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Chika Unigwe’s Love of a Fat Woman captures the subjectivity of beauty and the power dynamics of arranged marriages. Godwin brings a fat ugly wife home to his Nigerian family. Godwin married Tine for papers—in his words, “she was his passport” to Belgian citizenship, and he assuages his guilt by convincing himself that this was a fair transaction, as both parties get something out of the sham marriage.
The only person Tine connects with in Godwin’s family is his grandmother Mijn Oma, who is happy that Godwin married a well-fed woman—a real woman. Both women, who are from different generations and continents connect despite the limitation of language. Their unlikely partnership eventually results in a change in Godwin; as the deep connection between Mijn Oma and Tine intensifies, so do Godwin’s feelings for his oyibo wife.
—Olufunke Ogundimu, Nigeria Editor-at-Large
The second week of their stay—halfway into the vacation—Godwin’s grandmother arrived from the village smelling of the earth and carrying a sack of almonds and pears dirtied with sand. She wore thick glasses and asked in a loud voice for "the new wife!" She had not been told that Tine was not a real wife, just a woman Godwin had married to get his papers in order, and now Godwin felt guilty at her enthusiasm. He sent for Tine, who came out of the room in a baby pink dress with no sleeves; her face and arms flushed pink and put Godwin in mind of a giant pig. Mijn Oma, Godwin said dully, introducing his grandmother to Tine. Tine mumbled hello, but the old woman spread her arms and made rapid movements like a bird flapping its wings. Tine stood where she was, looking into the woman's face, unsure of what was expected of her. Godwin’s grandmother took the few steps needed to bridge the gap between them and hugged Tine. She held her and spoke Igbo into her ears, words that Tine could make no sense of but whose warmth brought tears to her eyes. She let go of Tine, smiled at the room, and said, Ah, our Godwin has brought us back a real woman! A beautiful woman. Her skin shines like a polished wall. She looks well fed, Godwin. When I heard you married an oyibo woman, I was afraid that you’d married a woman like the ones they show us in magazines, thin thin like chewing stick. This one is beautiful, Godwin. And her eyes tell me that she is a good one.
She handed the sack of fruit to Adaku for them to be washed and asked that a plate of almonds be brought to the sitting room. She was going to sit down and eat them with her new granddaughter.
For the rest of the day, she sat with Tine in the sitting room, eating almonds dripping with water. The grandmother spoke in Igbo and Tine spoke in Dutch and they both laughed that they could not understand each other; and when the grandmother pointed to the plastic sheet on the sofa they were sitting on and mimicked with her hands the act of tearing it up, Tine laughed and her laughter rang like a bell and at that moment Godwin felt a stirring in him that he thought might be the beginning of love.
Continue reading the Spring 2013 issue and discover writers from every corner of the earth, searching either by issue or by geographical region.
In a positive review of Asymptote contributor Darryl Sterk’s translation of Scales of Injustice by foundational Taiwanese writer Loa Ho, our own Vivian Szu-Chin Chih explains the difficulty of translating a linguistically complicated work into English. “Without certain knowledge about Taiwan’s colonial past and literary imaginations,” she says, “it is impossible to translate Loa Ho with a new perspective.”
In a conversation with Adam Morris, the translator of July’s Asymptote Book Club selection (I Didn’t Talk, Beatriz Bracher), Jacob Silkstone teases out ideas regarding process and intentionality. Morris speaks on what drew him to translate Bracher, and the influence of this particular novel, which “suggests that it is up to readers of I Didn’t Talk—and of history and moral philosophy—to decide whether narrative and memory can have any meaningful influence over whether history will repeat itself. History is not entirely objective; it is what posterity makes of conflicting memories.” To access our members-only discussion space and to receive the best of world literature delivered to your door, join the book club today!
In Around the World with Asymptote, our editors-at-large in Latin America covered festivals, prizes and the intersection of writing and politics in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Argentina. We also covered the latest literary prizes awarded in Vietnam and El Salvador. Translation Tuesdays brings us closer to world citizenship with two microfiction stories by Muzzafer Kale from the Turkish, translated by Ralph Hubbell, and a longer story from the Dutch by Dieuwke van Turenhout, brought into English by Michele Hutchison. If you’d like to keep stamping your passport from the comfort of your home, make the Asymptote blog your daily window on world literature.
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