Book Description

Fiction. African & African American Studies. Translated from the Hausa by Aliyu Kamal. Beginning in the late 1980s, northern Nigeria saw a boom in popular fiction written in the Hausa language. Known as littattafan soyyaya ("love literature"), the books are often inspired by Hindi films, which have been hugely popular among Hausa speakers for decades and are primarily written by women. They have sparked a craze among young adult readers as well as a backlash from government censors and book-burning conservatives. SIN IS A PUPPY THAT FOLLOWS YOU HOME is an Islamic soap opera complete with polygamous households, virtuous women, scheming harlots, and black magic. "Utterly addictive... The main character's plight was so abysmal and her husband was such a lowdown a$ $, I was sure that by the end of the story, he'd get his and I wanted to be there to see it... Would I read more by this author? Heck yeah!" --Nnedi Okarafor "Blaft refers to Sin is a Puppy as a kind of "Islamic soap opera", and that isn't far off the mark. Balarama Ramat Yakubu's slim, fast-paced novel centres on Rabi, the long-suffering wife of one adulterous and wayward Alhaji Abdu. Rabi and Alhaji Abdu's elder daughter, Saudatu, of marriageable age and excellent, virtuous disposition, is a central character in a secondary story line that converges with the main. Although one does not want to give away the plot, suffice it to say that the trajectory of the novel's narrative will be familiar to those who have watched Hindi romance films, just with a twist... Blaft's foray into Nigerian popular literature is an intriguing, exciting project" --Subashini Navaratnam "Let us get the multiple meta-textual reasons for celebrating this book out of the way; it is a Hausa (Muslim, Black, Nigerian, African) woman writing for her peers, made accessible to us by desi publishers who find a glossary to be redundant. Kudos all round! But what did I actually think about the story of a woman (temporarily) leaving her abusive husband while her daughter finds a suitable boy (or rather, twice married man)? Dear reader, I was rather charmed by it... It is not heartwarming in the treacly manner of popular films, but instead, like the family histories your aunties tell you, full of compromises and small justices, and the "life goes on" approach to domestic tragedy. This is not a story of exotic Africa, nor of epochal moments in histories of colonialism and its aftermath, nor yet about the fetishized tensions of being Muslim. Instead, it is shopkeepers falling in love with women stopping to buy dress material, and mothers vacillating between the street being unsafe and being a good place to meet eligible men, and bored wives eyeing comely electricians summoned to fix the wiring. Let other books talk about purdah and polygamy; this is a book that concerns itself with soap" -- Deepa Dharmadhikari