4 ideas
In 1980s Ilesa, Akin cannot consummate his marriage to Yejide. He hides this and secretly arranges for his younger brother Dotun to sleep with her so she will conceive, while his family blames Yejide for their childlessness and installs a second wife, Funmi. The children Yejide bears are Dotun's, and the truth comes out only after deaths, a separation, and years of estrangement.
When a community treats a married couple's childlessness as the wife's failing and the husband's virility as beyond question, the man with the actual problem has every incentive to conceal it. The pressure does not produce children. It produces lies, and each lie needs another to protect it, until the concealment does more damage than the original condition would have done.
Yoruba tradition explains repeated infant deaths as the abiku, a spirit child who keeps dying and returning, so a mother is urged to mark the child or refuse to love it. The novel places this belief beside sickle cell disease. The same pattern of loss can be read as spiritual rejection or as inherited biology, and each reading assigns guilt and prescribes grief differently.
Under intense social pressure to conceive, Yejide visits a mountain prophet, performs a ritual with a goat, and then carries a pseudocyesis (phantom pregnancy) for months, her body showing symptoms while her womb is empty. Her need to be believed pregnant and the community's appetite for miracles combine to override medical evidence. When a desperate belief is widely rewarded, it can manifest physically.