The Brooklyn Rail

There are lessons to be learned in Tolani Akinola’s debut novel, Leave Your Mess at Home. The book, which is intimate and wide-spanning all at once, follows four adult siblings—the failed social media influencer; her brother, the soon-to-be father; his sister, the baby gay; and her sister, the girl in love with her best friend—as they each navigate coinciding turning points in their own lives. It is in this moment, and in their own ways, that all four siblings begin to look homeward—their eyes turned curiously behind them, each sibling considering the place that they left.

Leave Your Mess at Home embraces many themes, sweetly considering so much contained within the sprawl of diaspora in its meditation on a Nigerian-American family in Chicago. There is the relationship between children and their parents, upward mobility and Black capitalism, resilience as an inheritance and a burden all at once, and so much else. But its most affecting theme—and offering within—is perhaps its most obvious one: pursuit of home itself.

“It wasn’t just about finding somewhere to lay her head. It was about finding someplace where the embraces were real, where she knew that someone actually loved her.”

Akinola’s characters have all made their way to the city of their upbringing. However, these homecomings are approached with held breaths and hesitation. Each sibling carries with them an unfurling crisis that leaves them wandering, searching. It’s complicated. They carry with them troubled memories of the place where they grew up, which is complicated even further by their tangled relationships to each other. However, what the mosaic reveals to us is that despite the differences, these siblings have found themselves circling the same thing. They are all looking for a place to call home. Not a house or a city, but rather, a place where they might feel held. A place where they might rest—at last.

“‘Well. I just want to say thank you.’ Karen’s expression is sincere. ‘For every meal you cooked. For every time you dressed me up and did my hair. I never forgot.’”

In taking such an intimate yet wide-reaching approach to examining the notion of home within the diaspora, Akinola takes part in the tradition of a lineage of Black writers and artists who have done so before her. In reading Leave Your Mess at Home, I found myself thinking of the 1978 cult classic, The Wiz—a film that, for me, feels close to an answer. The movie conjures memories not too far away from those present among Akinola’s characters—memories of days spent sick and at home from school, evenings thick with the scent of my mother’s collard greens, all brought together by a unified soundtrack (music certainly plays a role in Akinola’s novel, as Lianne La Havas, A Tribe Called Quest, Sade, and more, all contribute to the soundscape of this world). In its musical climax, The Wiz posits the question kept silent in Leave Your Mess at Home: where can we find home?

Within this company, Leave Your Mess at Home stands out as an individual (a testament to Akinola’s strength of characterization and world-building). In the vivid mess, the characters in Akinola’s novel continue their wandering—wordlessly and in the same direction. Regardless of if it’s sibling rivalry, shared trauma, or something else entirely, their questioning is common between them. Perhaps the pursuit of home is inherited, also. On their way, the siblings collide, they stumble, they rise—but most of all, they commit to the search. This commitment is, in part, Akinola’s point. Home can be many things. It does not have to be your childhood bedroom. It does not have to be the house you grew up in. It does not even have to be the people who you lived in that house with. Home, as elusive as it may be, is a choice—a choice in the community that we cultivate, in the caring acts that we do, and in the way that we hold ourselves. Akinola writes characters with abundant and overflowing lives. But it’s their interiority that is most captivating. We fall in love, throughout the novel, with all four of the narrators, despite their flaws. They aren’t perfect people—and yet, we continue on reading.

There is a point in the novel when a character references sankofa. They go on to explain that the concept means “go back and get it.” The term is commonly understood across the diaspora, and in many ways represents the urging call in Akinola’s book. The characters are left with no other choice than to go back for answers. It’s in facing the past that they can begin to find answers on how they might move forward—towards home. It’s tiring work, but it must be done. Home demands, just as it embraces.

“Home is a place we all must find,” says Lena Horne’s Glinda the Good Witch in The Wiz. Leave Your Mess at Home is a captivating exploration of that journey. It’s sankofa embodied. And Akinola urges us too. She looks to the reader and says to us one thing: “go.”