Summary
Chapter 2 begins with Carole, a striving second-generation, Nigerian-British young woman. At first glance, Carole has it all—she's a successful professional at an investment bank, slim, ambitious, well-dressed, well-mannered, and engaged to a posh British man. However, the narrator takes us into Carole's past to reveal the death of her father and two incidences of violent sexual assaults in her past. At 13, Carole was gang-raped by a group of university-age men, and again as an adult, her body is violated by officials in a foreign country.
Rather than allowing these traumatic events to define her, she decides to turn them into fuel for her ambitions. A year after she is raped in school, she recruits the help of schoolteacher Mrs. King to become the best student she can be. She eventually makes it to Oxford as a mathematics student—the only student from her low-income, working-class Peckham school to ever make it to such a prestigious university. At Oxford, she learns the ways of the British elite, swapping out the "ghetto" behaviors of her secondary school for posher behaviors fit for high society.
However, with this shift comes a subtle rejection of her mother's working-class and Nigerian identities. This rejection leads to a rift in Carole's relationship with her mother, Bummi, that is eventually reconciled with the appearance of the tolerant Freddy in Carole and Bummi’s lives.
Bummi
Bummi’s story begins with trauma. Like Carole, she grows up without a father. Bummi and her mother fight hard to survive as two women in a patriarchal Nigerian society until Bummi’s mother dies in a work accident when Bummi is 15. The adolescent Bummi is sent to live with a wealthy relative, Aunty Ekio. Expecting love and care for the first time in her life, Bummi is instead faced with an aunt who treats her harshly as an unpaid domestic servant. Despite these challenges, she attends the University of Ibadan to study mathematics—Carole’s propensity for math seems to have come from her mother. There, she meets her husband Augustine, an economics Ph.D. student at the same university.
The two fall in love, marry, and Bummi finally escapes her Aunty Ekio. In search of better opportunities befitting of people of their education, Bummi and Augustine emigrate to the U.K. Rather than finding success, however, the two discover that their Nigerian university degrees mean next-to-nothing in England. Augustine becomes a cab driver, surviving off of heart-harming junk food that will slowly kill him, and Bummi becomes a housecleaner. Meanwhile, they welcome their sole child, Carole. In Carole’s youth, Augustine suffers a heart attack and Bummi is left a single mother. Determined to carry herself and her child to success, Bummi starts her own cleaning company. However, to obtain the upfront cash to do so, she must sleep with a corrupt church official who gives her a loan in exchange.
Once established, however, Bummi’s business goes well. She even hires other cleaners, including one Sister Omofe from church. The two develop a deep friendship that blossoms into a romantic relationship. However, Bummi cannot overcome her deeply rooted shame about her homoerotic relations, and ends things with Omofe. Omofe soon moves on with another woman from church, while Bummi is left heartbroken. In this time, Carole goes away to university and the rift between daughter and mother begins to grow. By the time Carole is working at the bank, tensions are so high between the two that they don’t speak for months.
Over time, and with the introduction of Freddy to the family, the two reconcile. Bummi also hires Kofi, a Ghanaian-British man, to work for her cleaning company. He courts her, and the two settle into an easy, supportive relationship. Bummi muses that she would like to be polyamorous—with Kofi and Omofe, but that in Nigerian culture, such relationships are limited to men.
LaTisha and Carole were friends at Peckham. Like Carole, LaTisha grew up without a father—but while Carole’s father passed away, LaTisha’s dad actively left her family for another woman. The trauma of such an action leaves LaTisha with a deep internal wound, and she lashes out by being a “bad child.” She begins to throw parties, drink alcohol, have sexual relations with older men, and talk back to teachers.
Under the mentorship of Mrs. King, Carole walks away from her friendship with LaTisha, who is a “bad influence.” However, she never explains why to LaTisha, leaving her former friend to wonder what happened.
While Carole’s personal life and career take off after secondary school, LaTisha’s nosedives. At 18, she enters a relationship with a man named Dwight, who refuses to use condoms. She falls pregnant as a result, but only realizes when she is on the verge of giving birth, and after Dwight has already left her for another woman. She gives birth to her first child, Jason. At 19, she has a daughter, Jayla, as a result of a one-night stand with a man she meets at the club. When LaTisha is 20, Trey, the same man who initiated Carole’s gang rape, also rapes her. Her third child Jordan results. None of these men remain in her or her children’s lives.
LaTisha learns a hard lesson from these experiences and resolves to do better. She lands a job at a supermarket, and by the time she is in her 30s, she becomes shift supervisor. She also begins to have healthy relationships with partners, looking for partners with virtuous qualities rather than men who make her feel desired, then discard her soon thereafter.
Analysis
Much of Chapter 2 centers around the theme of shame: Carole's shame at having been raped, then later at Oxford, her shame around and desire to hide her "ghetto" upbringing. Her mother's life also involves shame from being a house cleaner, from having a romantic relationship with a woman, and from raising a daughter who seems not to want much to do with her. LaTisha's life involves deep shame, beginning with the moment her father left—and seemingly rejected—her and her family for another woman. Then, the shame continues as she gives birth to three children each of which has a different father.
Interestingly, as an adult LaTisha looks to Carole's life and believes it to be perfect: she wonders, reflecting on the past, how she ended up where she did while Carole's career and personal life seemed to take off. In fact, comparing herself to her grammar-school friend makes LaTisha feel even more shame at where she has ended up. What LaTisha does not know, however, is the deep shame that Carole has also felt, the intense struggles that she has overcome. At 13, Carole was too traumatized and ashamed to admit to anyone—including her friend LaTisha—that she was gang-raped by Trey and his university friends. Because Carole never communicated her own struggles to LaTisha, the latter is completely unaware that Carole's picture-perfect life also involved incredible hardship. If she knew, perhaps LaTisha would have approached her friend with more compassion, and in the same stroke, felt less shame at the things that have happened in her life.
In fact, Carole's perpetrator also raped LaTisha. If the two friends had perhaps had a vulnerable communication about struggle and shame, they may have helped each other overcome, and in so doing, dissolved the shame surrounding these life events. However, the lack of communication between the two friends fundamentally creates a rift that leads to even more shame in LaTisha, who is left wondering why her friend's life seems so perfect while hers is in such shambles.
Miscommunication or the lack of communication also contributes to the shame that Bummi bears, particularly in the case of her relationship with Omofe. When Bummi decides to end things with Omofe, she does so by simply cutting off communication with no explanation. Though Bummi ultimately decides to end the relationship because she feels that it is "wrong" and "shameful," she still loves Omofe. However, by never communicating her thoughts, Bummi leaves Omofe in a limbo state, wondering whether she did something wrong. In fact, Omofe reaches out incessantly in the weeks after the breakup to ask what was wrong and what she could have done better, highlighting her hurt, confusion, and even shame in having been rejected.
Just as was the case with Carole and LaTisha, the lack of communication and vulnerability between Bummi and Omofe not only stemmed from shame—Bummi's shame in having a lesbian relationship—but also created more hurt and shame.
