AWARD-winning writer Bunmi Oyinsan delivers a masterclass in storytelling with her latest novel, A Ladder of Bones, plunging readers into a weighty emotional landscape. Since the publication of her first novel, Silhouette (which was also serialized on national television), Oyinsan has consistently demonstrated a formidable ability to craft narratives that deftly balance social criticism, commentary, and compelling fiction. A Ladder of Bones continues this trajectory, brilliantly employing intertextuality to engage deeply with history.
In A Ladder of Bones, Oyinsan seamlessly blends Yoruba folktales, iconic works like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and reimagined historical figures (whose cameo appearances add significant depth) to illuminate the contexts of her five pivotal characters: Enilolobo (Eni), Siaka, Melvin, Iona, and Timothy. These individuals, each bearing unique and profound experiences, find their lives intersecting in Halifax, Canada, as they volunteer for an aid mission in a troubled African country. However, their humanitarian effort takes a grim turn when Melvin, a Liberian boy scarred by his parents’ militia-led murder, organises a gang ambush. Despite the volunteers’ peaceful intent, this sudden act of violence plunges them back into familiar patterns of conflict and trauma.
Despite the complex ideas A Ladder of Bones explores, a commendable achievement of the novel is the way it seamlessly entwines its characters’ arcs into a broader social dilemma and a tight plot. Oyinsan does a masterful job of navigating the complex debates surrounding immigrant life, refugee resettlement, and the haunting re-emergence of the transatlantic slave trade, which manifests as the contemporary Mediterranean migration conundrum. Moreover, through the imagined geography of Ilu-Ife, the novel offers a potent metaphor for African countries, delivering a trenchant critique of their systems of cronyism and gangsterism in governance, especially apparent in Enilolobo’s life as an activist. This expansive scope provides a varied and balanced overview of the trauma the Black body carries across the globe. Yet, while such a multiplicity of heavy themes might typically render a short novel dense and unreadable, Oyinsan’s key success is the remarkable effectiveness of her well-balanced and intricately knitted narrative structure. A Ladder of Bones is rich with significant metaphors that demonstrate the brilliance of the writer, demanding attentiveness from its readers as its narration unfolds. The novel is divided into four parts and an epilogue.
Part One, titled “Miry Burr,” introduces us to Eni, Siaka, and Melvin. The title itself is a potent metaphor for a world that clings stubbornly to them, even as they strive to escape its messy, inescapable grip. This entanglement is evident from the first character we meet, Eni. When she lands in the middle of a Halifax street, unaware that her life will entwine with a past stretching back to her enslavement, stolen with her twin and sold by trusted kin, it sets the stage for a narrative that spans lifetimes, including her reincarnation as Toluwanile Jagunlabi. In each reincarnated form and with a new name, Eni attempts to reclaim her past and challenge its erasure. The author’s apt descriptions make her leap from the page: we see her “scrawny, brown skin, and confused self in those eyes ‘set and huge, like minuscule saucers,’” or in the hair that “sags her surprisingly thick neck.” Around her wrists, “a thick band of keloids” serves as a stark marker of a previous enslaved life. These evocative descriptions are accompanied by subtle turns of phrase that balance imagined and real settings, such as Britain becoming “a veritable trail mix” – a vivid and relatable, slightly whimsical metaphor to capture diversity and multiculturalism. The novel’s language, perhaps, lifts off slowly, but gains incredible momentum and depth as the story unfolds, pulling the reader into its intricate world.
We then encounter Siaka and Melvin, both victims of the violence that erupted to steal their childhood innocence. Siaka was conscripted into the army before he could understand its meaning, while Melvin witnessed his parents’ murder, endured bullying that landed him in prison, and was deported back to Liberia, the very place he fled, hoping life would offer a different path.
The novel’s subsequent sections, “Part Two: Migration (Journey to a Place Where Dreams Go to Die)” and “Part Three: Home Place (A Habitat That is Carried in One’s Soul),” introduce Iona and Timothy. Iona, brought to Canada from Jamaica where she lived with her grandmother, is abandoned by her mother, who struggles with addiction, and a father who is trying to find himself by reclaiming his identity through a return to Africa. Timothy, despite being rescued from a refugee camp, cannot shed the enduring burden of “home.”
By the time we reach “Part Four: Can Dry Bones Live Again,” the connections between these singular lives become apparent. What ultimately binds them is the overwhelming weight of their pasts. While the plot resolution revolves around the volunteer initiative as the intersection of their experiences, the complexities of their lives stretch into a world that often seems to have no place for them. Her characters, in their attempts to reinvent themselves, inevitably fall into traps of racism, social structures that actively reinforce their erasure, and a myriad of other complexities intricately depicted throughout their journeys.
In this novel, both imagined geographies like Ile-Ifa and real places like Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Canada play crucial roles. Ile-Ifa, a place where destinies are divined with the hope for acceptance, consistently yields returns to lands where oppression has sapped humanity. Ile-Ifa, in this context, becomes the reflective lens for African countries. It could be any one of them. Oyinsan’s command of storytelling is undeniable; whether depicting the life of a resettled refugee in Canada, memories of slavery, or the realities of Africa across the dense tapestry of her themes, she masterfully builds and establishes her characters to unveil the narrative. A Ladder of Bones, structurally and thematically, through its characters, meticulously charts the ascent of trauma and its enduring remnants across generations. It powerfully illustrates that the present often reinvents the hardships of those who came before, shaping a gruelling path that relentlessly returns. Simply put, progress remains profoundly conditioned by oppression for the Black experience. Significantly, the novel’s major triumph is its successful interconnectedness of Black lives across Africa and the diaspora, emphasising that none are truly free.
Symbolism permeates the novel’s encounters. These encounters serve as glaring revelations: they illuminate how deeply ingrained oppression and survival instincts become, and the persistent imperative for Black bodies to seek new ground. Yet, the narrative powerfully conveys that from this foundational trauma, there is, in fact, no true escape. One particularly poignant moment arises in the Epilogue, when Iyin recognises Eni, appearing in a new form as a boy who is revealed to be Toluwanile Jagunlabi among African migrants adrift at sea. Although the reader is left to deduce what to make of the lived experiences of these characters, we are subtly shown how traumatic situations of ancestors are reincarnated into new lives. The novel’s core message culminates in a powerful, unsettling exchange. When Iyin’s mother recognises Eni, the two-navel girl from her Halifax past, now seen on television as a migrant boy, their dialogue serves as a devastating summation of the book’s central truth:
“But you said the girl did not harm anyone. You said that, when she spoke to you, she was gentle and did not threaten you in any way.” Iyin nodded, and her mother pivoted her head sorrowfully. “Humph,” her mother said, sighing deeply. “This boy that I just saw does not come in peace.”
This dialogue directly underscores a chilling reality: the Black body is viewed as inherently disruptive, no matter where it lands. This theme becomes most significant when we consider it alongside the name, “Enilolobo” – meaning “it is the one who left that has returned.” The name, based on the themes and the recurring trauma of the characters in the novel, highlights a Freudian operation of trauma on the psychic, revealing its cyclical and complex nature that continues to disrupt personalities and generations unborn. Eni, Siaka, Melvin, Iona, and Timothy are different people, but they are reincarnations of a legacy of violence and historical disruption that has reshaped whatever future they hold in view.
Significantly, for the portrayal of personal, racial, and regional trauma, Oyinsan understands the role of language in a work like this, and when she needs to be visceral, it is done with an affecting significance. For example, her depiction of the image of a child suckling its mother’s breast after a city was ravaged draws out the reader’s soul. The true success of this book lies in its ability to achieve the unity of elements typically found in a short story within the expansive form of a novel. It is a difficult, but profoundly important read. There is a strong chance the reader will return to it more than once.