Sensual, Playful, and Profound: Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread
Butter Honey Pig Bread is a novel about many things—sisterhood, love, relationships, trauma, silence, loneliness, spirit, forgiveness, food. It is a testament to Francesca Ekwuyasi’s vibrant, skillful, and heart-filled prose that these many elements never feel disjointed, but instead intertwine fluidly, crisscrossing between timelines and characters and continents.
The story begins with Kambirinachi, a woman who believes herself to be an Ọgbanje—a spirit that continually dies in childhood and is reborn, visiting grief upon a family over and over again. Kambirinachi defies the imperatives of the spirit world, going against the powerful voices of her “kin,” in order to stay alive and remain in the physical world to experience life as a human.
Her twin daughters, Taiye and Kehinde, grow up in the shadow of Kambirinachi’s instability. Whether she is indeed an Ọgbanje, or whether this belief is a symptom of mental illness, is not concrete, nor is it the point. What is far more interesting is the way that this conviction shapes her life, and the lives of her daughters.
As adults, Taiye and Kehinde are not in touch. Following a traumatic event that Kehinde refers to simply as “the bad thing,” the twins fell away from each other—rather abruptly, and painfully completely. They are both floundering, although in different ways. Neither is ready to acknowledge the rift between them or what caused it, but neither is able to move on from it either.
The story takes place in multiple settings. As both Taiye and Kehinde try to assemble their lives—even as they both know a vital piece is missing—the novel follows them both, as one or the other moves from Lagos to London, from Montpellier to Montreal, from Halifax back to Lagos. Each place is evoked with such lucent, homey detail that it could make you homesick, even for a place that you’ve never been. The language of the colours, textures, interiors, and weather are so incredibly sensual and perfect.
“In recent mornings, since moving back home to Lagos, she awoke to thoughts of her bees; they lived in an olive-green hive underneath the dappled shade of the palm trees clustered in the backyard. Among the palms, lush bougainvillea cascading over the fence between the neighbour’s compound dropped bright pink paper blooms like blessings upon the hive.”
And I can’t not mention the food. As you may have guessed from the title, food plays an essential role in this book. Taiye in particular devotes what energy she has to the preparation of exquisite meals. This is both an attempt to satisfy a deep hunger within her—something she also tries to sate with sex and drugs—and then, later on, as a way to begin bridging the gap between herself and Kehinde.
Francesca Ekwayusi is able to write both pleasure and pain in a way that is at once profound and playful. She plays with voice and point of view: Kehinde’s chapters are told in first person, Taiye’s chapters in third. Unless, of course, Taiye is combining food with a peace offering, or a way to make a tentative first connection—then it’s in a playful second person:
“This is how you make a salted caramel chocolate cake for your twin sister whom you haven’t seen in…God, a long time. In hopes that you avoid talking about the things you haven’t been talking about and just eat in silence.”
Kamibirinachi’s chapters are in third person as well…until they aren’t anymore. Saying more would be saying too much.
As the characters, and the book itself, move forward on their winding paths, there is a sense of immanent completion, of puzzle pieces just about to fall into place, of a world that got tilted off its axis regaining its rightful position. That is not to say that there is a simple fairytale ending to this book—it’s much too nuanced and deeply in touch with the complexities of life for that. To quote from one of Kambirinachi’s chapters:
“She doesn’t regret this life, but it hurts, nonetheless.”
This is the essence of the book, I think. A melding of life’s beauty and warmth with its pain and mistakes and messiness and amends. And above all, a testament to love. Butter Honey Pig Bread digs deep with such a light touch that you will be immersed in its depths before you even know it. And if you are anything like me, you won’t want to come back out.
Butter Honey Pig Bread
Francesca Ekwayusi
317 pages. 2020
About Lindsay Hobbs
Lindsay is a freelance editor, writer, and podcaster living in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario, Canada. In between reading books (and writing about them), she works as a library branch assistant and program developer. Currently, Lindsay is an editor at Cloud Lake Literary and the co-host of Story Girls: A Fortnightly Podcast About Books, with a Dash of Absurdity. You can find her personal bookish musings at her blog, Topaz Literary.
