and philosophical ambitions. Specifically, she argues that African novelists — Achebe, Tutuola, Soyinka, Okorafor — use the forest not as backdrop but as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, and creativity coexist as an ecosystem. The novel thinks like that structure. It thinks collectively, cosmologically, at the scale of a world rather than a self.

I agree. And I also wish to postulate that it is not only the forests and the mythic registers of African fiction that are thinking like worlds. Realist fiction too — especially the deeply interior kind, the kind centred on a single woman’s consciousness — must be read beyond the individual. The interiority is not the opposite of the ecosystem. It is the ecosystem’s most intimate expression.

The tradition I am most often placed in — and which I place myself in — is the female interior. The woman-centred. The consciousness. What a woman thinks, wants, withholds, mourns. Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter is a novel that barely leaves the room. Ramatoulaye does not go out into the world and act. She sits with her pen and her memory and her fury and her love, and the world comes to her through what she keeps. Buchi Emecheta’s Adah in Second-Class Citizen carries Nigeria to England inside her body, inside her ambition and her shame and her impossible optimism. The external world — the racism, the poverty, the husband who burns her manuscript — is the system pressing in. Chimamanda gives us Ifemelu in Americanah — her hair, her blog, her serial reinventions, her refusal to be legible on anyone else’s terms.

We — and I include myself — have largely read these books as representations. As mirrors held up to experience. As portraits of individual women navigating individual lives. But I think now, if we look again, if we really slow down and allow ourselves to feel the full weight of what these novels are doing, we find something else. We find the same deeply structural creativity that drives Edoro’s forests. These seemingly realistic characters and worlds are also thinking at scale.

The epistolary form of Ramatoulaye’s letter is a whole civilisation’s reckoning compressed into one woman’s handwriting. The restless contradictions of Ifemelu’s self-presentation depend entirely on which country’s racial grammar she is standing inside. Adah’s stubbornness is not personality — it is historical force refusing to be extinguished. These novels’ intelligence does not live only on the surface. It lives inside the consciousness, in how these women process what the world does to them and what they refuse to let it do. In what they keep. And what keeping costs them.

These are interior novels. And reading Forest Imaginaries, I kept feeling that Edoro was describing something they are also doing — something I am also trying to do — from the inside. The forest can be domestic, if we simply look farther beyond the exterior and follow the argument into the interior.

Edoro works with literal forests — Achebe’s evil forest in Things Fall Apart, Tutuola’s endless fractal forest in The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Soyinka’s cosmic canopy, and Okorafor’s aquatic futures. These are spaces where the rules of the ordinary world suspend. Where myth and power and transformation coexist in ways the village or the city cannot hold. The forest is where the African novel goes to think otherwise. But I write contested households.

Marriages. Contractual arrangements. A polygamous compound in Abuja. A neighbourhood still carrying the trauma of religious violence in its architecture, its silences, its widowed men. These are not wild spaces. They are heavily governed ones — structured by Islamic law, by tradition, by the logistics of who sleeps where, who eats first, what a woman is permitted to want.       And yet I find myself thinking that the household in my fiction is doing exactly what Edoro’s forests do. It is a laboratory. A living structure where multiple systems — religious, political, historical, personal — coexist and press against each other, not as passive conditions of experience but as active forces that the women inside must navigate, negotiate, survive.

The compound in Second Wife Season has its own ecology: hierarchies that shift with the season, survival strategies that look like submission, forms of power that the household’s official order cannot see or name. The Kaduna of Love, Insha’Allah is not only a setting. It is also a climate. The violence and silence are not mere backstories. They are the atmosphere that makes certain psychological outcomes — Faruk’s sealed grief, his vow of non-love — not just plausible but inevitable. The city produces the man. The man produces the marriage. The marriage produces the impossible private vow of a woman trying to crack open what history has sealed shut. This is world-thinking. It arrives through a woman’s consciousness rather than through a forest, but the structural logic is the same: the individual is not the only unit of meaning. The ecosystem is.

Ramatoulaye in So Long a Letter knows this too, even if she never names it. Her grief is not only hers. It is the grief of a generation of educated African women who were told that modernity and tradition could coexist, that their education and their marriages could coexist, and then discovered the cost of that lie in the most intimate room of their lives. The letter she writes is individual. What it carries is collective. Her consciousness is the forest the novel moves through.

I want to hold the tension honestly, because Edoro’s argument does something my novels resist — and the resistance is real and matters.

The domestic space in my fiction is not wild in the way Edoro’s forests are wild. But it generates its own counter-logic beneath the official order. Marziya’s second name is that counter-logic. Basma’s private vow is that counter-logic. The governed surface conceals an ungoverned interior — which is perhaps more dangerous than an actual forest, because the wildness has nowhere to go. It turns inward. It becomes the woman herself.

Her forests have cosmological ambition, a refusal of the individual that I cannot fully share. I am committed to Basma specifically. To Marziya specifically. To the texture of keeping a private vow in a house that does not know you have one. The individual and the ecosystem are not in competition in my fiction. They are the same argument at different magnifications. Still, there is a deep loneliness in these women that Edoro’s forests do not quite contain — not because the house cannot be a forest, but because we have never allowed ourselves to read it as one.

The domestic forest is a different kind of wild. Smaller in scale, and more dangerous for it. You cannot get lost in it the way you get lost in Tutuola’s endless trees. You can only get trapped. And that, I think, is the key distinction between myth and realism. Between a cosmology and a marriage. The epic forest is vast — you can flee into it, be transformed by it, emerge changed. The domestic forest is small and you cannot leave without ceasing to be yourself. Or rather, without ceasing to be the self the household has decided you are.

What I am reaching toward is something Edoro’s framework makes possible without quite arriving at: the African realist novel — particularly when it centres women — as a form of forest-thinking that has turned inward. The woman’s interiority in these novels is not a flight from the world. It is the world’s most compressed expression. She carries the system inside her because the system has made its home there. Her private cosmology is not individual — it is collective, historical, structural — but it lives in a single body, a single name, a single vow kept warm beneath the ash.

My women are not just thinking like persons. They are thinking like worlds that have been asked to live inside a person. Dr Edoro gave me language for what I had been doing. Now I want to use that language to go further — to ask what the African women’s novel looks like when we stop separating interiority from ecosystem, when we understand the kept thing and the living structure as the same argument made in different registers. When we read Ramatoulaye’s letter not as one woman’s grief but as a civilisation’s reckoning. When we read Adah’s stubbornness not as character but as historical force. When we read Basma’s private vow not as romance but as world-building.

I write women who keep things. I did not fully understand until Forest Imaginaries that what they keep is the world. Not their world — the world. The household cannot see it. But the novel can. That is what the novel is for: not to decorate the interior but to make the forest visible inside the house. To show that the domestic is never only domestic. That the woman with a second name is also keeping a counter-cosmology. That the contractual wife is also a weather system. That the realist novel, at its most intimate, is thinking about the scale of a world.

That the forest can be the house. Is inside the house. Has always been in the house. We have simply been reading the walls.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash