Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow

Damilare Kuku

Pan Macmillan

Review: Lauren O’Connor-May

Though the title of this book made me laugh and the back cover boasts that it is “hilarious”, the subject matter is actually very serious.

Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow tells the story of a Nigerian family reeling after the death of their beloved father.

Temi, the family’s youngest, has through her inheritance finally accumulated enough money to have a butt enlargement.

Desperate to get the surgery under way, she makes the bombshell announcement while all her relatives are still gathered in the aftermath of her father’s death.

Her announcement is met with everything except acceptance and for the rest of the book, Temi’s mother, sister, aunts, doctor and lawyer give us glimpses into the workings of their minds and the secrets they’ve hidden.

The changing viewpoint in each chapter slowly coalesces into the sad history of how societal pressures impacted them in painful ways.

While Temi doesn’t see her own beauty because she feels constantly in the shadow of her mother and sister’s curves, her mother and sister have found their voluptuousness to be a curse because of all the unwanted attention it has attracted.

Meanwhile, her aunts are wrestling with different demons. They are either too clever, too promiscuous, too outspoken or too ambitious for their husbands which ends with all of them returning to Temi’s nuclear family where they intrude on the parenting of their nieces.

This book is moving and thought-provoking and should have come with the warning, “Likely to make you cry. Don’t read in public”, which is what happened to me.

#nigeria

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