Monarch
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Excerpt
Everything, as I remember, was like in my aunt’s paintings then, complete with tablecloths and chinaware and expensive little red jugs. I was on holiday at my aunt’s in Lagos, and her husband wanted to know if I’d seen the outline of her buttocks the previous afternoon. I was eleven, which made it 1983, November.
“Did you see it? I know you saw it, boy. Tell me what you saw!”
Because he flipped through an issue of Ebony as he spoke, I thought the buttocks in question could be found in its pages. But he added: “You know I saw her the first time dancing like that in your hometown. She was the best dancer. She showed those old hands how to do it properly.”
When I’d glimpsed her on the balcony dancing, with long and graceful limbs, I thought I had never seen skin like hers, burnished under the sun. So that when she padded down the outdoor stairway to collect my bags and said to me, “Walahi, you have my sister’s nose!” I could only stutter. I thought she looked nothing like my mother. For one thing, standing close to me, she seemed barely taller than I was, and just a little older, so that I was embarrassed to call her Aunti.
PK Damilare Abiodun
PK Damilare is a Nigerian writer. He has an MFA in fiction from Brown University. This is his debut work of fiction. This fall, he will begin his PhD at the University of Southern California.
Maggie Love on “Monarch”
I tend to be drawn to coming-of-age stories. At their core, the best ones ask: Once we’ve internalized the ways of the world, to what degree do we question them, or even throw them off?
On the surface, our narrator Abu’s aunt Fauza leads a charmed life full of records, magazines, art—even a dancing pet goat. The class differences between her household and Abu’s are deftly rendered: At one point, Abu implies that if his family acquired a goat, they would eat it, not keep it as a pet.
But Fauza is only fourteen, and this fact makes her circumstances unquestionably bleak. Sooner or later, cracks begin to appear in the facade. Fauza’s husband, Umani, has a loud, opinionated circle of friends who visit often. They accuse Umani of giving Fauza too much leeway, pressuring both Umani and ultimately, Abu, to declare their allegiances. All of this takes place against the backdrop of political turmoil. This piece is full of profound truths: among them, the way in which a young person’s exposure to everyday injustices can take on the same magnitude, in his mind, as a global event.
“Monarch” is funny, magical, and vividly told. We hope you’ll find it just as captivating as we did.
Q&A by Maggie Love
- ML: One of my favorite things about this piece is the strong sense of place. “Monarch” is set in Nigeria, and you’re currently living in America. Did you write this story in America? I’m curious if that affected how you wrote Nigeria, if at all.
- PDA: I wrote the first draft in Nigeria. Even then, some of the finer elements of the setting were already in place.
For most of my twenties, I have been fascinated with the strange majesty of houses, their grammar, if you put it that way—what they seem to be saying, or are failing at saying. And it wasn’t until I finished the first draft that I realised most of what I was getting at had been provoked by a visit to a distant aunt in Ibadan, when I was much younger.
There are no parallels between her and Fauza, or that visit and “Monarch.” But the house, apparently, that place I spent a few days, strongly imprinted upon me a sense of the sentient, of wanting to be known.
In 2024, I was in Nigeria, after only a year away. I began to write the third draft then, to make the version that eventually was this, and there was that mild shock, of course, that you will never know a place enough. But rather than distance from my source material, I think the houses I live in, go to sleep in, are far more likely to affect the spirit of my work.
For context, during my first few months in America, while writing the second draft of this story, I lived in this strange studio with no windows. I saw no neighbours. I faced this dead, idle road. But there was always this gorgeous tree right at my doorstep, where I would go down and sit. - ML: Can you talk a bit about the importance of names for your characters? ?
- PDA: I don’t think I gave the names much deliberation—they came to me ready and survived, despite several iterations, except for Umani’s and the goat’s, who—you would not believe it—was originally called “Billy!”
As you can see, if the name “Billy” had survived, this becomes a very different story indeed. What I was also particular about (and you drew my attention to this during edits) was how Abu or the children might refer to Fauza, especially considering Yoruba’s etiquette of respect. She is to be called aunti or mummy, and to call her simply Fauza is to strip her of these “titles.”
Honor, ironically, is important in “Monarch”—we see this even in how the friends refer to Umani and to each other. The prefixes before these names matter. In one instance, Chief saying “Umani” is a sign of intimacy. In another, mentioning the name quite barely is stark disrespect. - ML: I’m really drawn to stories about characters who struggle, or fail, to act, and to stories about observers. We could categorize Abu this way, complex as he is. Why do you think you chose him as the narrator for “Monarch”?
- PDA: Abu is a stranger to this house, and even to Fauza. It is the first time he sees her; still she is his aunt, and his allegiance should be to her. But there is also, now that I think about it, the allegiance of men, men banding together. Masculine camaraderie. So there is a certain complexity to his silence, of how much guilt, if any at all, one can place on a child that spectates—even helplessly in this case.
This maybe becomes a different story if Abu were a girl or if it were told in the present tense. He is an adult telling this story now with the gift of retrospection. Is there a role he played? What does he do now?
One might be tempted to think a child’s account is mostly frank—naive, but bankable, trustable. Except the trick is, he is now an adult attempting to cosplay and wear again the eyes of a child. - ML: There are various Yoruba phrases throughout the story. Are you fluent in Yoruba? How does writing in multiple languages shape your work? ?
- PDA: I am, I am quite fluent. I have spoken it all my life—writing it well is another matter.
I think there are, sometimes, points in my work where a certain earnestness of thought is needed—supplanting that thought with an English equivalent is usually a great loss. And, of course, ideal equivalence is false. A certain dose of Yoruba is always necessary. There are certain expressions that the English language struggles to replicate—jagajaga for example might translate to rubbish or ridiculous nonsense, but there is nothing like the sonic dissonance jagajaga produces in me when I think of it. I can only hope this sense of sound and dissonance is reproduced in the reader too.
One problem, for me, is that Yoruba doesn’t appear to sit well beside English on the page—the friction is probably more apparent if you speak both. Yoruba is a very tonal language, and English, next to it, blunders and flattens. Less alive. So that, usually, I am tinkering with the right Yoruba phrase to complement the English sentences that surround it. - ML: You’re working on a book. Can you tell us about it, and where this story fits in? ?
- PDA: Not to give much away or hex the poor thing, I am tracing the lineage of a singular house over the course of two centuries. “Monarch” maps a specific period within that span.
- ML: Which books do you feel your work is in dialogue with?
- PDA: It has only just occurred to me recently that I might be writing a long, winding sally, in part, to V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, and to some degree, to certain British nursery poems. Back to the basics then, probably.
Ben Okri did talk about going back to read the Queen Primer when writing The Famished Road, and I think that remark has only just become clearer to me in recent months.
