Dust to Dust: From the Promise of Young Womanhood to Resignation to Patriarchal Marriage in Reading the Ceiling

Earlier this month, I received an email from a colleague personally asking if my family and I would be willing to host a high school student from Africa for two weeks. She had been recruiting hosts for several weeks and still needed a few willing families in order to place all of the students who would be staying in Muncie for a portion of their time with the Pan African Youth Leadership Program (PAYLP). PAYLP is funded by the US Department of State, and participants in the program do some orientation in Atlanta and culminating activities in DC but spend the majority of their time in the US in training and lectures at various universities across the country. Three cohorts come to Ball State University every year. We had considered hosting PAYLP students in the past and felt that the time might be right this summer. I was particularly interested in the cultural exchange that my 15-year-old daughter might gain from hosting an African student. She is infinitely interested in travel outside of the US. This would give her the opportunity to learn a little bit about the world without leaving home. 

We were assigned a student a couple of days before her arrival in Muncie. She would be coming from The Republic of Gambia. I quickly read the historical information about The Gambia that my colleague provided, and, then, I thought maybe I should read a novel or two written by a Gambian author in order to learn more about the culture of this small country on the west side of Africa. I didn’t find many options, but Dayo Forster’s 2007 Reading the Ceiling was available as an ebook for $1. I used one of the many credits I have with Amazon, earned by checking the box next to “No Rush” on orders that I don’t need immediately, and got the book for free!

Reading the Ceiling starts on Ayodele’s 18^th birthday, the day she has planned for what she sees as the beginning of the rest of her life, which she thinks will be triggered by having sex for the first time. She makes a list of a few possible partners for this important rite of passage. The rest of the book is divided into three parts, each following the chain of events that occur after sex with one of the choices on her list. The first choice is Rueben, a traditional Gambian boy who Ayodele finds annoying but who would definitely agree to the task. This choice ultimately leads her to study at a university in England, return to Gambia for a job in the government, and marry a womanizing widower in her middle age. Ayodele is much more attracted to her second choice, Yuan, who is the son of Chinese immigrants and plans to study in England after high school graduation. This option leads her into a fulfilling, long-term relationship with Yuan in Europe until Yuan dies suddenly in a motorcycle accident. Heartbroken, she ultimately gains a career in international trade and travels around the world but later returns to Gambia to care for her elderly mother, and finally, agrees to marry a widower with teenaged children who resent her. Last, the novel explores the possibility of Ayodele choosing Frederick, the father of her best friend who has a reputation of carrying on affairs outside of his marriage. Although she spends a semester abroad after her sexual encounter with Frederick, this option ultimately leads her to pregnancy and the difficulties of single motherhood, working her way up in the ranks of a Gambian car dealership, and a marriage as a second wife to the owner of the company, who is willing to help support her and her son.

The novel is well-written. You can see Forster’s careful implementation of craft in almost every line. And it evokes vivid imagery of West Africa through compelling—but wonderfully succinct—descriptions of food preparation, clothing, and scenery. Most of all, Reading the Ceiling conveys the difficulty that one young Gambian woman faces in her attempt to claim agency over her own body and life in her home country. It portrays the culture of The Gambia as doggedly patriarchal—even misogynistic—despite progress toward the liberal ideal of equality, as evidenced in the efforts of most families of Ayodele’s class to educate their daughters abroad. Though she is able to find some measure of happiness in each scenario, West Africa is inhospitable to Ayodele’s dreams of freedom and joie de vivre, a concept she discusses in one of her college classes. In fact, in each of the three situations presented in the novel, Ayodele ultimately capitulates to the patriarchal politics and demands of marriage and childrearing in The Gambia, settling for relationships with men she does not love, cooking and cleaning for husbands and children, and silencing her own opinions and desires in exchange for the familiar traditions of patriarchal marriage. Each scenario ends with resignation to death, as, after her mother’s funeral in each case, Ayodele admits to herself that she will be next.

Forster uses dust and mud imagery throughout the novel to indicate the dinginess of Ayodele’s life as a young woman, and then wife and mother, in West Africa as well as the inescapability of this life. Even in the opening passage, so reflective of Ayodele’s sense of her own sexuality and her eagerness to use it to open the mysteries of her life outside of The Gambia, imagery of dust foreshadows the inevitable power of her country to reign in the power of her young, rebellious body: “In the slit between my bedroom curtains, I see a long triangle of sky more grey than blue. The light changes with each sweep of my eyelids. At this time of year, when the harmattan blows straight off the Sahara, not even the wide expanse of the River Gambia can add enough wet to stop it in its tracks. It has coated with dust the mosquito netting on my window” (location 35). The slit between the curtains, representative of Ayodele’s sexuality, of course, allows her to see some of the play of light outside her window, or the possibilities of her future, but the dust, such an integral part of life in The Gambia during the dry season, prevents her from full enjoyment of the colors. Again, indicating her difficulty in leaving her culture behind, in the Rueben section of the novel, Ayodele falls into the muddy, “thickly brown” (location 446), and possibly crocodile-filled water of the river and struggles to pull herself from the its depths back into the boat carrying her high school friends. In a passage depicting Ayodele’s decision, after Yuan’s death, to settle in Mali, another West African country with apparently similar customs to The Gambia, she notes not only the muddiness of the river, but the dustiness of the garden outside her new home, and “the brown-tinged circles in the rice” left by the muddy tap water used to cook her food (location 1810). Although Ayodele’s meal is interrupted by the delivery of a letter from home, she ultimately returns to eating “the brown-speckled rice” (location 1844), having made the decision to stay in West Africa. In the last scenario, in which Ayodele becomes an unwed mother at the age of 18, she perceives her pregnancy as a “ridge of mud” (location 2479) and lives in a small house with a “mud wall . . . meant to keep the rainwater out” as she struggles to support her young son (location 2590). I could cite numerous other examples of mud imagery as representative of Ayodele’s inability to escape her home culture, many of which also portray water as opposite to mud, a possibly cleansing or freeing force—but one that never quite wins against the ubiquitous dust of the harmattan.

Reading the Ceiling ends with Ayodele’s memory of a story that she and her sisters and friends were often told in childhood—one that clearly echoes Ayodele’s perception of water as life-giving and dust as stifling. A mermaid, skilled in magical incantations and free to settle anywhere in the beautiful underwater regions of the sea, is nevertheless curious about life on land and enjoys observing the activities of fishermen on the surface. Like Ayodele’s story, the mermaid’s story is told in the form of a traditional dilemma tale, presenting several possible outcomes that listeners can judge as most or least desirable. In one ending, the mermaid is almost caught by the fishermen but struggles and escapes back to her beautiful home in the ocean. In another, she allows herself to be caught and lives the rest of her unhappy life as a human, abused and disfigured by the fishermen and their peers. The novel clearly outlines the moral of the story: “[I]f you want something, don’t halfwant it. Either want it properly and go and get it, or forget about it so you will not be drawn into someone else’s magic and get the decision taken out of your hands” (location 3433). The reader is obviously meant to judge Ayodele as failing to “properly” want life outside of the rigid restraints of The Gambia, despite the kaleidoscope of opportunities available to her as a young woman travelling abroad for her education. Instead, in the scenarios presented in the book, Ayodele allows herself to take jobs in West Africa because they are easy to secure after acquiring degrees in international development in Europe and the US, to return to The Gambia to please her sisters or mother, to acquiesce to marriage with men who will make her life materially comfortable and acceptable to those in her country who gossip about her European or American habits and aspirations.

A review of the fate of other characters in the novel reveals that Ayodele is not the only woman who becomes trapped by the expectations for women in The Gambia. The novel provides the reader with a panoply of young women who each chooses her own fate—either abroad or at home. One of Ayodele’s sisters, Taiwo, ends up marrying Rueben and living a traditional life in The Gambia. Ayodele notices that the Biblical reading during their marriage ceremony “was not from a raunchy part of the Song of Solomon . . . but instead from the rib creation passage” (location 1926), meaning, of course, that Taiwo has chosen domestic life as a helpmate to Rueben over the possibility of sexual passion, a choice that Ayodele also makes in each of the scenarios presented in the novel. Remi, Ayodele’s best friend, also chooses a traditional marriage in The Gambia, and, like Ayodele in two of the novel’s scenarios, she ultimately accepts that her husband will have intimate relationships other women. Moira marries right out of high school, and her husband leaves her and their three children a few years later. She struggles as a single mother, used and abandoned by a man, just as Ayodele does after giving birth to her son, but continues to enforce gender norms through unwanted advice and self-righteousness. The women who leave The Gambia, however, fare much better than those who marry Gambian men. Ayodele’s other sister, Kainde, lives independently in Canada, and Amina marries a European and founds a happy existance in Italy. Although both women tell Ayodele that their lives are not perfect, Amina admits that her life is mostly in her own control, which contrasts sharply with the experiences of Taiwo, who defers in every situation to Rueben; Remi, who decides that peace at home is more important than her husband’s fidelity; Moira, who accepts and promulgates the expectations for married women in The Gambia, and Ayodele herself, of course, in each of the three situations portrayed in the novel.

It’s important to note Reading the Ceiling is focused on the experiences of The Gambia’s middle class, urban dwellers with money for education and who are mostly Christian. People like this are in the minority in The Gambia, which is a very poor, largely rural, and majority Muslim country. Regardless of its limited scope, the novel clearly (and problematically for liberal Western readers—like me!—who are uncomfortable with this stereotypical characterization of West Africa) depicts The Gambia as a place where women are simply unable to successfully contend against traditional patriarchal norms. You might wonder, does it provide any hope, any glimmer of positive change for women? Maybe. The novel ends with Ayodele helping a man walking his dog on the beach to move a fish run ashore back into the sea. Afterwards: “My eyes catch what looks like the flick of a tail, sprinkling splashes of water high above the surface, slicing cleanly back into the ocean. Then it’s gone.” (location 3523). This transitory image suggests either that some women, embodied in the fish, will escape West Africa to the refreshing waters of other lands or that The Gambia, represented by the man, may learn from its female offspring, like Ayodele, to allow women to live in the waters of freedom and fulfillment.