When Rami's youngest son accidentally breaks a neighbor's car window, there's no man of the house to take care of it. Rami's husband, Tony, the handsome police chief in Maputo, Mozambique, has a wandering eye and is seldom home. After putting up with his behavior for more than 20 years, Rami decides to take matters into her own hands. One by one, she seeks out the four women who take up so much of her husband's time and attention. Confrontations erupt into violence, but what starts out as fisticuffs turns into four friendships, and all five women show up dressed alike, with their 16 children in tow, to surprise Tony at his 50th birthday party. At first, Tony flees. He then promises to abandon his mistresses. Rami won't hear of it. She demands that Tony marry them all, turning polygamy upside down.
In 1990, Paulina Chiziane was the first woman to publish a novel in Mozambique, where polygamy is legal. Delaying the plot for an occasional songlike poetic outburst, spicing the story with a few jawdropping African sexual customs, Chiziane weaves a big-hearted, seriocomic tale of polygamy and its price. "My husband has become a tourist in his own home," she says. Her outspoken sexual politics produce succinct little firecrackers. "To have only one love in life? Baloney! Only women, forever stupid, swallow that story. Men love every day.... All men are polygamous."
Feisty and exuberant, ferociously candid, The First Wife doesn't disguise the radical, iconoclastic spirit of its narrative. With delightful complications and unexpected plot turns, Chiziane's battle of the sexes is like none other in world literature. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.