Undoubtedly, 2024 is Damilare Kuku's year. Her debut collection, Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, proved she's a formidable storyteller. She further displays that prowess in her first novel, Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow, a polyphonic masterpiece that opens with a 20-year-old woman's proclamation: "I plan to renovate my bumbum in Lagos, live there for some time, and hopefully meet the love of my life!" Her timing is awkward: the assembled family has just heard the reading of her beloved father's will. Shock aside, the one thing Témì can say is "Nigerian families can be an obstacle in a girl's journey to a figure eight."
For her entire young life, people have relentlessly judged Témì's body. The invasive barrage about her backside--"blackboard," "mopstick," "inverted"--has been never-ending from family, friends, even strangers on social media. But Témì's declaration exhumes all manner of buried secrets as to how self-mutilation seems to be a young woman's sole path to finding true love and therefore happiness. Despite their sizable bumbums, though, what was labeled "love" hasn't been kind to the women in Témì's life: her mother, Hassana, survived assault; her older sister, Ládùn, battled desertion then lies; both her paternal and maternal aunts endured abuse and abandonment. So-called true love (with others) even steals away her best friends. And yet Témì's insistence on surgery persists: "I am doing it for me."
Kuku's novel is not unlike her impressive collection--sharply insightful, bitingly funny, wondrously poignant--except her stories here are also intricately, exquisitely interconnected. Témì becomes that everywoman searching for acceptance and affirmation--by any means necessary. --Terry Hong