Reviewing Women’s Resilience in ‘Adanna’ by Adesuwa O’man Nwokedi

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Summary: Adanna is the story of Adanna, a teenage girl whose dreams of being educated and future ambition as an employee at NASA are shattered after her father’s sudden death. To save her family from extreme economic hardship and pay for her younger sister’s medical care, she is forced into a marriage with Chief Arinze Nsofor, a wealthy man old enough to be her grandfather.  

Adesuwa O’man Nwokedi’s novel,  Adanna (2020), is a deep, traumatising, uncomfortable read that spans across 474 pages, exploring horrific intergenerational sexual abuse, physical violence, forced marriage, patriarchy, and resilience. While many readers seemingly see the novel as a romance/thriller, Nwokedi presents a story where the female body is treated as a transactional commodity, and the home becomes a patriarchal prison. Her novel addresses the cultural norm of sweeping domestic violence/abuse and child marriages under the rug.

The story follows the life of Adanna, a teenage girl whose dreams of being educated and working at NASA are shattered after her father’s sudden death. To save her family from extreme economic hardship and pay for her younger sister’s medical care, she is forced into a marriage with Chief Arinze Nsofor, a wealthy man old enough to be her grandfather. 

For two decades, Adanna endures sexual and physical abuse orchestrated by her husband and his vicious eldest son, Akanna. The narrative takes a dramatic turn when Chief Nsofor is murdered, and she becomes the primary suspect due to her years of suffering and abuse.

The dynamic characters of Chief Nsofor and Akanna brilliantly portray the unchecked nature of absolute male entitlement. While the former is a dictator who lived and enjoyed the culture of silence wrapped in the respectability of marital privacy and the enforcement of wifely submission, the latter is an egocentric man who abused power for his benefit. Their characters expose the power culture gives to men in the contemporary patriarchal society. While Adanna endures endless suffering and is stripped of her autonomy, society demands she remain a dutiful wife. 

Child abuse is not a mere collection of unfortunate crimes or circumstances; it is a structural byproduct of patriarchy. In the novel, Adanna is forced to marry Chief Nsofor at the age of sixteen. This coerced union is a reflection of child abuse as explicitly manifested through nonconsent, systemic domestic victimisation, societal pressure to preserve family honour, and the burden to save the family as expected of the girl’s child. While some readers may feel frustrated and angry at Adanna being a passive, flat character, her character vividly shows the reality of victims of sexual assault. They rarely express their emotions and lack the resources to escape their prison. Yet, society unfairly judges them, jeopardising the path to their healing. 

From the early chapters of the novel, Nwokedi established patriarchy as a comprehensive, systematic oppression sustained by socio-economic and cultural laws and designed to subjugate women. For instance, when Adanna’s father dies, the family collapses because in a patriarchal structure, wealth and systemic protections flow predominantly through male heads of households. Without him, Adanna’s mother is left completely disenfranchised and unable to shield her children from poverty. The result is Adanna’s discarded dreams of an education and future ambition at NASA. Her body becomes the currency her family has to clear their debts and fund her sister’s medical treatment. In addition, the author illustrates how patriarchy can be hereditary. Akanna, Chief Nsofor’s eldest son, inherits this sense of absolute male dominance. He inflicts severe physical and sexual violence on Adanna, knowing that the structural dynamics of the household inherently silence the victim and protect the male aggressors.

The murder of Chief Nsofor is a literal and symbolic collapse of patriarchal tyranny. Because the legal system, traditional customs, and community structures failed to offer protection to the oppressed individuals within the household, Nwokedi suggests that liberation can only occur through the total physical elimination of the oppressor. Also, the fact that nearly everyone in the household becomes a suspect proves that Chief Nsofor’s patriarchal abuse was all-encompassing, destroying his relationships with his children and wives.

In Adanna, the theme of women’s resilience is stripped of all romanticism and heroic traits. Instead, it is presented as a raw depiction of how women adapt to survive when they are completely abandoned by society, legal, and cultural institutions. The casual reader might see Adanna as a passive, annoying, and traumatic character. 

However, a feminist analysis reveals her endurance as a calculated form of resilience. While her environment breathes danger and death due to Chief Nsofor’s and Akanna’s dominance, Adanna’s resilience manifests as a quiet, stubborn refusal to let the abuse completely destroy her life. Her primary goal is to outlast the tyranny. Subsequently, her resilience deconstructs the strong black woman mentality that suffers endlessly without trauma. By showing Adanna’s vulnerability, the author argues that women’s resilience is not a superpower; it’s a heavy burden forced upon them by the patriarchal system. 

Ultimately, Adanna leaves us with an urgent, lingering challenge to dismantle the systemic structures of economic disenfranchisement, cultural silence, and male entitlement that trap girls and women in endless suffering and pain. While it’s a traumatising story, it’s also an unforgettable testament to the fact that a woman’s right to her body, mind, and future is always worth fighting for, no matter how terrifying the battlefield.