The book: “The Marriage Whisperer,” discusses challenges of women in marriage relationships and the burden of stereotypes and profiling piled on the women folk by the society. The Marriage Whisperer, a novella, is authored by Tess Ajibosin and published in 2020 by Daneli Herald Communications. In the work, six middle-aged women make their friendship a ready shield, falling on their collective strength to navigate the challenges of their marriages and relationships.
These intrigues are built on the backdrop provided by the family of Chris, Camille, his wife and counsellor to her friends.
In this book we meet Camille and her team of women placating Bisola, who is sobbing bitterly and bemoaning her heartbreak on account of her husband’s affair with his secretary. Bisola laments that she does not deserve what she is getting from Emmanuel.
She tells the consoling women that she is a submissive wife, and she obeys her husband who demands that she should not work so as to take care of the children. She says that she has done all the Bible asks of a married woman. This is supposed to be the wives meeting group, a period of prayer for the women happening once every month at Camille’s place. But Bisola’s travails have truncated the prayer meeting on this day.
The Wives’ Prayer Meeting Group had been started ten years earlier when they rallied around Amaka to pull her out of her depression, following the brutal murder of her colleague. The meeting quickly becomes a once-a-month, 90-minute “girl time” meant “to help them get away and re-calibrate.” Over the years, it has continued to provide the women the space and “time to speak freely without judgment. The group is for the women to talk, vent and discuss family and marriage issues, including cheating husbands, lazy husbands, delinquent children, dwindling sex lives and occupational troubles.
But for Bisola, she wants her husband, Emmanuel to hurt as he hurt her. She wants him impotent. After all, if he cannot perform his husbandly role at home, he should not be able to do it elsewhere. Much later in the book, we read that Bisola’s husband is attacked by some boys who rip-off his manhood. Could this be Bisola making true her threat?
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In this book Tess Ajibosin brings to the fore certain stereotypes that society has piled up against women and how bold, audacious, and successful women are perceived as loose ones who must have slept their way to the top. The author tells us about the stigmatisation that women face in society, even in their place of work. So Amaka is stigmatised at the office for being divorced. Even the married women in her office look at Amaka like she’s just waiting to snatch their husbands from them.
Another woman, Iniobong seems to have a special problem. She is in deep trouble as she is involved in a secret affair with her brother in law. Well, the brother in law dies much later of heart attack, but the guilt will be with Iniobong for some time.
In a sudden twist in the plot, Chris, Camille’s husband, hangs himself in his study. His suicide note shows that he has been the one behind the resolution of the problems of some of the ladies. He owns up to arranging the robbery attack on Bisola’s husband, the poisoning of the cigarettes that killed the brother in law who had been having a secret affair with Iniobong. He indicates in the suicide note that he is aware that he is not the father of the children born by Camille his wife. The secret of his medical condition has been hidden from him for quite long.
The intriguing secrets that are the hallmark of Camille’s life suddenly creep to the fore. Camille is a marriage counsellor. She helps her friends with her expertise. She helps with the stability in the lives of her friends. But her life is also a big bag of secrets. Her children are her souvenirs from her secret affair with Femi, as Chris’ medical condition shows. And everything becomes clear to the reader.
In the final analysis, The Marriage Whisperer is a beautiful fictional prose which creatively plays before our eyes the day to day, relatable marriage relationships and the challenges they face. In this 10-chapter novella and its 60 pages, Tess shows the reader that there are no perfect marriages. Any marriage or relationship that is working is the product of the people in the relationship putting in the work. Every couple carries their own baggage; but how they go about the secret in their cupboard makes all the difference.
. Olatunbosun is a broadcast journalist, fact checker and book reviewer at Splash FM 105.5, Ibadan. He can be reached via 0802-351-7565 (SMS only) and [email protected].
