By Olukorede Yishau
OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE, the brilliant mind behind the Booker-nominated ‘My Sister the Serial Killer’, has delivered a sophomore novel, ‘Cursed Daughters’. Her new baby packs a punch. It is no surprise it made the Time 100 Books for 2025, the year that has just slipped by.
Braithwaite offers us a novel that deeply explores the complex nature of female rivalry, trauma, superstition and familial obligations. And she does so in prose so sleek that they are a delight to follow. And its many humorous lines add to the book’s addictive qualities.
At the beginning of the book, Monife, the daughter of Bunmi, is buried after her remains are pulled out of the Elegushi beach, where she chose to end it all. Thanks to a curse the Falodun women have battled from generation to generation.
Some hours before the burial, Eniiyi is born and over two decades later, Eniiyi will jump into the same water in order to save a drowning man, when the facility’s gatekeeper’s concern is ensuring there are no witnesses to the calamity.
Eniiyi, Ebun, Monife, Bunmi and Kemi stand at the heart of Braithwaite’s compelling read. Trailing them are their ancestors, dead but not forgotten.
They include Feranmi, the beginning of it all, who was cursed because of her husband; Yemisi, who was labelled a witch; Yetunde, who men avoided like a plaque; Tobi, despised by her in-laws; the unstable Afoke; and Fikayo, the one whose health was her undoing.
In this novel that seems to suggest that some ends are beginnings, when Eniiyi emerges from Ebun’s birth canal, there is little doubt that she bears an uncanny resemblance to the deceased. Bunmi, the dead woman’s mother, becomes convinced that her daughter has returned to her through Ebun. From that moment, she dotes on the newborn and names her Motitunde, an identity that cements her belief that the child is her daughter’s replacement.
As Eniiyi grows, she accepts the unusual reality of having two grandmothers and addresses them accordingly, calling one Grandma West and the other Grandma East, in recognition of the wings each occupies in their family home, a home where its daughters have always returned when their men turn against them.
Eniiyi also sees Monife in dreams where the dead gives her the silent treatment until the day she says “not again” through Eniiyi’s voice.
Eniiyi grows up aware that she belongs to a line of women fated never to remain long in their husbands’ homes, bound by a curse said to have been placed on a long-dead matron who stole another woman’s man.
Over 200 pages into the novel, the identity of Eniiyi’s father or the circumstances surrounding her conception are shrouded in secrecy.
All we keep hearing is about a guilt we aren’t given details of a trick that helps drive the plot and sees us following, among other issues, the friction between Bunmi and Ebun over Eniiyi. Because of Bunmi’s attachment to Eniiyi, she invites herself into every decision that has to do with her or unilaterally takes decisions on Eniiyi without bothering to inform the mother and sees absolutely nothing wrong in her actions.
As far as she is concerned, they have equal rights to her. After all, she is her daughter’s replica and chooses to change her due date so that she can be born the day the original is interred.
The author shows us individual differences in the way Bunmi and Kemi (Ebun’s mother) handle the curveball life has thrown at them. While Bunmi hopes her ex will return to her and their children, Kemi throws herself at the Lagos society jumping from one benefactor to the other and even when she becomes a grandmother, she refuses to throw in the towel. Instead, she enhances her beauty with Spandex and Wonderbra.
Two major issues dominate the pages of this compelling read: generational curse and reincarnation. Before Eniiyi’s birth, all the Falodun women were concerned about was generational curse; her resemblance to Monife doubles their wahala as it brings in reincarnation and the fears associated with it.
The novel raises posers: Are generational curse and reincarnation real? Are they imagined? Are they just coincidences? Are there clear signs that define them? Braithwaite offers no straight or easy answers. Instead, she gives perspectives and leaves the answers to the reader.
She shows us the spiritual angle to these issues, especially how people who claim to know more than the rest of us purport to have the solutions to these challenges; in the long run, money must exchange hands.
Are there answers in the darker spiritual corners of Lagos? Can the pattern be broken? Is liberation possible from family secrets and silent traumas? And do we see results even when cash is doled out to the spiritualists?
In the end, choose to believe whatever you want is the quagmire we are left with in this novel whose plot oscillates between the past and the present.
At times, the past is the beginning of the curse; at other times, it is the years before Eniiyi’s birth or when she is a toddler; and the present is mixed, but mostly that period when many in their country feels the leadership’s run thus far has been disappointing.
Aside from the women, two other memorable characters stand out in this novel. The first is Sango, Monife’s loyal dog; the second is the Falodun house, the sprawling old and falling mansion with its east and west wings, that dominates the narrative. Without the house, this would have been an entirely different story, and certainly an incomplete one.
The author’s success in making both Sango and, especially, the house so integral to the plot’s development deserves high praise.
My final take: As we wish ourselves happy new year, let’s see family as everything, let’s see family also as nothing.
This 2026, family can make you and family can break you. It is a blessing to come from the right kind of family, one which stands with you through thick and thin, through trials and tribulations, through it all. And it is a curse to come from the sort of family that pulls you down.
Happy new year! And thank you for always reading me. I appreciate you. Greatly.
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As we wish ourselves happy new year, let’s see family as everything, let’s see family also as nothing. This 2026, family can make you and family can break you.
