Like a Mule Bringing Ice-Cream to the Sun <\/em> Morayo Da Silva is a retired literature professor from Nigeria approaching her 75th birthday \u2013 \u201cancient\u201d by her home country\u2019s standards, having \u201coutfoxed the female life expectancy by nearly two decades\u201d. Living in a similarly \u201cold but sturdy\u201d apartment in San Francisco, she is surrounded by the debris that you accumulate in an ordinary life: papers, unopened bills, junk mail, books, unfinished mugs of tea. She has no family and likes her freedom. Then an accident at home forces her to spend lonely days in hospital and a nursing home. On the surface, it\u2019s not the most vibrant life. But Sarah Ladipo Manyika\u2019s Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun<\/em> is a novel that is profoundly dissatisfied with surfaces.<\/p>\n The Goldsmiths Prize sets out to \u201creward fiction that breaks the mould\u201d and, as a result, it occasionally unearths buried gems. Ladipo Manyika\u2019s novel, shortlisted for this year\u2019s prize, fits the description. Published by Cassava Republic, a Nigerian imprint that launched in the UK this year, it received no reviews in the national newspapers. As the Goldsmiths judge Bernardine Evaristo has noted, \u201cA fiction about a septuagenarian black woman is almost completely uncharted territory in British literature.\u201d<\/p>\n The novel\u2019s title comes from a strange, esoteric poem by Mary Ruefle, \u201cDonkey On\u201d, which finds joy in everyday, persistent living. Even the most mundane activities jog Morayo\u2019s memory. Her folded clothes hold \u201cthe smell of Lagos markets still buried in the cotton \u2013 diesel fumes, hot palm oil and burning firewood\u201d. The act of cleaning her glasses provokes recollections of an eye hospital in Jos, the doctor\u2019s breath \u201csmelling sweetly of mangoes\u201d. A book picked at random from a shelf contains a postcard from a former lover, his signature conjuring the image of hands held in a darkened cinema, \u201chis thumb tracing circles in the centre of my palm\u201d.<\/p>\n Morayo has a sense of adventure that belies her years (it is while she is balancing on the edge of her bathtub, trying to get a better view in the mirror of the perfect place for a birthday tattoo, that she slips and falls). She has a striking capacity for sensual pleasures \u2013 in walnut bread, in (not too sticky) pains aux raisins<\/em>, or \u201cmelted drops of honey lavender and salted caramel\u201d ice cream, or the bright green eyes of a shop assistant. And she is deeply sexual. It\u2019s something that occasionally surprises her, as she is caught unawares by a \u201cwave of desire\u201d or \u201cunexpected surge of feeling\u201d. But why should arousal be unexpected because Morayo is over 70?<\/p>\n \u201cOld age is a massacre,\u201d she muses. \u201cNo place for sissies. No place for love songs. No place for dreaming. No place for dreaming erotic dreams about a man half my age.\u201d<\/p>\n This generous treatment of character, eked out one sideways glimpse at a time, extends beyond Morayo. The novel is crowded with often incidental figures. As they brush against Morayo, the \u201cI\u201d of Ladipo Manyika\u2019s first-person narrative passes between them like a talking stick. A passing homeless woman and a man Morayo meets at the nursing home are given as much time as her ex-husband or her closest friend, Sunshine.<\/p>\n Some of her dearest companions aren\u2019t Ladipo Manyika\u2019s creations at all. Morayo spends many hours in \u201cthe company of old literary friends\u201d, and textual references and physical books litter the novel\u2019s landscape \u2013 writing by authors as varied as Charlotte Bront\u00eb, Paul Auster, \u00c9mile Zola, Beatrix Potter, Ernest Gaines, e e cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin. The loosest of connections can bring a work swimming to the front of Morayo\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n The overall effect is to breathe new life into an old clich\u00e9. Like the dusty spines on Morayo\u2019s bookshelves, every character in this novel hides a vibrant, teeming inner world behind an unspectacular fa\u00e7ade. When she goes to buy two bunches of flowers, she thinks of \u201cMrs Dalloway and her delphiniums\u201d. Morayo is a woman who takes her search for pleasure into her own hands, sometimes literally. In the end, Ladipo Manyika\u2019s book reminds us of the value of indulgence and delight \u2013 in sex, in food, in company, and in reading. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nby Sarah Ladipo Manyika
\nUK: Cassava Republic, 2016
\n118pp, \u00a39.99<\/p>\n