In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Olufunke Grace Bankole’s epic novel The Edge of Water is a stunning multi-generational debut.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“A powerful and emotional debut novel that deftly explores the complexities of identity, family, and belonging.”
In her own words, here is Olufunke Grace Bankole’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Edge of Water:
In my debut novel, The Edge of Water, I tell the story of Amina and Esther, a daughter and mother who are separated by continents and the silence of the things unsaid between them, in the lead-up to a devastating hurricane. When Amina leaves Nigeria to begin afresh in New Orleans, Esther’s letters to her are suffused with nostalgia for the life they once shared. Likewise, the most meaningful songs to me are the ones that recall a time and place I am no longer in—for better or worse.
And this might be, in part, why I wrote a novel so deeply steeped in the layers of place, the dreams and regrets of the past, and longing for the unnameable. Although music features several times in The Edge of Water, the songs on this playlist are the ones that linger in the background of my years-long journey to completing the novel.
“Egwu” by Chike and Mohbad
In the Igbo language, “egwu” translates as music or sound. Aptly titled, the song—gorgeously upbeat and sweetly melodic—is about music’s irresistible quality, its ability to take hold and make us excited, satisfied, and ready to dance. When I first heard “Egwu” in late 2023, I was living in Egypt, and Tin House had just acquired my novel. The opening of the song with the word “imolenization,” a play on the word “imole,” and a reference to Mohbad’s nickname, immediately caught my attention. Imole, the Yoruba word for light, is the opening setting in my novel, the otherworldly place where the six souls of The Edge of Water have, for millennia, met again and again. I was intrigued, and “Egwu” did not disappoint. The song feels modern in its arrangement and traditional in its chorus of women. However I’m feeling, “Egwu” makes me incredibly happy and a little wistful.
“Sarama (La Charmante)” by Amadou and Mariam
Years ago, after deciding I would leave law to pursue writing, I created my first writing website, and set this song to play on its opening page. Aside from the title, “sarama,” which means “charming” in the language spoken by the married duo who are from Mali, I don’t understand a single word of this song and yet, since I heard it those many years back, it remains one of the most beautiful. “Sarama” reminds me of a hopeful beginning and leaping into the unknown, with nothing but the pure desire to create something meaningful and enduring—all while carried along by song.
“Sweet Mother” by Prince Nico Mbarga
If you ask any African, any Nigerian about popular highlife songs—past and present—“Sweet Mother” is bound to be mentioned. In the first chapter of The Edge of Water,Esther sneaks to a party at a highlife music club. A hugely popular musical genre filled with brass instrumentation, strings, and vivacity, and noted to have originated in 19th century Ghana, highlife was a mainstay of the 1960s Nigeria in which Esther came of age. Although “Sweet Mother” does not appear in the novel, in a culture—Yoruba—where mothers are like god, and in a book about the transcendent love between mothers and their children, “Sweet Mother” must be on this list.
“Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye
Now, to the first song that specifically appears in The Edge of Water: when “Sexual Healing” comes on the radio of a tailor’s shop while young Amina is next door buying sweets, it is her first taste of what the America she had yet to reach might be like. “Sexual Healing” is of course about romantic and sexual longing. Although Amina doesn’t place the song in this particular context, it is for her the first wanting—of a place far away—of something she can’t yet have. Many of us, as children, heard, loved, and sang a song, the meaning of which we didn’t quite understand, but the feeling of which held us in its grip. “Sexual Healing” is just that for Amina, and one of my all-time favorites as well.
“Sweet Banana” by King Sunny Ade
In 1980s Nigeria, juju music was particularly popular, with artists like Ebenezer Obey, Shina Peters, and King Sunny Ade widening the reach of the musical genre to international audiences. These musicians and many others were favorites of my mother’s, and their voices were the soundtrack to early-childhood-party attendance in Nigeria, and my later growing up in the US. I admired the charismatic, handsome, and wildly talented Sunny Ade, and even as a little girl, understood his appeal to the older men and women around me. Especially mesmerizing were his dundun drums playing prowess and steel guitar magical plucking. Juju music is joyful party music with complex and brilliantly layered instrumentation, and King Sunny Ade has proven to be its most transformational ambassador.
Teenage Amina, on the cusp of her first romance, clearly understands the meaning of the risque and double entendre lyrics of “Sweet Banana,” but pretends otherwise in order to quell Esther’s suspicions of her daughter’s sexual awakening.
“Freedom” by Jon Batiste
Amina’s first weeks in the US are marked by wonder and excitement for her newfound freedom, far away from the judging eyes of Esther. Amina now has the potential to become everything that had up to then been impossible. She tells the reader of her neighborhood walks, during which the young men admire her beauty and call after her, complimenting her African features. Jon Batiste’s, “Freedom,” is a fitting ode to this facet of New Orleans life. Listening to the lyrics, I can imagine Amina strutting through the streets of her Mid-City neighborhood, nodding along to “Freedom,” embodying its bright and limitless feeling.
“Back That Thang Up”/ (“Back That Azz Up”) by Juvenile, Featuring Mannie Fresh and Lil Wayne
The dominating sounds of early 2000s hip-hop must include the profound influence of New Orleans’ Juvenile and the other artists of Cash Money Records. If one went to a house party, frat party, club party, or any event where dance music featured, when “Back That Thang Up” came on the speakers, within about two seconds of the song’s violin opening, the women in the place were prepared to do just that. For better or worse, “Back That Thang Up” is an American classic.
And I’m convinced this is the song Amina would have secretly danced to inside her bedroom, in the New Orleans apartment she shared with her cousins, Fatima and Rashid. I recently watched—for research purposes, of course—the Juvenile NPR Tiny Desk performance, which included string players from the Louisiana Philharmonic and other New Orleanian superstars. At the end, the very engaged crowd requested an encore of “Back That Thang Up,” which Juvenile and the band promptly supplied. A commenter under the concert video described the music as harmonious and “elegantly ratchet,” and that is perhaps the most apt and the loveliest description of Juvenile’s incredibly popular song!
“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman
This has to be the quintessential You can keep your false promises song. Like the narrator in “Fast Car,” Amina is a dreamer and, early in the novel, imagines what life might be like with a man who is more talk than follow-through. Amina, too, wants “a ticket to anywhere” other than the world she was born into, and the life imagined for her by culture and family. What I find so compelling about “Fast Car” is that although we are told earlier in the song that the life the young couple attempts to build together ends in heartache, the story ends with the woman encouraging the man to take the journey anyway—and it’s left to the listener’s interpretation on whether they go at all.
“This Woman’s Work” Cover by Maxwell (Original by Kate Bush)
Although none of the women in The Edge of Water have a precarious childbirth, their travail in the aftermath and adjustment to motherhood are worthy of Kate Bush’s heartrending “This Woman’s Work.” But it’s the Maxwell cover that I first heard. And although I like Kate Bush’s original very much, it’s Maxwell’s falsetto that resounds in my head when the song comes to mind. At its core, this is a song about regret for the things left unsaid and undone. In the opening of her letters to Amina, who has just left for the US, Esther acknowledges the desire to address the silence that has lingered until then.
“In a Sentimental Mood” by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane
I can’t remember where or when I first heard this tune, but I have always felt and loved it deeply. In the aftermath of a storm, there is a period of taking stock—of combing the terrain to ascertain what is lost and gather what remains. The piano arrangement in “In a Sentimental Mood” reminds me of a slow and deliberate walk-through, while the saxophone is reminiscent of mulling over the uncertain. The song is a little melancholic, and yet on the tip of hope.
“Feeling Good” by Nina Simone
Despite the heartache at the center of my novel, it is also a book interspersed with joy and happy expectation. I can’t think of another song that better encapsulates the simple exuberance of being alive to witness the day, and anticipating the living that’s ahead than Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” Her double repetition—in the opening—of the lines “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me” is both declarative and affirming. For the characters in The Edge of Water, despite the devastation of the hurricane, new beginnings hover on the horizon.
Olufunke Grace Bankole is the author of The Edge of Water (Tin House).