A mother's gift — generational trauma through the African diaspora

Daily Maverick

3 days ago

Though at times overwritten, Bitter Honey captures the nuances of parenting through dislocation.
In Bitter Honey, novelist Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström explores the emotional undercurrents of motherhood and daughterhood. The novel reflects on how the past bears down on the present. How mothers carry their histories into their daughters' lives – often uninvited and sometimes totally unrecognised.
My research is concerned with narratives that crack open the heart of African motherhood, stories that strive not only to expose pain, but also to understand it. Bitter Honey gestures towards this emotional terrain.
One line is emblematic of this exploration: ''When I was your age, I moved to Sweden without my mother. With nobody.' Tina has heard this story a million times.' It captures both the weariness of inherited trauma and the fragility of the desire for understanding that threads through the novel.
Bitter Honey begins with the promise of protagonist Tina's rising stardom. Alone in a dressing room, navigating fame and the sudden reappearance of her absentee father, Tina's story has all the markings of a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel shaped by psychological and moral growth). But the novel's emotional nucleus is not fame, nor even fatherhood – it's Tina's mother, Nancy. Or at least, it wants to be.
Nancy's story is one of deep and curdled regret. Ákínmádé crafts a portrait of a woman who once stood at the cusp of a glamorous new world, having fallen in love with Malik, an ambassador's son who offers her access to elite circles, state dinners and the Swedish prime minister. But it is Lars, her white Swedish professor, who slowly unpicks the seams of her life.
The novel promises a sense of romantic tension, inviting the reader to feel torn between Malik's genuine warmth and Lars's sophistication; but no such ambivalence actually materialises.
Lars is not charming. He is jealous, controlling and ultimately predatory. Ákínmádé's portrayal of Lars makes it clear that he is not a romantic dilemma; he is a colonising force. Nancy's life with him is one of slow suffocation, and her daughter Tina is born of that rupture. Throughout the novel, there are subtle allusions and, at times, more overt depictions of Tina's struggle with her mixed heritage. However, these moments feel overwritten, particularly in lines such as Tina's desire to 'fully wear her mixed skin'.
While the phrasing may aim for poetic resonance, for me, it comes across as reductive. The metaphor inadvertently simplifies a complex and embodied experience, raising un­­easy questions. Can identity be worn? Is it something that can be adorned, removed or chosen at will?
Ákínmádé appears to be engaging with the constructedness of race and the illusion of agency with­­in African dia­­sporic identity. But Tina's exploration of these themes lacks depth. There remains a striking incongruity be­­tween how she understands herself and how the world perceives her.
At times her lack of critical self-awareness is jarring. Particularly when set against the more richly developed and emotionally layered portrayal of Nancy.
Love and regret
Where Ákínmádé excels is in her careful rendering of Nancy. Her character is more vividly drawn, more emotionally accessible than Tina's. We see her consumed by grief and fear, mothering from a place of survival rather than nurture.
'She would have re­sisted him. Even if it meant Tobias and Tina vanishing into thin air, never existing.' This is the agonising truth of Nancy's lifetime: that her children are reminders of her own loss of agency. Her love is knotted with regret.
There's an urgent question running through Bitter Honey. What does it mean to parent when your life has been violently derailed by structures beyond your control?
This legacy of cultural dislocation is a theme Ákínmádé touches on, but stops short of fully exploring. Nancy, as an immigrant mother, carries a kind of preemptive grief. Her decisions are shaped not just by personal trauma but by a constant anticipation of harm. The immigrant mother often exists in survival mode, where care is expressed not through softness but through constant vigilance.
'You figured I have no agency without him?' A line Tina delivers in a moment of confrontation typifies the novel's uneven dialogue. Ákínmádé at times stumbles into phrasing that feels stilted or overwrought, reducing what could be moments of real emotional depth into awkward exchanges. Yet her broader ambition, to map generational wounds and diasporic complexity, is clear.
The novel's scope is wide. We move between Sweden and the US, from the 1970s to 2006, witnessing how each locale produces different shades of di­asporic identity. Ákínmádé is particularly attuned to how Gambian communities shift across contexts – Gambians in Sweden are not like those in London or in New York. This specificity highlights that place informs not only experience but the perception of self.
Ultimately, Bitter Honey is at its most compelling when it slows down, when it allows Nancy's grief to speak plainly. One of the novel's most poignant lines arrives when Nancy warns Tina before she signs with an American label that brands her the 'Swedish siren'.
'The world gives you your heart's desires, then violently rips it away from your hands when you're most vulnerable. Please stay vigilant.' Here, Ákínmádé captures the ­cruel irony of diasporic ambition, the way success can echo colonial exploitation, offering visibility at the cost of safety.
Through Tina, the reader is kept at a remove from the raw reality of Nancy. The moments where we begin to glimpse the true texture of her life, her regret, her protectiveness, her survival, are all too fleeting.
What would their lives look like without this fear? This is the novel's quiet, un­­answered question. Are these maternal guardrails protection or shackles?
Bitter Honey doesn't offer a resolution. But in asking, it reveals the aching legacy that mothers like Nancy pass down: not just trauma, but the impossible task of surviving without softness. DM