Peer-reviewed article
Unquiet minds: Mental health, trauma and alienation in Ayọbámi Adébáyọ’s Stay With Me
Zacham Bayei, Hashim Musa Abubakar ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This is a literary analysis of Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀'s novel Stay With Me. It looks at how the story portrays mental illness, trauma and isolation in Yejide, a Nigerian woman facing infertility, forced polygyny and the loss of children. The paper reads these experiences as bodily, relational and cosmological trauma, drawing on the Yoruba belief in abiku, the 'spirit child'. It argues that the novel presents infertility and loss as symptoms of structural violence. It is about an adult woman's mental health as shown in fiction, not about the well-being of children.
Key points
- The novel follows the psychological breakdown of Yejide after infertility, forced polygyny and multiple maternal losses.
- Trauma is shown in three forms: somatic (pseudocyesis and sickle-cell crises), relational (marital deception and betrayal) and cosmological (the abiku belief).
- The alternating, retrospective first-person narration reflects the belatedness, dissociation and unspeakability of traumatic memory.
- The paper reads infertility and loss as symptoms of structural violence.
- It identifies five themes: reproductive trauma, marital secrecy, stigmatised grief, sickle-cell disease as an intergenerational wound, and the mirroring of domestic and national instability.
Limitations
This is a literary interpretation of a single work of fiction, so it offers no empirical data on children or on any intervention. Its focus is on an adult woman's experience, and children appear only through the theme of maternal loss.
Abstract
In its debut novel, Stay With Me, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ takes the personal tragedy of a childless Nigerian marriage and turns it into an introspective exploration of mental illness, trauma and isolation. The novel follows the psychological breakdown of Yejide, a woman whose infertility, forced polygyny and multiple maternal losses bring her to the edge of grief and madness in a culture that normalises men’s secrets while medicalising women’s pain. This paper explores the ways in which Adébáyọ̀ dramatises trauma as somatic (pseudocyesis and sickle-cell crises), relational (marital deception and betrayal) and cosmological (the Yoruba belief in abiku, the “spirit child” who dies to torment its mother). The novel’s alternate, retrospective first-person perspective formally represents the belatedness, dissociation and unspeakability of traumatic memory as articulated by Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman while alienation functions simultaneously at the gender, marriage and nation levels. The paper argues that Stay With Me reimagines the experience of infertility and loss as a symptom of structural violence and calls for a new critical focus on mental health in African women’s fiction through five interlocking themes: reproductive trauma, marital secrecy, stigmatised grief, sickle-cell disease as an intergenerational wound and the mirroring of domestic and national instability.