53 pages • 1 hour read
Black Sunday
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Part 4, Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4, Chapter 13 Summary: “This Old House”
The penultimate chapter in 2021 is written through Bibike’s eyes and presents a look at four generations of her family by introducing her daughter Abike sitting with Bibike’s grandmother, who is singing oriki—a traditional form of Yoruba poetry—to her.
Her grandmother continues to tell stories, especially of her own childhood, now that Abike has been born. Bibike has even started to record some of these stories so Abike can listen to them as she gets older.
In her narration, Bibike divulges how Ariyike has settled into the role of Pastor David’s wife, and this is surprising since her sister seems so different. She didn’t even think Ariyike truly believed in Jesus.
Grandmother does not approve of Ariyike’s role. She turns to proverbs, which Bibike says are “easy to get tired of” because they don’t always adapt to the modern world (223). She is trying to find her own values.
Grandmother reminds Bibike to have a priest say the Viaticum when she is dying, and Bibike tells her grandmother that she will be around for a long time.
Father appears after making a last-minute decision to stop by with his business partner, who he tells to look around. The man is clearly interested in the property. Despite this, Grandmother expresses her concern for her son. He obliges, talking about his new wife, who is pregnant again after having twins.
Then, his partner returns from looking around; they comment on the house and yard. They leave soon after.
Grandmother spends the rest of the day confused and out of it. She falls asleep, and Bibike eventually asks the woman who helps with cleaning if she can keep an eye on her.
When Bibike leaves, she thinks of how Abike was conceived in her grandmother’s house after her boyfriend Tunde drove her home. He proposed when she found out she was pregnant, but Bibike refused. She didn’t want to give up her independence.
Now, she thinks about how her father seems to want the house for himself and worries her grandmother won’t be able to refuse him. She also recognizes she has barely processed seeing her father again.
When she arrives at Tunde’s apartment, she calls Ariyike, who says she knew their family would come back together because “[t]hat was what happened when you trusted in the Lord and made him your restorer” (233).
Bibike tells her their father wants the house and she won’t let him have it, but Ariyike points out it is technically his since he is their grandmother’s only child. She tells Bibike to “get on Father’s good side” (234) since she needs a man in her life.
After the call, she paces through the apartment, talking about how she won’t let her father have the house. Tunde suggests legal action, and Bibike thinks Abike is lucky to have someone who will take on responsibility without being asked.
When Tunde and Bibike arrive back at her grandmother’s house, they discover her grandmother had passed away while Bibike was gone.
Bibike goes to her grandmother’s room and looks at her ere ibeji shrine. She remembers that her grandmother was also a twin, though her sister had passed away when she was little. According to older Yoruba, identical twins shared a soul before they were born.
Tunde comes in and says he has contacted her siblings and called an ambulance. The woman caring for her grandmother also passes Abike to Bibike, who notices all of them are looking to her for direction even though she does not have it.
Bibike realizes she doesn’t care as much about the house. Rather, “[i]t was Grandmother I wanted to be around, the mellow person she became in the last five years” (239). However, she still wants to live there but fears her father may have sold it. Tunde promises to help her.
Tunde is in the military and the next morning buys drinks for several sergeants, describing Bibike’s father and saying it’s possible he shook his mother to death and took her property documents. Drunk, they promise to find him for Tunde.
Bibike and Tunde don’t hear about her father until after the funeral. The military officers eventually arrest Father and, on their way to Lagos for trial, he asks to use the restroom. He tries to run, and the officer accompanying him mishears the sound of him tripping. Thinking someone is shooting at him, he kills Bibike’s father.
Ariyike is furious at the role Bibike and Tunde played in father’s death and tells them she never wants to see them again.
Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary: “Black Sunday”
Ariyike’s last chapter, from which the title of the novel is taken, jumps to 2015 and begins in the women’s ministry office at the New Church. The women’s choir is practicing, and Ariyike thinks they sound bad and will embarrass her.
The choir is led by Ariyike’s friend Rosetta—the state governor’s wife. In addition to financial benefits provided to the church by the governor, Rosetta brings people to the church. Pastor David and Ariyike refer to her as their “little lighthouse” (246). Because of the general lack of interest in Christianity now, Rosetta is extra important, which is why Ariyike allows her to lead the choir.
Ariyike’s assistant tells her there is a young woman who wants to meet with her. She agrees.
Ariyike recognizes the girl as Alex, a worship leader in one of the University of Lagos campus churches; there aren’t many since it is hard for young women to advance in the church without a husband and because “Christian practice is very masculine” (249).
Alex asks Ariyike to talk to Pastor David so he will speak to the state governor—the father of her child. The last she heard from him, he had given her money to get an abortion. However, in the waiting room, she says she heard God say she should keep the baby. Now the baby needs heart surgery, and the governor has not returned her calls since he was born.
Ariyike yells at her, calling her naïve and saying that she is not the first girl to claim that God told her not to have an abortion. She is frustrated by the scandal this situation could bring for Rosetta and for the church. Then, Ariyike soothes Alex, quoting the Bible to help her have faith that her son will be okay.
Alex’s anger returns, and she claims everyone already knows, including Pastor David. She insists this is not the first time that Pastor David has facilitated a relationship between a young girl and a politician.
Ariyike sympathizes with her, thinking she has also done what she needed to in order to get ahead. However, claiming God told her not to have an abortion is too much. She thinks: “The kind of girl to fuck a married man is the kind of girl who gets a compulsory abortion. This is Lagos, not El Dorado. There is no happily-ever-after for her here” (254). Turning it on Alex, Ariyike tells her she had a choice, stunning Alex into shame. Ariyike thinks of an old Yoruba story, the moral of which is essentially that shame is female, and merit is male.
Ariyike feels guilty and admits that even in her faith, she is most interested in helping herself. However, she thinks of it as such because believing in Christianity this way, she is able to understand her own importance and that she deserves love.
Alex cries and Ariyike comforts her, convincing her to come to the church service the next day. After she leaves, Ariyike realizes the baby seemed unusually still. It didn’t make a sound or move.
Later, she meets with Rosetta and tells her about Alex. Rosetta already knows and reveals that Alex did actually get the abortion.
As she debates talking to Pastor David, Ariyike thinks of her grandmother. To her, Grandmother was cranky and only tolerable when telling stories. She realizes now that it is important to ask why the storyteller tells the story. Now that she is older, her perspective has changed on the story of Olokun, the goddess of the ocean.
Pastor David comes home and they have sex. Ariyike brings up Alex, and he chastises her, telling her she looks for scandal and ignores her role in the church. They argue and Pastor David reminds her that she is nothing without him.
She thinks of the first time she realized she was a physically separate person from Bibike and how that feeling defined her. It forced her to recognize how she was important in her own right. As a result, she says, “I am not a nobody and you are not God. You’re not the one writing my story” (269).
The next day, Ariyike and Pastor David arrive at church. When they do, Ariyike spots Alex waiting and tells her that Pastor David will speak with her.
The pastor’s assistant calls and says he hears screaming coming from Pastor David’s office, so Ariyike goes and finds him on the ground, bleeding from his penis because Alex shot him with a staple gun.
Ariyike reveals that the morning of her wedding day, she confirmed with her mother than Pastor David was behind Pastor Samuel’s scam of her family. Ariyike told her mother that she was marrying him for revenge and within five years, she would destroy his life. She thinks of a story in which a boy tricked a king to win a contest because of his cunning.
However, she never actually intended to ruin her husband. She did it for her gain, but she admits it has come at a price. She and Bibike have not spoken in three years. Her brothers are both in the U.S.
She closes the book by telling Alex “It is going to be okay, I promise” (276), while also saying that she is lying.
Part 4, Chapters 13-14 Analysis
It is fitting that Black Sunday ends with Bibike and Ariyike’s narration. Andrew and Peter are referenced as being in the United States, having achieved their peace with the consequences of their family’s decisions in Part 3. However, since living in a male-dominated society has played a major role in this book, Bibike and Ariyike needed to have one more section of their own.
The continuing themes of religion and storytelling more distinctly intertwine with themes of survival in Part 4. For Ariyike, the former provided a way to feel deserving of love, despite what she has done in order to survive and provide. Without Christianity, she would not have been able to see her own importance. She stopped trying to pretend that her “self-serving” nature was not the reason for her involvement, and, as a result, she was able to stand up to Pastor David and declare “I am not a nobody” (269).
For Bibike, storytelling also offered a lens through which she could view the world. However, she has grown past it, thinking of storytelling as ineffective and begins to carve out her own values. For her, this decision is how she achieves independence. It is why she chose not to accept Tunde’s marriage proposal. She wishes to find peace in doing for herself and her family what she can, but her identity is not tied to that. Rather, it is bound to her living up to standards she set for herself.
Because of the structure of Black Sunday, it is possible to compare Bibike and Ariyike as they develop, and Part 4’s focus on their narratives in particular brings that to the forefront. While they are twins, they have chosen different paths in life. Neither is better or worse. Because they each narrate their own chapters, their lives are put up for judgment. However, the readers are able to examine the reasons each sister makes their decisions. In Part 1, they are “the same sad the same angry the same afraid” (20), but after that, their paths diverge. Ariyike doesn’t think Bibike should hang out with Aminat and At first, Bibike does not feel the same, but ultimately, she recognizes how different she and her sister have become. Ariyike understands that her choices have come at the cost of her relationship with her twin and that this was the price of survival.
In the end, both women find some redemption, though Ariyike is more pessimistic about the future. She has accepted that she lives in a patriarchal society, and while she stood up to Pastor David—which was important for her own personal development—she does not fully believe everything will resolve afterwards, knowing she is lying when she tells Alex that everything will be alright. Bibike has carved out a space for herself in which she feels independent. This distinction is signified in the fact that the sisters are twins but see the world differently. As a result, Black Sunday offers half a resolution. The reader gets only slices of the sisters’ lives, and it is unclear what will happen next. Ariyike’s almost inadvertent revenge on Pastor David brings the novel full circle, returning to the source of their misfortune from the first section. Bibike closes out the novel with the return (and death of) their father. However, as mentioned above, two very different women exist in comparison with their younger selves.
By finishing both with Ariyike’s triumph and belief that everything will not be okay, Black Sunday concludes as a portrait of life in Lagos and what two women may need to do in order to survive there. Both Ariyike and Bibike resisted the patriarchal elements of their lives as much as possible, but Ariyike still believes she lives in a man’s world. Even her religion is led by male figures. Bibike resists this idea more, refusing to depend on Tunde by saying no to his proposal and working to keep her grandmother’s home and legacy. Readers are privy to these differing perspectives, but the question of how to survive in such a world remains.
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