Hello, African Scholars,
Please use this blog site to post your comments on Reading the Ceiling, Prologue and Part One. Please reflect on and connect with the novel. The main character is close to your age. What do you have in common with her? In what ways is her life quite different from yours? How do her thoughts compare with your thoughts? Her potential futures with yours? The original assignment sheet, which has more suggestions, is attached here: Reading the Ceiling Assignments 2. Your first comment is due April 29, and the second, on Parts Two and Three, on May 13.
My life and the life of Ayodele run many paralles, yet at the same time there are experiences that are vastly different. For example, Ayodele and I, being around the same age, both face the questions of adulthood and what will become of us in the upcoming years. This is highly common among teenagers, as they are faced with life changing decision such as their career and college choices. Not only are we faced with the decisions influencing our professional life, but also our personal life. Adolescence is a time for girls to become women, they decide who they are and what their interests are. There is also a huge focus on sexuality and how it is portrayed and interpreted by young people. Ayodele encouters this along with American teenagers. Unfortunately, Ayodele is faced with a deadline for this deed which forces her to make a decision she is not prepared for. And there is a huge contradiction between what her mother believes and what society and her friends believe. I am thankful i am not faced with deadlines involving my sexual experience, and am free to make decisions for me on my own time. It is very interesting how people claim that American overemphasizes sex, but then in other cultures there is just as much emphasis. And in other cultures there are societal pressures that are part of a culture which force this young girl to make decisions she is ready. In this sense, our cultures are similar and overlap in ideals. I am also similar to Ayodele in the sense that i am somewhat reserved when i am put into large groups of people, and am not always the most outgoing person. This relates to Ayodele because she is pretty quite and reserved a lot.
Throughout this book i find myself looking at Ayodele amd agreeing with her and disagreeing with her. Just like Ayodele I am lost. What will i do when i grow up? Who will i love etc. All the thoughts, reactions and emotions Ayodele feels throughout the book is perfectly normal. She is trying to find herself just like any young adult and how she fits in society. Just like many young adults, like myself, she gets distracted with boys and her feelings. Everyone wants to feel accepted in some sort of way, the reason why so many people are in relationships, in my opinion, is because we all love that feeling knowing that someone out there likes you as much as you like them. Every teenager wants that feeling so when Ayodele finds it she gets attached. Attachment is good but it is also dangerous and leads to heartache. Which unfortunely Ayodele continues to feel.
Regina, you make a really good point about the need for attachment – wanting to be wanted. Ayodele seems really ambivalent in her feelings about this to me – she wants love, but she settles (in the first section, anyway) for meaningless sex. Is this a defense mechanism of some sort? Not sure!
I think what Ayodele experiences is similar to many teenagers. I know the question floats around people I know and no one ever agrees on whether or not to have sex is a good decision in whatever situation. I mean, in a sense I sort of feel like Ayodele making the decision herself is even smarter, because only you can know when you’re truly ready. That said, by my own personal morals and standards I do not agree that she was ready, but I can understand the motivation to avoid other kinds of guidance that are only so confusing. I also can understand, when people around you are growing up and having experiences, to have those experiences too at whatever the cost. So many times I have seen people feel and also myself have felt left out. But in attempts to gain these experiences we leave out the essence of what they are exactly. I don’t think that her decision is a healthy one, but I totally understand the motivations behind it and I have seen my own friends make similar decisions, not necessarily regarding sex, that make them miss a true experience in order to eliminate something from their bucket list, so to speak.
It is really interesting to me that the decision to her that matters the most, and that in the book, shape her three different lives, is the sex decision. For one thing, it makes me think about sex in a much more serious way since her future was so altered depending on the partner. But for me, the next huge decision I’m expecting to make is college, regardless of what sexual experiences I have leading up to it. In the book I don’t know if it is the culture that is pressuring her to consider sex to be a life altering act, but I sort of feel as if she could have viewed the college future as an equally if not more important decision, so it’s interesting to me that she chose sex.
I think the impulsive and non-thorough way Ayodele makes major decisions is a self defense mechanism. Agonizing over which boy to sleep with did not yield the results that Ayodele wanted – she did not end up feeling as mature or as satisfied as she wanted to. So deciding to go to college so far away without giving it as much thought as you would think a person would when living so far from home was a way for Ayodele to just make a decision and not agonize over it. If you think about it, you cannot really blame yourself for making a certain decision if you don’t feel like you really made the decision for yourself. I myself hate making decisions and I realize making decisions for college is in some sense going to be painful for me. It is so much work to sit down and think really hard about what will happen in your future, and it is really scary. I think her passive attitude ends up landing her in situations in which she is not as happy as she could be, and it also makes her more reluctant to get over Kamal, because she cannot actively think about decisions that will get her out of the rut she falls into by getting dumped. It seems to me as if Ayodele could benefit from being told that the easiest path is not always the best path, or indeed the true easiest path for that matter.
Lula, you’ve done a thorough job of analyzing Ayodele’s decision-making. I share your view that she seems to be focusing on the wrong kind of decision, but perhaps it’s the one place she feels that she has some control, since her college future is not really in her hands and her mother seeks to influence her in most other ways. I can’t help feeling that her decision really has little to do with sex.
Ayodele is a very strong-willed character. She knows what she wants and she makes elaborate plans to get it. She also seems very confident, in the way she can influence men and the way she has grown up to be a good head-of-household. On her 18th birthday, all she is concerned about is becoming a woman and, in her mind, that means losing her virginity. She just has to make up her mind as to with whom she will lose it to (in my opinion, if she is having a hard time decided with whom she’s going to have sex with, she is definitely not ready). To Ayodele, losing her virginity on her birthday will prove to herself that she is not a child anymore. I think this is a very common mindset of many teenagers. Though most people probably don’t make their 18th birthday a deadline for doing the “deed,” teenagers are constantly bombarded with pressure to lose their virginity, whether it be from peers or the media. In American media, sex is glorified and commercialized to sell products and boost ratings, which totally smothers it’s real value. Reading about Ayodele’s mindset makes me wonder how sex is portrayed in Western Africa, and what caused her to think that sex is so important in growing up. While reading this book, I realized that there is a lot of pressure from Ayodele’s mother to start a family of her own and fit into the “ideal” woman’s role, which centers around family and providing for the husband. I wonder how that translates into Ayodele’s eagerness to lose her virginity, especially since she seems reluctant to go down the traditional path.
I noticed that Ayodele seems to think that the man that she is with will determine how her life will play out, and who she will be. I think that she should realize that the only person who can control her life is herself, and that she shouldn’t have to choose a man that will force her into any sort of life she doesn’t want.
I think Ayodele needed you around to advise her, Mel. In response to your last point about her being in control of her own life, independent of any man, I suspect that that is the idea she is groping toward, but the choice of a sex partner may seem to her like her only option for exerting control. Not a good way to demonstrate independence, for sure, but she seems caught between two ideas of womanhood. Great comment – I hope you’re enjoying the book.
One thing Ayodele and I have in common is the theme of maturation and growing up. She is surrounded by others, like her friends, growing up around her and making decisions about their futures (such as education and partners). Because I am also at a similar age, I am also experiencing the need to make potentially life changing decisions, like about college and career, that can shape my future. In my head, just like Ayodele, I can see many different futures. However unlike Ayodele, I am not surrounded (fortunately) by the pressures of “the deed”. I think what she’s dealing with seems much more almost stressful but at the same time typical. And while her friends don’t seem to have a problem with it, her mother does. Ayodele’s mom tells her to stay away from men – that they only want one thing and when they get it, they’ll leave. I am not subject to that kind of opinion/belief. Both my parents do not group all men into one category, or distrust/dislike them.
I do think Ayodele’s and my thoughts are very similar. I find myself constantly questioning both my actions as well how others perceive me, just like Ayodele does. But unlike myself, many of Ayodeles thoughts have to do with her potential sexual/life partners. Her thoughts are more focused on that aspect of her life – which also has to do with her future. Like I mentioned before, we both question/worry about our future education. Ayodele tends to focus on who she is going to end up with and what her life will be like as a whole, more than I I do. But because we 17 & 18 respectively, we share the simple/standard universal questions about our future that young adults have.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Greta. Given all of the big decisions that Ayodele faces as she leaves high school, it does seem a bit odd that she focuses on “getting The Deed over with.” Perhaps she feels that this is the only decision about her future that she can control – if and where she will go to college seems to be up to others, and the alternative, traditional marriage, seems like a well-worn path. Is her big decision an act of rebellion, then? Perhaps.
Ayodele and I have similar Mom’s in certain ways. Ayodele’s mother is kind to her, yet expectant. She is also protective with and a bit awkward with sexual issues. My mom can sometimes be awkward when I speak about boys, and she is very protective. Ayodele seems so be very self-conscious and quite sometimes too, which reminds me of myself. When I’m in a large group of very talkative people, I tend to keep to shrink back a bit, unlike when I’m with someone alone, I like to start the conversation. Ayodele seems very quite, and waits for other people to talk like when they were in the canoes.
Her life is different from mine in that she has a set time to have sex at 18 in order to “become a woman.” If that was my case, I don’t know if I could handle that task as casually as Ayodele did. She just had a list of men she wanted to use to get it over with, and chose one that she didn’t even like too much in the end. In my case, I wouldn’t be able to choose so quickly. I would wait until I found the right man.
We are all pressured with life-changing decisions, but Ayodele and her friends seem to have it much harder than us. They know they have to leave their families to go to a good college. As long as they get a good education, things turn out alright, but if not, they seem to bring shame to their family. Ayodele is strong, and I have faith that she will make the best decision for herself in the future.
You’ve made some interesting connections, Rosa. Ayodele does seem like a very familiar character despite the differences in culture. You make a good point, though, that going away to college is a much bigger deal for her – at the time, there were no universities in The Gambia (there’s only one even now). I agree that her decision seems very casual – not even very calculated – just something she has to do to assert her adulthood, I guess!