Novel
Coming to Birth
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye · 1986
Synopsis
In 1956, the year martial law came down on Kenya, Paulina leaves her Luo village at sixteen to join in Nairobi Martin, the husband she has been given. Pregnant, frightened by the big city, she loses her child; further miscarriages follow, and Martin, a man under pressure rather than a brute, beats her for nothing. When the marriage becomes untenable, she leaves for Kisumu, where she earns her living teaching sewing to women, and falls in love with a married man by whom she has a son. Her life moves at the pace of the country's.
Context
Crowned with the Sinclair Prize, the novel is the author's best-known work. It follows Paulina's life from 1956 to 1978, matching it to the stages of Kenyan history, from the state of emergency to the years of independence. Graham Hough, in the London Review of Books, saw in it not a feminist novel but a striking statement of the women's cause; Adewale Maja-Pearce, in the Times Literary Supplement, praised its language while judging the political burden carried by the couple too heavy. It was reissued in New York in 2000.
Who it is for
For those who like coming-of-age novels with a female protagonist, where a woman's life is bound up with the history of a country.
Prizes and reception
Winner of the Sinclair Prize and reissued in the United States in 2000, it remains the book by which its author is known.