His Only Wife

“I desperately wanted the wedding to be over because then I would have done my part. Or, rather, I would have begun to do my part.”

Afi agrees to marry Eli to fulfill her familial and cultural duties. Therefore, she regards her wedding ceremony as an important crossroads. She hopes that making the union official will liberate her from her responsibilities to Olivia and Aunty Faustina Ganyo. However, the second fragmented sentence of the quotation foreshadows all that Afi’s arranged marriage will require of her. Her duties are not finished with the wedding; thus, the ceremony is an omen of conflicts to come.

“She didn’t have to say that at present my place was being occupied by the Liberian woman, a woman who wasn’t Eli’s wife, who despised his family, who looked down on our ways. She didn’t have to say it because we all knew. It was what kept us up at night, what woke us up with a start at dawn. It was the problem I had been chosen to solve.”

The Ganyos’ reason for arranging Afi and Eli’s marriage is the inciting event of the novel. Afi is not simply marrying Eli to make her mother and new mother-in-law happy. Rather, her new role requires her to amend the Ganyo family’s deeper conflicts. As a result, Muna becomes the antagonist of Afi’s story. Afi is compelled to blame another woman for Eli’s neglect and the Ganyos’ pressures rather than holding Eli responsible due to the way the Ganyos attribute agency over their son’s choices to his lover.

“Look, I’m already tired with all this marriage business—church marriage, marriage in the registrar’s office, traditional marriage. I feel like I need to read a book to understand it all.”

Afi’s work to understand the Dynamics of Arranged Marriage unsettles her narrative world and account. Afi knows that marrying a man she hardly knows is complicated.