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Repeat a family story often enough, and it becomes a kind of legend – or a curse. The Faloduns at the centre of Cursed Daughters share tales of heartbroken women across the generations who just can’t seem to hold on to a man. There’s Fikayo, whose husband left after he tired of tending to her chronic illness; Afoke, who seduced her younger sister’s boyfriend; Feranmi, the matriarch of the family, who got pregnant by a married man and received the curse from the man’s first wife. Again and again, the narrative is interrupted by these tales about grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers; eventually, it feels almost as if the novel is haunted by the stories themselves.
Nigerian-British novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite splashed on to the literary scene in 2018 with My Sister, the Serial Killer, a taut debut about sisterhood, jealousy and murder. Cursed Daughters, her second novel, swaps true crime for a more atmospheric spookiness, but it shares a lingering fascination with the dark secrets that might bind the women of a family together. The Falodun curse forms an ominous, ever-hovering presence for the three main characters – Monife, Ebun and Eniiyi – as they grow up, fall in love, and attempt to defy the supernatural forces that seem to hold their family in thrall.
In 1994, 19-year-old Monife meets gentle, light-skinned Kalu, whom she nicknames Golden Boy. He’s the perfect man, she believes, to break the curse. “There was not a single shred of doubt in her mind that they would be together for ever,” she thinks at one point, in a moment of dramatic irony. We know their relationship doesn’t end well: the novel begins in 2000, as Monife drowns herself at a beach. Monife and Kalu’s love story unfolds throughout the novel with an inexorability that eventually becomes a tad predictable, especially when we meet Kalu’s rich, beautiful and cruel mother.
Monife’s death casts an eerie shadow over the lives of the other two protagonists. Monife’s cousin Ebun gives birth to a daughter on the day of Monife’s funeral – a daughter whom, she notes with growing unease as the years pass, looks and acts exactly like Monife. Twenty-four years later, that daughter, Eniiyi, falls in love with Zubby, a light-skinned boy she rescues from drowning. Their connection – instant, visceral – feels otherworldly, and Eniiyi begins to have strange visions of Monife, uncanny intrusions that force her to reckon with the notion that she may be a reincarnation of her dead aunt.
Braithwaite braids these three women’s stories into a narrative that unfolds gracefully even as it leaps backwards and forwards in time. But despite the novel’s decades-spanning scope, its story feels oddly static, even claustrophobic. Cursed Daughters spends much of its time establishing the preternatural similarities between Monife and Eniiyi – the same-shaped scars on their thighs, the same relationship dynamics with their (very similar) boyfriends, the same recurring image of a black bird of prey. But all these details seem to signify, with little variation, is that the family is, well, cursed. Elsewhere, one finds a similar heavy-handedness. “What if the trauma of losing the love, stability and social standing that came with marriage had left epigenetic markers on generation after generation of the Falodun women?” wonders Eniiyi, who happens to be an aspiring genetic counsellor.
But Eniiyi’s musings do gesture at a meaningful idea: paranormal trappings aside, the true family curse may just be the Falodun women’s inability to reckon with their past. After Monife dies, her room is kept just as she left it – except for the water damage that seeps through the ceiling and warps the door and walls, an evocative symbol of unprocessed grief. One sees lingering family trauma in the way Monife’s mother can’t let go of her ex-husband – she resorts to arcane rituals in an attempt to lure him back – and in the way Monife overreacts to being left alone at a party by Kalu. “How could he understand how easy it was for a person who purported to love you to abandon you?” she thinks, reminded of her father’s sudden withdrawal. It’s these emotional responses, these ways one learns to love, that also form a family’s inheritance – a resonant truth that deserves more development in this novel about intergenerational pain.
