After the success of her debut novel The Girl With The Louding Voice, Abi Daré is back with a sequel, And So I Roar. Adunni’s journey resumes with her dream of attending school painfully delayed, as she is forced to return back to her village to clear her name when she is accused of murdering her sister-wife, Khadija. The story unfolds over 24 hours. As Adunni awaits trial, she meets young women and girls accused of other crimes like a husband’s untimely death, resisting FGM, and droughts in the village.
And So I Roar is dense. Daré jam-packs the novel with a kaleidoscope of devastation, each new character enduring their own particular injustice. “I thought that this might be the only chance I have to really get down and dirty on some of the issues affecting young girls in underserved communities,” the author explains. She toys around with structural devices to convey the scores of themes and characters she introduces and some, like letters from old lovers, work quite well as a container for the backstories and others, like the make-believe talk show, err a little on jarring. Even Adunni’s book within a book is a little on the nose with the didacticism, particularly because the young character is already crafted to be wise beyond her years.
We find moments of levity from her easy-to-follow writing, the charm of Adunni’s voice made up of a familiar cobbled up English, and the infusion of romance and tenderness in the characters’ backstories. Just like in Daré's debut, And So I Roar invites readers to bear witness to a spectrum of human suffering- some natural but most of it sanctioned. Daré challenges us not to look away.
Abi Daré and I speak virtually shortly after the publishing of And So I Roar and she lets me into the thought and research that went into the choices she makes in the novel. She delves into what it was like to write a sequel, she unpacks the standout themes including motherhood and climate justice, and she reflects on loss and grief both in the novel and in her own life and the symbiosis between the two. Towards the end we speak briefly about her writing routine, what her favourite authors do really well and what books she is currently enjoying.
Tell me a little about how different the process of writing And So I Roar was from The Girl With The Louding Voice.
With The Girl With The Louding Voice, there was no expectation. The Girl With The Louding Voice was successful but even if it wasn't, even if it was just a handful of people that read it, it wouldn’t change the feeling that people are watching over your shoulder with the second book. I've heard quite often that the media is not as kind to second, third, fourth books as they are to debut novels. I think that impacted my ability to create for myself. I found myself trying to create for an audience and I struggled. And So I Roar wasn't my first choice of story. I actually tried two or three other ideas first that didn't go quite well.
Does that mean you weren't initially planning to write a sequel for The Girl With The Louding Voice?
No, I wasn't. The second book was going to completely depart from Adunni’s story. I wanted to write something else, but that something else didn't work out. So I took a moment to myself and Adunni’s voice came back. And I thought, okay, let's see where it goes. The first line of- I think it’s chapter three- was the first thing I heard. “The time is exactly ten minutes to twelve in the midnight and I cannot sleep.” I was in my kitchen and I just started typing, and everything started coming to me.
Tell me a little about the choice to anchor both books on the pursuit of education.
A report was published from UNICEF that about 10 million children were out of school in Nigeria and that most of them were girls. I think education is incredibly important and I think everyone should experience its benefits. I needed to tell the story in this way especially because Adunni was a maid and it is common for middle class wealthy people in Nigeria to hire maids that are of schooling age. What does it mean when you send your kids to school and the maid of the same age is at home doing chores for you? I guess I also wanted to remind readers that the people you hire, the only difference is that she was born into poverty. And she might even have not been born into poverty; life might have happened.
Another standout theme in the book is motherhood. You have good mothers, mothers who are trying their best and mothers who do terrible things. Why was it important for you to portray that range?
Growing up, I thought my mother was perfect. It wasn't until she started telling me some of the mistakes she'd made that I realised that she was just as human, just as flawed. So, I started with Adunni’s mother’s story and then filtered through to different women, because ultimately this is a book about women, particularly rural women that you don't realise exist but go through the same things as women that live in the city do- maybe just not with the same economic power or capacity. They have affairs and they lie and they stab each other in the back. I wanted to show that and of course, motherhood is very much tied to that resilience. With Tia's relationship with her mother and how fractured that is, at the end she comes to understand that apart from maybe a handful of people, no one is intentionally bad.
My favourite was Iya’s mothering. I enjoyed the story of a mother not necessarily biologically, but through stepping up. A lot of us in African countries know an Iya.
Exactly. We call everybody aunties. I have my own kids who were born in the UK and I remember for a long time my daughters couldn't understand why they had to call my friends auntie. “But she's not your sister,” they’d say and I would have to explain that it is a sisterhood. The spirit of ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ sadly, is not as strong as it used to be.
You’ve talked about how the first book was inspired by a conversation with your daughter. Has the process of writing the books, and writing about motherhood specifically altered your own mothering experience?
I realise now that every seed that is sown in a child doesn't die, that it germinates and if you're not careful it can actually become something that is so deeply rooted. If it's a bad seed, then you've wounded a child, potentially for life. With my kids I try to be conscious of the choices I make. But I'm not perfect and I know that, especially with my teenage daughter who is in that uninterested phase in her life with one word answers to everything. For many of us, it's not until you're much older that you realise whether your mom was amazing or if she was manipulative and horrible. But I want my daughters to come out of it and think my mom was trying to do the best for me. I'm also at that age where my own mother is getting older, and there's a real fear of losing her and I want to give her as much as I can through storytelling, so I bring a lot about motherhood into the stories I write.
Throughout And So I Roar there is this tension between tradition and modernity. You see many characters having to reconcile the two different worlds. Tell me a little about that.
It's always been fascinating for me. I came across a blog post about some educated young girls who live in the city, but they went back to the village to celebrate a virginity ritual. It was a beautiful ceremony and the girls were really beautifully made up but there were questions in the comments like, “Why don't men do this? Why are we only having virginity celebrations for women? What does virginity even mean?” And then there were people from the communities that responded to say “Look, this is our tradition and we love it.” The back and forth was interesting to me because when I began to research rituals and tradition for the book, I quickly realised that a lot of them disproportionately affect women. And no surprises there I guess. I just found it so fascinating that in 2024 a lot of these things prevailed. I wanted to explore that. And there are so many of them that are wonderful, but because I was writing from a point of view of what is harmful to the girls, I had to try and find the ones that were really out there and explore them to show how when there's an issue, it’s the girls and the women who are to blame.
But there are many issues that disproportionately affect women and girls, so I wonder why you chose climate justice as the issue to illustrate that.
So, it was partly because Adunni needed to go back for a reason, and this was not a conscious thing but when I was writing The Girl With The Louding Voice, there were torrential rains the day she left her village, just this horrible downpour. The more research I did, the more I realised that many African communities are going through changes in climatic patterns and I wanted to highlight the impacts of that on the communities. I thought, why don't we mirror what's currently happening in the novel, which is the extreme changing rainfall patterns; torrential rains and then absolutely nothing. But because the book is about women, I wanted to bring in how these climate changes affect them in particular.
There's a lot of grief in the book. In your acknowledgements, you talk about how you went through loss yourself when you're writing this book. I'm very sorry about that.
Thank you.
I wonder if writing the book helped you process that loss in or if you felt even more connected to the characters because you were going through loss too.
So, there are three people that passed. I was quite close to two. The third was my father, who I wasn't very close to. The first two two passed when I was writing the first two versions of the book that didn't quite work out. I just couldn't write. I would go to the café and sit down and just stare at the laptop screen or cry. With my father, I had an estranged relationship with him. He came back into our lives much later in my late 20s, early 30s, and of course, there was such a fracture- not even a fracture, it was a chasm. Our conversations were very, very strained. I always felt very frustrated because there's so much I wanted to say to this man. And so when I was writing Tia and her mother, that was me trying to channel the little snippets of the conversations my father and I had. There's no big secret between my dad and I though. By the time Tia is ready to have a conversation, her mother has already passed. In my case, my brother and I decided to go back and see my dad in 2022 but even then we still couldn't talk, and then he died a year after. When he died, I was editing the book. And so to answer your question, I think that it was a mix of all of that. I was writing the book thinking of how fleeting life is, and how once a relationship is completely broken and shattered, it’s incredibly hard to put it back together. There's nothing you can do once the person has gone, you'll always have questions. It's life.
I know we talked about the range of mothers, but as I listened to you speak about your relationship with your father I realised that there's also a spectrum of fathers in the book. And by extension, there's a spectrum of romantic relationships as well, which felt like a balm. Tell me a little about the choice to infuse some romance between men and women, especially because so many of their interactions in the books are so fraught.
I think that's why. Because I remember after the first book a few people asked me if I hated men [laughs]. Of course not. I don’t think life is one dimensional. Yes, obviously a lot of the men in The Girl With The Louding Voice were horrible. So, it was a conscious decision in the second book, but also it started with wanting to give Tia a backstory. What could make the relationship with her mother so broken that I could link with her decision not to want to have kids? I really love exploring class differences especially within Africans or Nigerians because there's such a huge wealth divide between the poor and the wealthy. That’s where Boma’s character comes from. Adunni’s father’s story was also rounded out a little more and it doesn't justify what he's done, but you understand him more. So yes, I was trying to say that there are some good men and there could be good relationships, but as life tends to happen, relationships break up, and people grieve those break ups. Many of us come into relationships with our baggage, like Tia and Ken. And at some point when Iya is talking to Tia, she says something like you want to share the burdens of life with somebody that can make the journey easy because a long term relationship like marriage is not an easy thing.
Okay, let's talk about the general writing process a little. Have you got a routine?
Yeah, I try to write every day. It doesn't mean that everything I write every day makes it to the final cut but I'm going to write it anyway, because writing is a muscle, and you have to strengthen it. So I’ll get up, do everything I need to do at home, then I’ll get the girls to do whatever they want to do, because they are home, and then I leave the house because otherwise it's going to be a knock on my office door every two seconds. So I go to the café, have my regular, although I've gone off caffeine right now, which is such a pain. I really miss caffeine and decaf coffee doesn't quite cut it. But anyway, I write and then I also do some business stuff. I’ve set up a writing Academy for emerging writers. I also have a foundation where I'm trying to get girls off the streets and back into schools, and I'm trying to do so many exciting things with the girls like teaching them early writing. And then I come back home to make dinner, or get my daughter to make dinner because she loves to cook. And then I go to bed, say my prayers and sleep. Next day it’s rinse and repeat.
Do you read when you write?
I have to read when I'm writing but I don't read for pleasure, I read to learn how to write better. So I'll pick up a Margaret Atwood book. She is one of my absolute favourite authors of all time, she is such a master at crafting the most amazing sentences. I’ll pick up an Atwood book and look at how Margaret is describing a room. I'm looking at her word choice, at her punctuation and I read it like I'm in a classroom and learning from this great author who has been able to do stuff that I've not been able to do. But in the evening, I’ll try to pick up a book for pleasure. Although often, by the time I get home I'm so exhausted I can't do that.
Are you reading anything for pleasure now?
So I just finished Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson, who wrote Black Cake. It's a really good book that's out next year. Maggie O'Farrell is another writer that I love. Ann Napolitano too, I loved Hello Beautiful so much. I just love the denseness. I really admire writers that can write dense prose that is very meaningful, and can hold so much. They’ll describe a scene and there's so much they're describing about the scene and none of it feels like a waste. I really love that. And I think she did that quite well with Hello Beautiful.