Synopsis
Widows in the Web of Grief explores the psychological pain and trauma women experience in their daily lives after the deaths of their husbands. The most grievous pain that tortures their bitter hearts occurs when they have no children to warm their homes and to care for them in their old age. They are generally the first to be accused of the deaths of their husbands, should the death occur under suspicious circumstances; forced to confess to sins that they might have committed while their husbands were alive; forced to drink libation water, stripped naked, and raped through a ritual cleansing; and locked indoors with the bodies of their dead husbands for days, a deeply traumatic experience that also exposes them to illness. Since society does not listen to the teachings of the clergymen, the author C.E.F. Nwaiwu uses divine power as the deus ex machina to rescue the widows from their cyclical web of unspeakable grief and to drive the people to obey a divine order from the Holy Writ, thereby abolishing their barbaric customs.
This novel centres on three women, Adanma, Nworie and Onyebuenyi, who are abandoned by their husband Dede Okoro, fondly called Fafor, due to unrelenting pressure from the parish priest, Criswell. The clergyman believes that a man ought not to have more than one wife. For Dede Okoro, a new convert, to be enshrined into the Christian faith, he must choose one of his four wives to marry in a white wedding, and divorce the others. Since the parish priest does not know much about the people's culture, Dede Okoro feigns obeisance and then sends his other three wives away to their parents' homes in the early morning. In the people's culture, this indicates that he has not in fact divorced them. Years later, Dede Okoro dies with no one to care for him as his first wife Aluonye has been taken away to an herbalist to cure her illness. The three other widows return home to face the challenges, griefs and pains of widowhood. They are isolated like lepers and become the objects of ridicule in their society. They are subjected to a brutal series of rituals. Their hair is shaved off, and they are forced to drink libation water to purge them of the sins they may have committed when their husband was alive. They are stripped naked, kept indoors with their dead husband’s body, and forced to undergo a humiliating ritual cleansing through sexual abuse, which is believed to exorcise the spirit of the dead from them. But the men who abuse them in the name of this barbaric ritual cleansing reap the doom of madness and death. Òbia, the expected levir, dies in the act of performing the widows’ ritual cleansing while the other men, Aham and Ikem, become mad from the anger of Dede Okoro's spirit. With Òbia dead, the widows are relinquished to marry the nearest kinsman, Chinedu. As Chinedu ventures to pass the night with Onyebuenyi, the youngest widow, he expires. Fear grips the hearts of the people. The next man to inherit the widows as the levirate law demands sees the widows as his deathbed and fears marrying them. He believes the widows should be burnt alive. The widows run away to hide themselves in the sanctuary of God for protection. This religious harlotry is frown upon and is forbidden in the people’s culture. The experts in the custom order that the widows should be immolated. Sam, a station pastor, cannot send the faceless men who make this order away as he is threatened with death. The widows then face prosecution. They are stripped naked, tied up, bundles of firewood are heaped on them, tyres are hung around their necks, and gallons of fuel are poured on them to sacrifice them to the gods of the land. At this point of their despair, they surrender their lives to Christ, and pray for the forgiveness of their sins. They also pray for God to deliver them from their vitiating predicament, since it is in their faith to serve him and denounce the custom for which they are being sentenced for immolation. But the fire prepared for them consumes the twenty-four elders who circle them as witnesses to their deaths, and their lives are spared. This miraculous power of God stuns the hearts of the unbelievers, and each turns to God.
