Written by Mide Olabanji
Chika Unigwe’s The Middle Daughter follows the life of a close-knit, upper-class family in contemporary Enugu, Nigeria. A week before Udodi, the first daughter away for school, would arrive for the holidays, she died in a car crash, signalling a major shift in the family. “After Udodi died, things fell apart,” Nani, the middle daughter and protagonist of the novel, shares; “it was as if my body moved in slow motion. I conserved my breath by hardly speaking to anyone.” Her father, fondly referred to as Doda, sensed that his middle daughter was struggling with grief, so he began taking her on dates every weekend where they bonded and learnt a lot about each other.
As if Number 47 had not had its fair share of calamity, just when Nani was beginning to win the battle against grief, death paid another visit to the house two years after Udodi’s accident, taking Doda this time. “[Mother] had a wild look in her eyes. But I was the one that ran mad,” Nani confessed on the day he died. Their house, “once bloated with laughter and songs and colours so bright they made the eyes hurt, now smelt overwhelmingly of heartache.”
“Particularly pressing in children who lose a parent… self-alienation is a loss of a sense of familiarity and mineness with something that is considered as integral to the self,” expresses Allan Køster, Senior Researcher at the National Centre for Grief, Denmark. This is because, as humans, “our sense of self is a distributed phenomenon relying on daily confirmation through interaction with our habitual environment.” After severing this interaction twice within two years—first with her sister and later with her father—this was true for Nani. She withdrew into herself and would not eat, and her grades suffered as a result.
Nani struggled with the loss of her older sister and father. Convinced that her mother and younger sister had moved on too quickly, she struggled under the weight of her lonely grief and resented them for it. This translated to frequent outbursts, arguments that got physical, and rebellion. When Miss Oyibo, her SAT prep tutor, called her a prostitute for wearing a mini skirt to class, she wore another mini skirt the next day despite warning to not do so. And when she was sent out of the class, she never showed up again, even though her mother’s driver dropped her off for the rest of the week. Her mother was furious when she found out, and a heated argument ensued. Nani yelled, “I don’t want the lessons; I don’t want the stupid SAT; I don’t want to go to America!”
“There are times when other emotions are spurring the anger, and we use anger to protect the raw feelings that lie beneath it,” writes therapist Kyle Benson. This phenomenon is known as the Anger Iceberg, explaining how anger is often only the tip of the iceberg, with many other underlying emotions and thoughts hidden out of sight. Behind Nani’s anger and defiance was pain and fear that her mother was blind to. She thought, “Udodi had gone to America and died… [We] had expected to be together in Atlanta at the same time while she did her postgrad, going to the same school, sharing a room. We had these dreams. I was going to live with my sister again. What was the point of going to America if Udodi wasn’t there?” Deep down, she wanted her mother to hold her in her arms and ask why she wasn’t going to America, so that she could tell her everything, and also because Doda would have asked.
It was shortly after this argument, while tending to her father’s roses outside the gate, that she met itinerant Ephraim for the first time. Their relationship started on a good note: with his Bible under his arm, he came every day bearing gifts—boiled groundnut, oranges, bananas, soursop, and a listening ear. Spurred on by his insistent questioning and a self-confessed Spirit of God that directed him to Nani, she told him things she could not tell anyone else, easily ignoring the way he spoke and smelt. She talked to him about her fear that another family member may die while she is away abroad, how Udodi’s death made her lose her faith, and how she dreamt of her dead sister every night.
It was Ephraim who opened her eyes to the baby-making factory her mother was operating under the guise of a private clinic. This information further alienated Nani from her mother, making her resentful. “Mother’s clinic was a betrayal of everything Doda stood for… Every meal I ate, knowing how it was paid for, choked me… I hated Mother for making me an unwilling accomplice to her evil.” With this anger bubbling inside her, Ephraim found the perfect opportunity to invite her to a vigil, “to pray for the ability to forgive.”
When the vigil ended too late to go back home, she agreed to spend the night at Ephraim’s despite being secretly wary of the idea. She told herself that there was nothing to be afraid of because he was, after all, “a man of God, a friend who had never given [her] cause to doubt him.” Even Ephraim sensed her hesitation and asked, “Are you afraid of me? Nani?” and she had to assure him that she was not.
This self-gaslighting and politeness of Nani in the face of potential danger tracks with the aspects of female socialisation that raise women to be deferential. Even when he barged into the room with nothing but boxers that did nothing to hide a blatantly erect penis, Nani considered that he did not notice his jutting penis and would not embarrass him by pointing it out. Nazgol Rasoolpour traced this politeness trap back to “deep-seated patriarchal norms, which have long dictated that women should prioritise others’ feelings over their well-being in situations that demand self-preservation.”
Even after he overpowered and raped her, a part of her still could not believe it. She kept telling herself that it was “just a bad dream; that Ephraim was a Christian and would never do anything to hurt [her]; that the pain between [her] legs was not really there; it was a phantom pain, and once [she] got up it would be gone.” Another part of her wanted to promptly report him to her mother, but then she remembered Chinelo from the estate. Chinelo was raped in a male student’s room, and her mother had said that she asked for it. Additionally, the children were taught that “rape” was a heavy word that “darkened rooms and sucked the air out of everything … and was therefore a word that must be hidden. It was not to be spoken of except in euphemisms, like Mother did… Chinelo was defiled by three boys. Defiled cloaked the ugliness of the act and made it possible to be spoken of.”
Two forces are at play here: rape culture and internalised misogyny. Julia Becker defines rape culture as the societal beliefs and attitudes that normalise and downplay sexual violence, often by protecting perpetrators and blaming victims (a phenomenon known as victim-blaming). Meanwhile, Syeda Rahmani examines internalised misogyny through the lens of women adhering to and upholding rules that restrict their own freedom and autonomy. Because patriarchy is the dominant cultural framework, women not only internalise its values but also pass them down—especially to their daughters.
By blaming Chinelo, Nani’s mother bypasses female solidarity and instead reinforces rape culture, revealing the depth of her internalised misogyny. She does not equip her daughters with the language to report sexual violence; instead, she instills the dangerous belief that simply being in a man’s room is enough to justify rape. As a result, Nani does not report Ephraim but turns the blame inwards: “It was all my fault, breaking Mother’s rule and going out with a man at night… How could I have been so stupid? ‘Good girls do not go to men’s houses.’ I could hear Mother say this if she ever got to know.”
Four weeks after the incident, Nani realised that the assault resulted in pregnancy and went back to Ephraim to beg him for an abortion; but to the poor preacher, it was the perfect stepping stone to being “the son-in-law of a woman whose money will not be exhausted in one lifetime.” When Ugo, Nani’s younger sister, went to Ephraim’s to take her back home, Nani refused to follow her because she suspected that her mother would not forgive her for being raped. And when Ugo told their mother of Nani’s refusal to leave Ephraim, she disowned her on the spot: “‘Nani is no longer my child.’ Then she turns and walks back inside, taking whatever hope Ugo has that she will bring Nani back.” Alienated from family and friends, Ephraim continued to physically and sexually abuse Nani.
Melanie Notkin’s coinage of the term PANK (Professional Aunts No Kids)—well-educated, high-earning professional women who, whether by choice or circumstance, did not envision motherhood for themselves but deeply cherished the children of their siblings or friends, generously offering their time and resources—perfectly captured Nani’s Aunty Enuka. The middle daughter only escaped from Ephraim’s hold after seven years and three children, and it is ironic that the woman who would rescue her is the unmarried, childless Aunty Enuka, who their mother had discouraged them from emulating.
In 2010, Laura Ellingson and Patricia Sotirin examined data that revealed that aunts, although not a part of the nuclear family, fill gaps in nurturance inevitably left by nuclear families and are instrumental in bridging broken relationships when nuclear family structures falter or collapse. Similarly, the female quotient maintains that aunts serve as a safety net, a comforter, a protector, and a supporter—and in true fashion, Aunty Enuka embodied all of these roles for Nani when it mattered the most. She was the first person who really pressed Nani on the truth about her attachment to Ephraim, and so she spilt everything. “It was the first time I had told anyone the entire story, and all at once, not in drips, and as I did, I felt lighter,” Nani expresses. Not only did Aunty Enuka get Ephraim arrested, she was also the first person to tell Nani that the assault was not her fault: “even if you had walked into his house naked.”
