Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery.
She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.
Kambirinachi and her two daughters become estranged from one another because of a trauma that Kehinde experiences in childhood, which leads her to move away and cut off all contact.
She ultimately finds her path as an artist and seeks to raise a family of her own, despite her fear that she won't be a good mother.
Meanwhile, Taiye is plagued by guilt for what her sister suffered and also runs away, attempting to fill the void of that lost relationship with casual flings with women.
She eventually discovers a way out of her stifling loneliness through a passion for food and cooking.
But now, after more than a decade of living apart, Taiye and Kehinde have returned home to Lagos.
It is here that the three women must face each other and address the wounds of the past if they are to reconcile and move forward.
My Review of Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Firstly, this book will make you salivate. Yeah. There's a lot of food descriptions and recipes that would literally make you hungry.
It's a story told by the perspective of three Nigerian women, Kambirinachi, and her twin daughters, Taiye and Kehinde.
For Kambirinachi, she's an Ogbanje, a spirit child that keeps coming to the world and going back to the spirit world, but she's determined to stay with her alive parents.
Though her spirit kin keeps dragging her back, keeps calling her back, she insists on staying, because she loves her parents and is willing to stay with them.
Her own perspective of the story is a little bit disconnected from the others, because half the time, it's a struggle between her, her spirit kin, her sanity and her responsiveness to grief. She's easily difficult to misunderstand, and people refer to her as mad.
Because she struggles with the grief of losing her husband early in life, she is not really a present mother for her twins. She's always disconnected, doing things nobody understands, seeing things nobody else sees.
Taiye and Kehinde are identical, but mostly different because of their body types.
While Taiye is slim and has the perfect body type Kehinde always wishes she has, Kehinde is plumpy and despises her shape.
She doesn't even eat much like Taiye, the glutton, but somehow the food Taiye eats finds a way to go to her body and make her fat.
Kehinde's perspective always reveals the fact that she's envious of her sister. She feels their mother loves her more, adores her more.
Why always Taiye? Why never me? And when she experiences a traumatic event, she totally disconnects from Taiye and all attempts by her twin to make amends is rendered a fiasco.
Kehinde will also disconnect from her mother too, when she goes to Canada to study. Taiye's perspective is more sincere, more open.
She tries so hard to make amends and connect with her sister again, but Kehinde flatly refuses.
While schooling in London, she writes to Kehinde frequently and tries so hard to be in her sister's life, but Kehinde vehemently shuts her off.
After ten years, Taiye, now a chef, has returned to Lagos to stay with her mother and Kehinde will also come home for an inevitable reunion.
When Kehinde comes home with her husband Farouq, the three women must confront their issues and embrace the wounds they hid from each other and nursed themselves.
This a book about grief, food, trauma, child rape, queer love, because Taiye is gay.
This book cuts across different continents and generations. It's a very interesting book.
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