Finally! I am an Alumnus of the book Rid me of This by Aisha Oredola. For many reasons too personal to blog about, I have been unable to concentrate on words, let alone read books. I guess I gained my freedom with this intelligently written story by Oredola…or in her language… I got ridded of this.
So here, I have decided to test my healing by writing a review of Rid me of This. Enjoy:

Kumbi, a young lover of knowledge, numbers and poetry finds herself in a darkly wealthy family with unreavelable skeletons in a cupboard. Growing up in the abyss kind of took away her abilty to show love and filled her with hatred and emptiness. For Kumbi, life was nothing but darkness, until she met some friends and circustances that unveiled her thirst for light.
 Rid me of this is the story of how she sorth liberation from the blackhole while searching for God.

 Something highly spectacular and conspicuous about this book is the writer’s knowledge of  diverse religion and cultures. How she managed to shuttle facts and languages from different tribes into one story still intrigues me.
From Kwame, I learned a lot about Ghanaian Delicacies – I know now that I should always ask that pork is not added to my Jambalaya. (A joke you’d get only after reading the book..lol)
Moreso, ‘Rid me of This’  is a delicious concoction of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba customs and languages.

To my favorite character – eeem, sincerely, it’d be Uthman. Mehn! The strength of this dude was hyper-inspiring. How he got faced by sexual temptations and managed to survive won my heart completely. Beyond this, even though he got little help from Kumbi, he sort of single handedly saved his family from years-long misery and penury.
I must point out that there was a little lax somewhere in the middle of the story, however, the last quarter of the book picked up the pace and made the wait for action worthwhile. Who could have suspected that love was cooking – in the most unexpected of places, most unexpected of hearts.
I really hope a Kumbi ends up with Jamal, for their love, as described is pure and divine. After, the last page of the story, I kept turning over through the glossaries, asking for more... more of the love story between the two birds … Sincerely I wanted more… if only there’d be written a part two.
I shall end it here with some of my favorite excerpts from the book:


“To have life is one thing, to know the purpose is another. I have to find myself, by myself. I have to understand that here, on earth, if you don’t search, you won’t find. And if you do not search within yourself, you can never find what you’re looking for in someone else”

“ Fight what? A good warrior out to know some secrets about his opponents before selecting his weapons. Don’t you agree? But you’re inexperienced and young, you don’t know what you’d be getting yourself into by loving me”

“As humans, we have more similarities than differences and fail to search for knowledge of what we differ in. We push away light , to wallow in conflict because it is easier than actually digging deep…”