Olufunke Grace Bankole’s debut novel The Edge of Water opens with a prophecy: “A storm is coming.” The order of things, the Iyanifa tells us, will be disrupted by a soul who defies her fate.
What follows is the story of three generations of Nigerian and Nigerian American women: Esther, who dreams of a different life but finds herself stuck in the traditions of Yoruba Christianity; Amina, who goes to America ignorant of the divination her mother received that foretells danger for her there; and Laila, who is left with questions about the mother she barely knew. Through many points of view, the novel reckons with the collision of tradition, free will, and the devastation of a historic storm.
Exploring the narrative powers of choice and betrayal, the complexity of identity and belonging, and the many revisions that take place across a family and a life, The Edge of Water asks the question of how much we owe our loved ones, how much we owe ourselves, how much we control our destiny, and when it’s okay to let ourselves off the hook.
I interviewed Olufunke Grace Bankole over Zoom to discuss her book. We talked about layered storytelling, the difficulty of crafting a multi-POV novel, and what it was like to resist traditional immigrant narratives through writing about middle-class people from modern Nigeria.
Mariah Rigg: The Edge of Water is so ambitious in how it moves through time, layers POV, and borrows from the epistolary. Can you talk about how you came to write this novel, the seed it grew from, and what the journey toward completion looked like?
Olufunke Grace Bankole: I tried to implement a structure that reflects the complexities of the Yoruba, Nigerian, American, Christian, traditional religion cultures I grew up within. And inside those various worlds, I hoped to explore the tensions through the intimacies of language and storytelling. The novel grew from the very first short story I wrote many years ago—about a young Nigerian woman, newly-arrived to the U.S., who was working in the New Orleans French Quarter, and found herself without a place to go during a life-threatening hurricane.
I’d moved to New Orleans for work after graduating from law school, and the city became the first true home of my adulthood. When Hurricane Katrina struck, though I no longer lived in New Orleans, I couldn’t help but wonder of those who were far from home—as I had been, during my time in the city—and caught in the storm. What might life have been like for such a young woman back in Nigeria, and how might the aftermath of the hurricane affect her hopes and dreams, and the future of her family? The novel’s core emerged from my attempt to answer these questions.
MR: Your novel opens with a prophecy, a promise that the rest of the story lives up to. This oracle is especially echoed through the use of divination at each chapter’s opening. How do you see this sense of predetermination—and conversely, the free will that Amina exerts through her journey to America—informing your novel? Did you struggle at all with this dichotomy?
When Hurricane Katrina struck, I couldn’t help but wonder of those who were far from home and caught in the storm.
OGB: I think this dichotomy between predetermination and free will is central to the identity of many of us who are shaped by religious and cultural systems that tell us aspects of our lives must be carried out in prescribed ways. And yet, there is something—maybe the tiniest of feelings—within us that compels us to believe we can have so much more than what we’ve been given. Amina certainly struggles with simply accepting that the world she was born into is all there is, and she is determined to break free of it, even if she is unsure of what true freedom might entail.
MR: The Iyanifa and her prophecy are often at odds with the Yoruba Christianity practiced by Esther and others in The Edge of Water. Can you talk more about this clash, and why it felt important for it to be present on the page?
OGB: I think one of the most comical and evergreen dynamics for many Nigerian Americans who grew up in the church is realizing how much of Yoruba Christianity is steeped in Ifa and other traditional religious practices. It would not be uncommon, for instance, for a person seeking spiritual guidance to receive counsel from their pastor and divination from a babalawo simultaneously.
More broadly, wherever we are from, I find many of us are seekers—continually striving to understand the mysteries of living; and when one path fails to answer our longing, we reach for another.
MR: What were some of the difficulties of writing a multigenerational, multi-POV novel? What advice would you give other writers trying to accomplish this?
OGB: It was important to me in the writing of the novel to explore how silence, within ourselves and with others, impacts the viability of our dreams, the possibilities for our lives, and the depth of the pain we carry. And perhaps nowhere is silence more insidious than inside nuclear families—in this case, between mothers and their daughters.
I chose a multi-perspective approach with this novel because we often tell different stories, out of the very same experiences; I tried to give each character’s voice adequate space.
For me, the most challenging part of telling a multigenerational tale is effectively conveying each character’s distinctness throughout. I’m still sorting through the ways in which I might better accomplish this going forward, but for now, the advice I would offer another writer is to find a unique aspect of each character’s personality that can serve as the vehicle for their storytelling. For instance: The Edge of Water’s main narrator, Iyanifa, a Yoruba priestess, tells her side of matters through cowrie-shell divination. Esther, who misses her daughter that is living abroad, writes intimate, one-sided letters that are often informed by one of her favorite pastimes: community gossip.
MR: One of the POVs I was surprised by while reading was Joseph. What was behind your decision to give him this space in a novel otherwise populated by the voices of women?
My decision to not name Hurricane Katrina was meant to underscore that the storm could be any storm that threatens marginalized people everywhere.
OGB: It was important for me as a long-time student and admirer of African literature—past and present—to hopefully present a multi-dimensional male character who, though having his own story to tell, does so in the service of the women in his life. I very much enjoyed being with the character of Joseph—through his longing, shame, triumphs, and tenderness.
MR: The storm at the center of The Edge of Water remains unnamed, though readers can tell by the novel’s details that it is Katrina. As unprecedented storms level communities around the world, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico to North Carolina, it feels almost prescient to withhold this information. Can you talk about what it felt like to write and revisit this novel during a time of accelerated climate change?
OGB: Natural disasters are ever on our horizon, it seems. My decision to not name Hurricane Katrina in the novel was indeed meant to underscore that the storm could be any storm that threatens the survival, the dreams, and the dearly-held future of marginalized people everywhere. There were several times during the course of writing and editing when I needed to take a break because events off the page, in conjunction with occurrences in the novel, were painfully close to home. And that made me think, too, of how pervasive the grief of the consequences of climate change will increasingly become.
MR: I won’t spoil the novel’s ending, but I will say that I couldn’t help but wonder what Amina’s life might have looked like if she’d stayed in Nigeria. Did you think about this at all while writing?
OGB: From time to time, I’ve wondered the same. This novel is not the story of a girl who has a horrible life in Nigeria, and America is the only way out. Amina’s longing for life in the U.S. is more an attempt to determine for herself what more might be possible—and America offers that chance.
MR: A bit of a pivot away from the book and towards your inspirations as a writer. Whose work do you return to when you’re stuck? Which authors would you say are your guiding lights?
OGB: Once I knew that I truly wanted to write, African women writers—and their incredible, enduring works—became foundational for me. They are the reason I imagined that I, too, could tell stories. Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter, a spare and stunning classic, inspired the epistolary form between Esther and Amina. Tsitsi Dangarembga and Nervous Conditions kept me writing at a time when I experienced stinging rejection. And the incomparable Yvonne Vera’s body of work helps me to continually stretch the parameters of language on the page; word by word, sentence to sentence, she is a north star for me, absolutely.
