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A review by aish_dols
Better Never Than Late by Chika Unigwe
5.0
Nigerians living in Belgium are the focus in 'Better Never Than Late'. Their Interconnected lives result in a mosaic of experiences and realities that tell and show the reader all the angles of what it means to be an immigrant, legally or illegally. The collage that this book is, wove stories from different narrators, in first person and then, in the third person narrative. What I really like about it is that the narrators, most of them know each other, felt like branches of a tree meeting at the trunk.
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"In Belgium, rape is not considered a violent crime but a moral one." – I shivered at this line.
A couple move to Belgium after a riot in Jos that caused the husband to lose his fortune, and his wife, to abandon her good job and life of convenience. They host their African friends every weekend to starve the loneliness and unpredictabilities that being an immigrant brings. BNTL hides nothing. The secrets of the lives of these people resurrected unexpectedly as I flipped more pages. You think you know a character and then, viola, something happens that clutches your heart.
Chika wrote of Nigerian men who for papers and to secure their stay, marry Belgian women, of white women who try to blend into the Nigerian – or African – ways but are stereotyped. I totally enjoyed Tine & Godwin's story. It ended in a way I didn't see coming which was how all the characters' stories ended or continued in my head because the author left them to live regardless of the fact that she told their story, she made them tell it.
The family of gbolahan is proof that immigration can make or destroy a family as he lost Ego due to circumstances and was bewildered when his daughter indirectly told him she will have to be white to be successful. Several myths were straightened. Now I know it's not absolutely true that black men find it so easy to marry white women, I know that the loneliness immigrants feel is heavier than the life of glitz and glam they live (or not) & that they long for home, companionship and laughter than comfort.
⬇⬇⬇
"In Belgium, rape is not considered a violent crime but a moral one." – I shivered at this line.
A couple move to Belgium after a riot in Jos that caused the husband to lose his fortune, and his wife, to abandon her good job and life of convenience. They host their African friends every weekend to starve the loneliness and unpredictabilities that being an immigrant brings. BNTL hides nothing. The secrets of the lives of these people resurrected unexpectedly as I flipped more pages. You think you know a character and then, viola, something happens that clutches your heart.
Chika wrote of Nigerian men who for papers and to secure their stay, marry Belgian women, of white women who try to blend into the Nigerian – or African – ways but are stereotyped. I totally enjoyed Tine & Godwin's story. It ended in a way I didn't see coming which was how all the characters' stories ended or continued in my head because the author left them to live regardless of the fact that she told their story, she made them tell it.
The family of gbolahan is proof that immigration can make or destroy a family as he lost Ego due to circumstances and was bewildered when his daughter indirectly told him she will have to be white to be successful. Several myths were straightened. Now I know it's not absolutely true that black men find it so easy to marry white women, I know that the loneliness immigrants feel is heavier than the life of glitz and glam they live (or not) & that they long for home, companionship and laughter than comfort.