This is Not about Sadness (review)

The debut novel by Nigerian-German writer Olumide Popoola, This is Not about Sadness enters the literary community with a subtle eloquence that disrupts staid notions about migration, Black womanhood, love, and the possibility of the in-between spaces of unlikely friendships. Popoola manages a salient examination, that is at once lyrical and haunting, of Black women’s identity and subjectivity. She provides an intimate lens into the intergenerational, intercultural friendship between women of the diaspora, while including the larger backdrops of working class, ethnic London and the critical politics of gender violence that is at its apex in post-Apartheid South Africa.

This is Not about Sadness tells the story of Tebogo, a young South African woman who faces the trauma of being raped on a dusty corner of an urban township. In order to reach outside of her circumstance and survive, Tebogo shares her story with her London-based South African male friend, Lucky, who offers her a respite out of South Africa. She arrives in London to a self-exile that manifests in multiple dimensions. In a tiny corner of London, Tebogo enters the life of her reclusive, Jamaican neighbor, pensioner Mrs. Norma Thompson. It is in the spaces of silence, as they first pass each other at the entry of their home, that a dance of friendship and, ultimately, a surrogate mother/daughter relationship grows between them; two women who carry the burden of bruised spirits. Thompson, a mysterious shadow of a woman, emerges as someone numbed by the death of her children twenty years ago. Their abbreviated lives clutter her memory, making her unable to move beyond the aborted chance at motherhood.

It is through Tebogo and her stories about becoming a teacher in a local London community center that Mrs. Thompson is able to envision another life for herself. As their friendship emerges through the tending of Mrs. Thompson’s backyard garden, a thread of possibility is created. Tebogo gains an adoptive mother and a sacred space to ask for acceptance of the things that she cannot speak: her rape and being a lesbian. Mrs. Thompson becomes educated in Tebogo’s world of LGBT struggles; she learns of other South African women who have died at the hands of “corrective rape.” At first Mrs. Thompson, with her conservative Caribbean sensibility, has difficulty with this knowledge, telling Tebogo “Me no got time fi speak bout sin” (Popoola 34). Tebogo resists being silent about these stories and gradually helps Mrs. Thompson understand the subtext of her own brush with death through the narratives of the South African women who do not survive. As Mrs. Thompson grows to understand the magnitude of what Tebogo is sharing about her own rape, the two women become a family; opening an enduring space in each other’s hearts. It is this loving, this adopting of each other, that anchors them—as migratory subjects, as seeking selves—and gives them roots; witnesses to the flowers they see bloom over the season of their short friendship. Mixed into these snapshots is the largesse of history, memory and grief. They share the language of exile and home; of a need to return to the safety of interior spaces which only moments of shared pain and love can create. Popoola’s writing allows the reader to hear the virtual cracking of Mrs. Thompson’s fragile exterior as she and Tebogo mourn under the beauty of releasing grief together.

Tebogo, with her youth, bounds into Mrs. Thompson’s eggshell-encased heart. Mrs. Thompson begins to invite Tebogo into her home; unable to forget the manners of her Jamaican upbringing where nurturing and nourishment have been the bedrock of cultural transmissions between women of African descent. These traditions live in the homes of mothers, sisters, aunts and friends who have loved and kept each other alive without words for generations.

Popoola intersperses the narrative with Mrs. Thompson’s inner voice—written in a lilting Jamaican patois—as space of foreshadowing about the losses that will come alongside poignant lessons learned. From the...