In your story “The Case for and Against Love Potions,” a villager counsels a woman on the pros and cons of using love potions to win over a resistant love interest. What inspired the narrative?
I once asked my mother, when I was a girl, if love potions were real, and she told me an interesting story. She said that in a village in Cameroon, where we used to live, there was a wife who was completely dominant over her husband. People could not understand why the man seemed so powerless, and many thought that his wife had used a love potion, which we call a “charm” in Cameroon. So that set off my initial fascination with the idea.
I also grew up at a time when it was not uncommon for people in Cameroon to go to a fetish priest when they had problems they couldn’t solve themselves: they had been trying for years to have a baby, or to get a great job, or they wanted a lightning bolt to strike their enemy dead. Stories circulated of people who had turned to a fetish priest (or a “ngambe man,” as we called them) for help, but something had gone wrong and madness had ensued. My family was religious, so we generally stayed away from such practices; perhaps that was what egged on my curiosity, because I always wondered what it would be like to rely on potions and concoctions to give you your heart’s desire. I don’t know anyone who actually used a love potion, but I know quite a bit about crazy things people have done to make someone love them, and I leaned on that for the story.
The story is told as a first-person speech, delivered to an offscreen (so to speak) character. Who is your narrator? Why did you choose to tell the story from his point of view?
As with pretty much all of my writing, I didn’t give much thought to how I should go about telling the story—I simply started writing and let it unfold. The moment I wrote the first line, I heard this middle-aged West African man, who is quite the know-it-all. He thinks highly of himself and his wisdom, and he is delighted to impart his knowledge to a younger person. As I wrote further, I became fascinated with his sort of thoughtless sexism, even while talking about a woman he cares about. I’ve spent a great deal of time around men like this narrator, who think they are entirely justified in speaking carelessly about a woman’s body and what happens to her as she gets older. He is also a proponent of the patriarchal order, so he is, in a way, telling the story in a manner that seeks to justify and uphold that order.
Why has this young woman turned to him for advice?
Desperation. She is yearning for love and believes that someone like the narrator can offer her some guidance. That is another consequence of growing up in a patriarchal society, like the one in which I grew up, where age and gender are believed to be tied to wisdom. Men are considered wiser than women, and older people are wiser than younger people, so who could be wiser than an old man? I don’t dismiss the age part, because I know I’ve certainly got wiser with age, but the young listener may not know that gender and wisdom are not always related.
Where is the story set? In an actual contemporary (or historical) African village or in an imaginary place?
It is set in an imaginary African village, in the eighties. I spent my early childhood in a couple villages where my mother worked as a community-development assistant, though those villages were fairly modern and some homes had electricity and TV.
The society you’re writing about is, as you said, a patriarchal one, in which a woman’s life is considered pointless unless she has “the high honor of being called a wife.” Are love potions a kind of feminist device in this world—a way for a woman to assume some control over her own destiny? Or are they just another way of playing into the social order?
I think the narrator would like to believe that a love potion is a feminist device, because it allows a woman to gain some agency. But I would argue that it is the opposite, because it puts a man (or a husband) at the center of a woman’s life. Why doesn’t a fetish priest create a potion to make a woman feel good about herself with or without a man? Though I should add that this story is not only about women seeking love but about the human need to love and be loved in return. History abounds with stories about the lengths to which some men have gone to win the love of a woman. Perhaps it’s a good thing that love potions are not common—otherwise we would miss out on many great stories of unrequited love.
What do you think the narrator’s belief in love potions says about the world in which he is living?
It says something about the acceptance of the supernatural in his village. I was quite surprised when I came to the U.S. and told my new friends about supernatural events in my town and they laughed incredulously. I suppose there were logical explanations for why a man suddenly became wealthy after his child’s mysterious death, but in my homeland people were quick to believe that it was because he had offered his child’s life to an occult called Nyongo and the occult had given him riches in return.
It’s interesting to see the lengths to which the parents in the story go to find spouses for their children. What was your inspiration for that?
I believe parents’ wanting their children to get married is universal, but, yes, some parents take it too far. Both tactics that I had Bulu’s parents try were inspired by people I knew. When I was a teen-ager, I overheard a neighbor telling some adult relatives of mine that, as a young man, he took too long to find a wife, so one day his parents arrived on his doorstep with one. Interestingly, his account didn’t seem to shock any of his listeners. The part about Bulu’s “caging” was inspired by a friend, a fellow African immigrant, who told me that, after years of living in America, he went to his village for a visit, and his parents, displeased with the fact that he was still single, got a bunch of young women together and put them in a lineup. Unlike Bulu, he did not “break the cage.”
The story actually contains two stories—one involving the failed use of a love potion and one involving a successful case. Why did you decide to structure it that way?
The first draft of the story was very short, less than a quarter of the final version. It was all about Wonja, and yet I gave it the title “The Case for and Against Love Potions.” After several drafts, I realized that the title did not exactly fit the story, because Wonja’s ordeal was only a case against. So I wrote Gita’s story to balance it out and make the title fit. I suppose one could say that I had a title I loved and it forced me to structure the story this way.
Your second novel, “How Beautiful We Were,” was published last week. Does the story relate to it in some way? Did you write the story while working on the novel?
This story was originally an outtake from “How Beautiful We Were.” Because I wrote the novel in the course of many years, characters came and went from it, and one of the characters I had to let go of had used a love potion to disastrous effect. Though I had cut out the character, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of love potions, so I decided to write a separate short story. The village in this story bears a lot of similarities to Kosawa, the village in my novel—because I love Kosawa so much, I’m having a hard time leaving it.
"Love" - Google News
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Imbolo Mbue on Sexism and Love Potions - The New Yorker
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