Stay With Me

Yejide is one of the protagonists in the novel. She is characterized both through her own first-person narrative voice and through her husband Akin’s first-person observations.

Yejide had a difficult childhood. Lacking a supportive mother figure, she felt tense and unhappy with her father’s multiple wives and rejects traditional polygamy. Nevertheless, she still remains in thrall to other traditions: Her desire to forgo any sexual experiences until marriage to prove her “chastity” to her stepmothers leaves her lacking crucial knowledge of sex and reproduction. While Akin admires her beauty, independence, and intelligence, he also values her sexual inexperience because he can deceive her regarding his impotence. The combination of Yejide’s ignorance and Akin’s deception leads to the main conflict in their marriage: their inability to conceive a child.

Yejide often feels The Pressures and Limitations of Tradition from multiple sources, and much of her character arc is built around learning to resist pressures so that she can be her own person. As a young wife, she often sacrifices her own comfort and convictions to please others out of fear of losing love and intimacy. Her desire leads her to do things that violate her sense of self or harm her, such as when she accepts Funmi despite her original insistence on a monogamous marriage or her dealings with Prophet Josiah to win the support of her mother-in-law.