The Fragile Work of Belated Love: On Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief

Grief is never punctual. It arrives late, sometimes decades after the wound has been made, and it lingers longer than anyone thinks it should. In Yewande Omotoso’s novel An Unusual Grief, grief arrives not only after death but after estrangement, an estrangement so entrenched that reconciliation feels impossible, even in retrospect. The book is less about mourning a daughter than about recognizing, too late, the textures of her life.

At its center is Mojisola, a middle-aged Nigerian woman in Johannesburg, who learns that her adult daughter Yinka has died by suicide. The two had not spoken in years, their relationship corroded by silence, disapproval, and the weight of expectation. In a gesture both desperate and defiant, Mojisola leaves her distracted, philandering husband and moves into Yinka’s flat. There, among her daughter’s clothes and books and lingering smells, she begins a strange apprenticeship to absence. She tries on Yinka’s dresses. She flips through her novels. She discovers evidence of the life she ignored: Yinka’s queerness, her mental health struggles, her hunger for freedom.

Omotoso resists spectacle. There are no melodramatic breakdowns, no forced reconciliations conjured from beyond the grave. Instead, her prose operates in a register of quiet. The novel is built from gestures small enough to miss: the weight of a cardigan, the awkwardness of cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, the silence of a phone that will never ring. In this restraint, Omotoso captures something true about grief, it is less a drama than a low-grade fever, altering the body’s every movement.

What makes the novel especially striking is that it is, at heart, a late bildungsroman. Literature tends to reserve self-discovery for the young, but Omotoso insists that transformation can come even in late middle age. Mojisola is not a sympathetic character, she is stubborn, reserved, and often judgmental, but she is forced into a confrontation with herself. To sit in her daughter’s absence is to reckon not only with loss but with her own complicity: the silences she maintained, the expectations she enforced, the narrowness with which she loved.

This is not unprecedented in African writing, but it remains rare. So much of the canon has been invested in nation-building narratives, or in youthful rebellion against tradition. Omotoso shifts the focus: what happens when it is the parent, not the child, who must grow? Her novel suggests that change is possible even after a life has seemingly solidified into habit.

The tension between Yinka and Mojisola is not simply generational; it is also diasporic. Mojisola embodies a certain Nigerian middle-class ethos: disciplined, respectable, tethered to propriety. Yinka, by contrast, rejects those codes. Her flat is small, unbeautiful, defiantly ordinary. She refuses the comforts and performances of her mother’s class, embracing instead a queer identity and a restless, fractured independence.

The clash is familiar across the African diaspora. In Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, children scatter across continents, carrying with them both privilege and dislocation, their lives shaped by a cosmopolitanism that often unsettles their parents. In Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, the intergenerational line fractures again and again under the weight of history. Omotoso places her conflict not in the broad sweep of slavery or migration but in the narrow confines of a Johannesburg apartment. And yet the resonance is the same: the impossibility of passing down a coherent cultural inheritance when one generation’s values feel like shackles to the next.

Perhaps the most radical thread in An Unusual Grief is its attention to female solitude. Mojisola is not only grieving her daughter; she is grieving her own unlived life. She mourns the erotic self she abandoned to marriage and duty, the pleasures she denied herself out of decorum. In one of the novel’s most striking moments, she begins to touch herself for the first time in decades. The scene is understated, but its implications are vast.

Omotoso aligns herself here with a growing body of Black feminist writing that insists on the fullness of older women’s lives. One thinks of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes, which wrestles with women’s desires within and against marriage, or even Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman, which grants an elderly Caribbean man the erotic life he had been denied. In Omotoso’s hands, Mojisola’s rediscovery of her body is not indulgence but reclamation: the insistence that desire need not end at middle age, that grief can reawaken the body rather than numb it.

The class thread that runs through the novel is as important as the intergenerational one. Mojisola has been shaped by respectability; her husband is a professor, her life framed by middle-class rituals of status. Yinka rejects all this. Her flat is a refusal of bourgeois aesthetics, her life a rebuke to the polished surface her mother values. As Mojisola inhabits this space, she must confront her own prejudices, the subtle disdain she held for her daughter’s choices, the ways in which class informed her failures of love.

Omotoso does not dramatize this with polemic. Instead, she lets the reader feel the dissonance of a woman accustomed to privilege suddenly inhabiting ordinariness. It is in the ordinary; laundry, groceries, neighbors, that Mojisola begins to shift.

The novel is careful not to offer false redemption. There is no cathartic reconciliation, no moment where Mojisola and Yinka magically understand one another across the veil of death. What exists instead is a quieter form of peace: a willingness to live differently, to love more attentively, even if it is too late to repair the past.

This refusal of consolation is one of Omotoso’s most courageous choices. In an era where fiction often leans toward uplift, she insists on complication. Love, she reminds us, is rarely symmetrical. Sometimes the most one can hope for is the grace to see clearly after the fact.

An Unusual Grief belongs to a lineage of African diaspora novels that treat loss not as rupture but as revelation. Where Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Americanah explores migration through romance, and Ben Okri in The Famished Road uses the supernatural to meditate on continuity, Omotoso strips everything down. Her canvas is smaller, but no less urgent: a mother, a daughter, a flat in Johannesburg, a silence that cannot be undone.

Her achievement is to show that the private can carry the weight of the political. In Mojisola’s grief, one glimpses the legacies of patriarchy, class, respectability politics, and the costs of silence in African families. And yet the novel never feels like sociology. It remains intimate, specific, stubbornly human.

An Unusual Grief asks more than it answers. How do we mourn the people we never truly knew? How do we make peace with the versions of ourselves we never became? Omotoso does not tidy these questions into lessons. She leaves us with Mojisola, fumbling toward grace one day at a time, her grief awkward but real.

It is this refusal of neatness that makes the novel linger. Omotoso trusts her readers to sit in ambiguity, to endure complication, to see in Mojisola not only a mother mourning her daughter but a woman startled into a second chance at herself.