BookBrowse Reviews Daughter in Exile by Bisi Adjapon

BookBrowse:

Lola anticipates a wonderful life in the United States, but is unprepared for the turmoil, anxiety and depression awaiting her in a strange land.

In Bisi Adjapon's Daughter in Exile, main character Lola is a Ghanaian who lands in New York City in 1997, pregnant and with only $250 to her name. She is forced to make a plethora of decisions on the fly in a country where she knows few people, is frightened and is about to bring a new life into the world.

Expecting her fiancé, an American Marine named Armand, to have secured temporary housing for her, Lola is blindsided when she discovers he hasn't followed through on his plan, for no apparent reason other than flakiness, and that she is now homeless. A Jehovah's Witness and immigrant from Martinique, an aloof woman named Mrs. Summer, provides a room for her but only for one night. Olga, who Lola met in Senegal, takes her in temporarily. A married woman with children, Olga admonishes her young friend, "You're far too trusting, Lola. The world isn't made up of wonderful people who love to do the right thing."

When she needs a savior after having broken up with Armand and given birth, Lola's Auntie Theodora enters the story. Theodora's maternal instincts give the naive new mother cover; she teaches Lola how to bathe her child Dele and clean his umbilical cord, and what to do when he is ill. Theodora even saves Dele from choking. But a family dispute causes irreparable harm and Lola has to move again.

Complicating her housing instability is Lola's lack of knowledge about American employment. The limitations of her tourist visa force her to take on a series of shady jobs that barely provide enough money for her to survive.

Often, in novels like this, women in struggle lean upon men, if only to keep their heads above water. Lola tries, but the men in her orbit fail her disastrously. After Armand's defection, Lola, not the most discerning character, falls for good guy Rob, but he isn't what he appears. Then there's Kwaku, a fellow Ghanaian she was acquainted with in Senegal. He offers to help Lola with a job but only if she can provide counterfeit papers and answer to the name of "Mary."

If there is one thread that repeats itself throughout the heartache of Lola's destabilization, it is the resilience of immigrants. On a dime, they may be forced to manage betrayal by people who are supposed to be allies while also being threatened by the systemic strangeness of a different country. Some, like Lola, find religion to be a peaceful space, a way to cope in a foreign land.

There is an irony in how we as a society speak of immigrants and their courage while admiring them from afar, and the tropes that portray their resilience in a fantastical way. We don't necessarily examine what they experience hour after hour or see their daily lives clearly, but we lavish heroism upon them. Daughter in Exile is, in a way, a classic story of the American Dream. It is an aspirational tale with a heroine who takes on great risks, suffers incredible losses and stitches herself back together again. But to define the novel as only that is to minimize what Adjapon has delivered to us. In the many things Lola must manage — language, culture, employment — pressure and trauma are forever hanging over her head. In this way, Daughter in Exile is riveting as a cautionary tale, powerful with a raucous pulse and a vulnerable character. That it toggles between immigrant expectation and immigrant trauma is the point of its sad, beautiful story. It never loses sight of the fact that hope — "the thing with feathers," as Emily Dickinson wrote — for a better life is what matters in the end.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2023, and has been updated for the February 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.