The Teller of Secrets by West African writer Bisi Adjapon is a historically and culturally vibrant coming-of-age drama narrated by Esi Agyekum, a spirited young woman born in Lagos shortly after Nigeria's independence from Britain in 1960. As a child, Esi and her brother were taken from their Nigerian mother and brought to the town of Kumawu in Ghana by their father.
Esi is a delightfully gregarious narrator, using sight and sound to describe her experiences vividly. The story opens with nine-year-old Esi eager to shed her restrictive cocoon and emerge with wings to claim her place in the world. Life in Ghana with her strict father, aloof stepmother and older stepsisters is difficult and lonely. Vague memories of her mother's weeping face haunt Esi, although it will take many years to solve the mystery of her mother's glaring absence from her childhood.
While her sisters meet secretly with boys, and her father has affairs with other women, it is Esi who guards their hidden lives, unaware that one day she, too, will be forced to conceal important parts of herself from her family. Intelligent and ambitious, she is the apple of her father's eye and the only one of her siblings who is university-bound. Esi's father is the headmaster of Kumawu's only secondary school, a man of principle and honor at work and a physically abusive patriarch at home.
Scenes from Esi's all-girls boarding school show a teenager brimming with sexual energy and enjoying the special romantic unions formed between older and younger students. Love blossoms for sexually adventurous Esi in various quarters, and she goes on to date a fellow college student, Randolph. What Esi thinks is an engagement to Randolph turns out to be a fully fledged marriage ceremony at her father's house.
Adjapon's characters--from Esi's domineering father and rebellious stepsisters to the maternal relatives who try to shield Esi from the truth about her mother--experience a pendulum of emotions, from immense joy to terrible sadness. Their interactions with each other and with Esi illustrate the skewed gender dynamics that plague the narrator, as she rejects cultural norms that diminish her worth.
The sweeping arc of Adjapon's densely absorbing drama includes a fresh interpretation of post-colonial West African political dysfunction and military overreach from a young woman's perspective, her physical and intellectual emancipation at its simmering center. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer
Shelf Talker: A university student with a strong feminist sensibility and a fearless approach to sexual freedom narrates this lively West African coming-of-age drama.