The urge to know the future is inborn, it seems; from infancy, we are comforted by the anticipated. Prophecy, defined simply as prediction, assumes many forms throughout literature. Divination—seeking to foretell what is coming through supernatural means—is core to the Yoruba traditional religion of Ifa, practiced in Nigeria and around the world.
I discovered in the early research for my debut novel, The Edge of Water, that my paternal ancestors were Ifa practitioners, long before their introduction to foreign religions. Cowrie-shell divination introduces each chapter of the book as the all-seeing Yoruba Ifa priestess, Iyanifa, gives the reader a hint of what is to come in the life of Amina and her family in the lead-up to a devastating storm that strikes the city of New Orleans.
Similarly, the following books are all works of fiction in which a life-altering prophecy is featured. The prophetic emerges in several ways—through cultural expectation, divination, dreams, religious influence, and folkloric pronouncement. In some of these books, characters’ engagement with the prophetic provides a sense of comfort, clarity, and communal fulfillment, while in others, confusion and despair are the result.
Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka
In this Nobel Prize-winning play, the king of a Nigerian village has died and tradition decrees that his chief horseman, Elesin Oba, must thereby commit suicide and follow him into the afterworld. Failure to fulfill this is a curse for the village–life will not go well. A white colonial administrator attempts, however, to put a stop to the duty ritual by imprisoning the king’s horseman. What we then encounter is Soyinka’s stunning examination of the volatile and enduring tension between the Yoruba will to preserve a purposeful tenet of their indigenous culture and the audacity of Western colonialism to insist on knowing best. The reader is left reeling by the heartwrenching aftermath of the horseman’s inability to adhere to his spiritual duties.
Efuru by Flora Nwapa
Another classic of African literature, this piercing novel tells the story of newly-married Efuru who is struggling with fertility. With her father, she visits the dibia, the Igbo healer and diviner who mediates between the human and spiritual worlds. In sharp detail, the dibia outlines the sacrificial steps Efuru must take in order to ensure that by the following year’s Owu festival, she would be pregnant. Efuru heeds the dibia’s guidance, and when the Owu festival arrives, her in-laws are delighted, as they detect the scent of pregnancy on her being. Indeed, Efuru soon gives birth. But the joy of the prophecy’s manifestation is short-lived when the dibia–after predicting, without providing details, that there will be an issue with Efuru’s child–dies suddenly, along with his unspoken pronouncements over Efuru’s future and the reassurance his foreknowing had once provided.
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
The theme of childbirth is also present in this moving novel, in which the course of the main character’s, Adunni’s, life is irrevocably altered when she unknowingly partakes in the fulfillment of a curse that had been prophesied to her pregnant sister-wife, Khadija. Khadija’s lover, and the father of her unborn child, Bamidele, reveals to Adunni that in his family, a pregnant woman must be washed seven times in a river, or the woman and her unborn will die during childbirth. On a journey far from their shared home and husband, Adunni must help a laboring Khadija reach the river for a bath before the baby arrives. Adunni’s ability to assist Khadija in fulfilling the ritual has tremendous consequences for her own fragile future. Of note is that in this, as in other instances of a prophetic utterance, the precise source of the folkloric pronouncement is often unarticulated, but simply accepted as the collective what will be.
Fortune’s Daughter by Alice Hoffman
The predictions of tea-leaf divination are at the center of this aching novel about loss and longing. The central characters, Rae and Lila are two women, two mothers, with similar life paths who nonetheless hold a disparate relationship to the tea-leaf fortune-telling that shapes their perspectives. When the paths of Rae and Lila intertwine, both arrive at a knowing whose silence has threatening implications. As readers, we are left grappling with the consequences of knowledge that is revealed and that which is withheld, and the impact of both on the scope of our choices.
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
If we are told the exact date of our death, would we live differently–make choices that honor, reject, or align with that foreknowing? A psychic tells four siblings, in their youth–Simon, Klara, Daniel, Varya–the exact day they will die. We then follow each of the four as their lives unfold. The Immortalists deftly probes, in part, how we consciously or subconsciously participate in the fulfillment of the words spoken about us, by examining the varied ways–quietly, despairing, lonely, hopeful–the siblings choose to live, based on the extent of their belief in the prophecy they were given.
A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
In this poignant novel about the history, layers, and resistance of womanhood, we witness the coming-of-age of Kirabo, the teenage protagonist who until the novel begins had been raised by her grandmother, but now hungers to know her mother, and the origins of her own emerging wildness. In seeking out the counsel of Nsuuta, the village’s prescient witch, Kirabo encounters various shades of the prophetic–a foundational one being that many years before, when Kirabo had been brought to the care of her grandparents as an infant, Nsuuta had predicted that the day would arrive when indeed Kirabo would come to her, in search of her mother. From then on, Nsuuta would be a kind of guiding light and catalyst for Kirabo. And even more compelling than the bits Nsuuta offers about Kirabo’s mother is her outlining of how women have had to shapeshift to survive the patriarchy throughout time; notably, within the novel’s four-part structure, Kirabo follows a path of evolution into her own womanhood that ultimately fulfills Nsutta’s words.
The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen
Set in nineteenth-century Sweden, this lush historical novel–about the destructive consequences of settlers’ encroachment on the indigenous Sámi people of the Sápmi region–begins with prophetic dreaming. Reminiscent of a central theme in The Edge of Water, the book opens with the night-before dream of one of its characters, Lars Levi–a Lutheran minister. Attributing it to his family line, his standing as a vessel of God, and his home in the gray Scandinavian tundra, he believes in the power of dreams to foretell. On the morning that prominent reindeer herder and Sámi leader, Biettar Rasti, unexpectedly walks into church during Sunday service and kneels at the altar shaking, Lars Levi recalls an unsettling but forgotten dream from the previous night–perhaps it had been a portent for stubborn Biettar’s unlikely religious awakening. From this very incident–Biettar’s conversion–the families of the two men become inextricably joined in ways that have transformative, damaging consequences for all.
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