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On the edges: a reading of Toke makinwa's 'On Becoming'

It begins like the tale of a little girl crying for candy, and suddenly becomes that of a curious teenager, conscious about what her first prom date will look like.

Toke Makinwa

This memoir gently finds its way into the depth of the narrator's life, it starts like a gentle breeze parting her on the shoulder and then becomes a swelling storm threatening to tear her apart.

It begins like the tale of a little girl crying for candy, and suddenly becomes that of a curious teenager, conscious about what her first prom date will look like. On Becoming Toke Makinwa is a powerful coming-of-age narrative.

It portrays the wounded, broken and depressed edges of Toke, because to her, it is a “book born out of pain, confusion, betrayal, and scars” – although an autobiography, this narrative breeds hope through the dark and murky paths of Toke's life.

The unconscious psychological pole thrust at the hard crust of Toke's life cannot be ignored by any reader – because, like air, this narrative is an affirmation “that the sun will shine again."

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It is important to state early that Toke brings to bare the nakedness of her broken soul and the rawness of her passion which cuts through her fold leaving her to bleed profusely – as she gets breezed into the domain of adulthood so early in life, getting robbed of all innocence that comes with being young.

At an age when most of her age mates thought of hide-and-seek and other fun things, Toke becomes too frustrated and strong for a girl her age. Whatever strength she gathered is as a result of the death of her parents. This great loss opens many doors to the cloud of psychological denial that govern her growing into a lady – and then the woman that she is.

The inseparability of her parents even by death gives her a different perspective about life, love and the act of loving. This perhaps accounts for the major reason she strings her existence along broken love's way. She describes graphically, her father’s death:

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Another person who makes Toke see love as a plausible object rather than a void is her late grandmother. Like her parents, Yemi Alice’s death can be attached to her inability to stomach the hurt that comes with the death of the Makinwa couple. Because, while others mourn ‘brown suits’ and ‘a funny over protective mum ,' granny ‘was not the same.’

Toke doesn’t find these experiences comforting as she is engulfed by a different kind of emptiness, anger, bitterness and brokenness. Unlike her siblings, she is burnt by the fire that tears her family apart; she watches her life crumble like cookies before her very eyes.

She becomes unsure about her application to her environment and her reactions towards the care and nurturing she gets from her aunty who becomes mum – a new sensation graces her taste-buds, and this sensation is something she later comes to accept as fear.

She explains that this haunting phenomenon plunges her days and nights into physical and psychological torments and darkness. She is lost in self-pity and employs multiple probes as an evidence of the abstractness of her mind.

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Rhetorical questions are thrown into the wind of the narrative, for a reader to come-to-terms with an idea, which Toke has come-to-terms with – and this is the confusion that has found a base in her heart.

The most reoccurring element along the edges of Toke’s life is her constant quest to deny that she has a problem – even when this problem lives in the folds of her skin. In as much as she tries to let the past live in its skin, it crawls back to her like a snail pulling out of its shell. Just like her taste of fear, Toke’s olfactory lobes are not free from the sharp trauma that cuts through them. She says:

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Toke makes it clear through her allusion to an Irish Headstone that hurts and memories are imbedded in the power of love and death – thus, as a child, she struggles between the sheets of a pain caused by death and restoration only love can bring.

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Similarly, Toke’s search for love opens her up to the trials that come with it. She constantly, tries, to find a similar reflection of the brown-skin who breaks the door for others to escape despite smelling of rubber – when the fire broke out in their apartment in Abuja. She confesses that:

The introduction of Maje into the narrative serves as the first flicker of hope. But like snow flask under the sun, her marriage brings with it a new level of emotional shifts and contradictions.

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Toke pitches the terms of her acceptance of these contradictions along gender's way as she states:

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It is rather obvious psychologically, that Toke doesn’t stay in her relationship with Maje, because of societal stigma as she states above – but because of her denials and her search for her late father’s love. Because unlike most kids her age, she didn’t have a home after the fire outbreak. She unconsciously confesses:

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So, while Toke has proven to be brave, and has no words for Anita (done stylistically, by leaving the chapter dedicated to her blank), it will be very wrong to stand in the dark and in the danger of a single (as propounded by Adichie) to make assessments on Toke’s stormy and messy marriage, and the many women that got in between the walls.

For me, Toke’s memoir comes across as a powerful recall of the psychological recess of Toke’s becoming-of-age haunting past.  And this indeed permits a reader into the walls of denials and defenses that she built over the span it took her to find herself behind her personally created mask and pseudo-realities.

This also serves as a template for her acknowledgment of truly becoming an unapologetic and God-fearing woman after the heat, fire, and pressure of trying to find love lost.

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