Greetings! 👋🏽
I hope you are doing well, and taking good care of yourself.
Welcome to another edition of The Reader’s Perspective newsletter.
I wrote this one in just a few hours and I really hope you enjoy reading it.
Zikora is a short story about womanhood that also explores the strained relationship between a woman and her mother. It was published in 2020. The book is about 40 pages long so it can be a nice evening, weekend or lazy day read.
Like everything Chimamanda has written, it’s a masterpiece. This short story delivers excellently and still leaves you wanting more. It is narrated in first person, which makes it somewhat warm and intimate.
The story is set in a delivery room and begins with a vivid description of Zikora’s pain that “sat like a fire in her back.” Her mum is with her in the room and in that first paragraph, we see a glimpse of the type of relationship they have.
We learn later that Zikora’s lover abandoned her when she told him she was pregnant so she was left to rely on her mum. Her mum, who had taught her that to be a woman is to bear pain but in that moment, Zikora was tired and felt like she was disgracing her.
There’s a small flashback moment to how Zikora and her lover, Kwame, met and how great their relationship was…until it wasn’t. “There was a miscommunication” was his response to the news of Zikora’s pregnancy with his child, before walking out on her.
When she tried to give him updates, he took the liberty to reply whenever he felt like it and described her gesture as manipulative. He claimed that she made a decision that excluded him and that he was hurting, not wanting their relationship to end the way it did.
He eventually started to ignore her, making it crystal clear that he wanted nothing to do with the child Zikora was carrying but she still texted him when she went into labour and kept checking her phone, waiting for his reply.
“I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” Zikora told her cousin, Mmiliaku, when she was afraid that people at work knew she had been dumped while pregnant. She turned everything in her mind, this way and that, and ended up blaming herself.
After the baby is born and her father calls her to congratulate her, Zikora reflects on her childhood and her mother’s struggle when her father married another woman to bear him a son. She thinks about how different he is with this other woman, treating her mother only with respect.
“I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.”
She remembers the day her father left them and how she’d blamed her mother. In that moment, Zikora feels a tenderness towards her mother; a kind that probably only comes from now being a mother. In the end, all Zikora had was her mother.
This book is one of my best reads. 10/10. Even though I have an okay relationship with my mum, I know how complex mother-daughter relationships can be, for a myriad of reasons ranging from misunderstanding to unmet expectations.
Have you read this book? What did you think about it? Leave a comment, maybe? 😉
If you read this book after reading this review, do come back and share 😊