By Henry Akubuiro
The Baby is Mine, Narrative Landscape, Nigeria, 2021, pp. 97
How does it feel to live in a house where two women are claiming the motherhood of one newborn baby? Sixes and sevens: that sums it up. So it is in Oyinkan Braithwaite’s novella, The Baby is Mine.
The opening pages of this offering is somehow beguiling, but the plot condenses humour and squabbles in most parts. Who is actually the mother of the newborn baby? Unraveling this mystery isn’t as easy as modern science makes it look. The more you follow the bedlam in the house of Bambi’s late uncle, Folu, where he is seeking refuge, the more you get befuddled.
Set during the coronavirus pandemic in Lagos, Nigeria, The Baby is Mine tees off with Bambi as the narrator. He is living with his girlfriend, Mide, captivating with her “wide hips and kinky hair”. She has a beautiful flat in Ikoyi overlooking the lagoon.
Mide’s discovery that Bambi has been cheating on her through the discoveries in his phone infuriates her, leading her to send him packing. With nowhere to go, he moves to Uncle Folu’s house nearby —”Uncle Folu was the first person I knew to die from the virus”.
Strangely, in Uncle Folu’s house, unknown to him, lives two women —Aunty Bidemi and Esohe —who both claim to be the mother of the new baby, Remi, who looks like “a baked potato”, and fight at the least provocation, with Bambi serving as an emergency troubleshooter. Echoes of “That’s my baby!” and “He is my baby!” reverberate in this house from the two parties.
What makes matters worse is that the pandemic is in full swing, and the hospitals in Lagos are overstretched. No doctor has any time to be running DNA tests, which Bambi is canvassing.
Esohe concedes: “… I think the best thing we can do now is try to live together in some kind of harmony until we have a chance to do the test. After all, none of us is going anywhere any time soon” (p. 25).
Still baffled, Bambi, however, recalls seeing Aunty Bidemi with her swelling belly and the glow of pregnancy. Esohe was a mere side chick. That suggests Bidemi is the mother of the baby boy. Sometimes Bambi has to keep the baby or sleep with him when the warring women won’t allow peace to reign.
Bambi has more than just the warring women to contend with. A crowing cock in the compound makes a moment of silence a luxury in this ‘Fuji house of commotion”. Bambi would like to shut it up. For one, it has no business making noise at 1:05p.m. He wonders why the meddling cock has chosen to settle in the compound. A funny scene unfurls when the clocks want to attack Bambi when he finds it in the garden.
Oyinkan Braithwaite’s The Baby is Mine is hard to put down. It keeps you on the edge of your seat as you strive to find out how Bambi is going to untangle himself from the dysfunctional house he has come to seek refuge in and how the paternity mess will be unraveled. But the author isn’t anxious to calm your nerves, as the plot keeps zigzagging.
Despite his randiness, which sent him packing from Mide’s house, you can’t help but feel for Bambi with his ratcheting misery at the old bungalow: “The world outside my bedroom was silent. No crowing. I blew raspberries and Remi gurgled. I had fed him and changed his nappy, but he still would not sleep. I lay next to him, dangling my chain over him while he reached for it…” (p. 47).
Esohe is the most troublesome of the two women. When Bambi refuses to make love to her, as she craves, she storms out, while plotting to rope him into a sham liaison with her, an allegation Aunty Bidemi almost buys until Bambi proves himself innocent.
The lockdown has brought a certain claustrophobia to Bambi for just a few days he has been living with the two women, but even the aggrieved girlfriend, Mide, in her loneliness, won’t get him off her mind.
There are some unexpected tense moments in the plot, like when a blood smeared wall is discovered and when little Remi is in the throes of death. The images of disappearing light and freaking darkness in the house weave contrasting undertones.
As the plot winds, Bambi takes away the baby from the old bungalow to nurse, and he is warmly received by Mide, who had earlier booted him away. But then, you begin to wonder, shouldn’t this indeterminate ending have been avoided by the author? The bonus here, though, is that the hero of this fiction is a villain who has morphed into a saint.