'No God Like the Mother': Stories honoring motherhood

Kesha Ajose-Fisher's award-winning collection has been re-released in a gorgeous new edition.

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I first picked up Kesha Ajose-Fisher’s debut story collection, “No God Like the Mother,” when it came out in 2019. The nine stories, set in Nigeria, the United States and elsewhere, start with motherhood and radiate out from there to explore its challenges. Ajose-Fisher said in an interview in Urban in 2020 that one of her goals was to “be as brutally honest as possible about what it takes to be female in this world.”

“No God Like the Mother” won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for fiction. Now it’s been re-released in a gorgeous new edition from Forest Avenue Press that includes a readers’ guide and an updated glossary of the Nigerian pidgin used in the book. I read it again, and found it as moving as the first time.

Ajose-Fisher is American — she was born in Chicago and now lives in Portland, Oregon — but grew up in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city and former capital. That experience infuses her collection, from the title story, about a young girl whose mother follows a traditional Nigerian custom to give birth, to the final one, “In Her Shoes,” a searing tale about another girl whose mother betrays her.

The stories are spare, in the sense that they pack much emotion and complexity into few words:

That night, a sharp wailing sound woke Josephine. It was not Tia’s cry, and it could not be the tremors next to Josephine’s heart — that angst had gone mute for a couple of years now.

Those lines come from “Nobody’s Child,” a story about a teenager whose mother kicks her out of the house for getting pregnant after a random encounter at a party. In another story, “Sleep,” a traumatized mother struggles through her day:

I crawl to a halt outside my boy’s bedroom door. I sit in the doorway wondering where to start. It is foggy inside my head again. I curl into a ball. I cannot bring myself to stand. My bones will not unravel. Only my tears move.

“No God Like the Mother” may be fiction, but it draws deeply from the truth of women’s experiences. Wikh Ajose-Fisher’s skill in evoking character and sense of place as well, it’s no wonder this collection is a winner.