A cab driver weeps in the rain. His child is dying, refused treatment for lack of money, and the doctor he has unknowingly picked up is Isioma, young and accomplished and morally alert, and she promises to help. Hours later, she receives a marriage proposal in a candlelit restaurant, joy blooming amid the memory of another family’s devastation. This opening juxtaposition in Judith Dooshima Pila’s debut novella, If We All Knew, establishes not merely plot but moral scaffolding. In contemporary Nigeria, private happiness and collective suffering exist in perpetual uncomfortable proximity.
While If We All Knew presents itself as accessible relationship fiction tracing marriages and friendships among Abuja’s aspiring middle class, it accomplishes something more structurally sophisticated. It interrogates how silence functions as both a survival mechanism and a slow poison in lives organised around performance. Through the interwoven narratives of Isioma and Adoo and Bisola and Hadiza, the novella argues that authenticity under oppressive structures is not moral luxury but existential necessity and that the systems designed to protect us become the very mechanisms that surveil and judge and ultimately isolate us. Tradition and family and religious community, and social media networks all turn against those they claim to shelter.
If We All Knew employs what might be called a structure of progressive exposure, where each chapter peels away another layer of performed normalcy until characters stand stripped before both community and reader. The story opens in medias res with Isioma already established as a competent doctor and already in a relationship with Terna, and immediately sets forth its foundational formal principle. Juxtaposition as moral pressure. Every moment of private joy is staged against unwitnessed suffering, and every celebration is shadowed by someone’s exclusion.
The novella’s true formal innovation emerges in its delayed centre. Chapter Six contains the revelatory flashback to Isioma’s university assault and hidden pregnancy, and secret relinquishment of the child. Structurally, this placement is masterful. We have already witnessed five chapters of Isioma’s life, her marriage and her family negotiations and her friendship with Adoo and her role as moral centre, all before learning the suppressed origin story that recontextualises everything. The effect is readerly complicity: we, like Terna, have lived with Isioma while knowing only her performance of wholeness.
This technique of narrative unreliability through omission functions differently from traditional unreliable narration. The third-person narrator never lies but withholds, and the withholding itself becomes thematic content. The form enacts the question: What does it mean to know someone when the social world demands selective presentation?
The novella employs ensemble construction that initially appears conventional, with chapters alternating focus among Isioma and Terna, Adoo, Bisola and Harry, and Hadiza. Yet close attention reveals these are not discrete storylines but parallel structures of concealment. Each woman negotiates between public presentation and private suffering, and the form itself argues this is not individual pathology but systemic requirement.
The final chapters shift rhythm and adopt a dispersed resolution structure that refuses a simple climax. Rather than building to a single dramatic confrontation, the narrative distributes healing across multiple minor moments. Aunty Dems’s quiet apology to Chidinma. Dauda’s market-stall defence of Hadiza. Bisola’s restaurant opening. This formal choice challenges conventional dramatic structure while enacting a thematic argument. Restoration under systemic oppression does not arrive as a triumphant reversal but as accumulated small dignities, provisional and ongoing.
Pila’s prose style initially reads as transparent realism, clear and accessible and grounded in Nigerian English idiom, yet closer inspection reveals a poetics of understatement where emotional intensity manifests through restraint. Consider the sentence rhythms. Pila favours paratactic construction with short coordinate clauses linked by simple conjunctions that create a staccato, accumulative effect. This is not artless simplicity but a deliberate rhythm of shock. Each brief clause enacts a single action, and the parataxis refuses causal subordination that would imply understanding.
The dialogue demonstrates remarkable sociolinguistic precision. Pila code-switches fluidly between Standard English and Nigerian Pidgin and code-mixed registers, each encoding class position and regional identity and relational intimacy. This is not decoration but characterisation through linguistic performance. We hear who characters are by how their speech shifts across contexts. More significantly, the code-switching itself thematises the book’s central concern with constant modulation between registers mirroring the modulation between performed and authentic selves.
The figurative language operates through what might be called domestic surrealism, with metaphors drawn from everyday Nigerian life that, through defamiliarisation, reveal emotional truth. “Moving around this room like a helpless goat” captures Adoo’s paralysis. “The ground should swallow her up with Harry’s casket” captures Bisola’s shame. These are not elevated literary metaphors but vernacular images that ground abstraction in physical reality.
Yet Pila’s most powerful stylistic choice is strategic silence, what the prose refuses to render. Isioma’s assault occurs in the past and is narrated through retrospective summary, not a visceral scene. Elvis’s physical violence toward Adoo happens offstage. Harry’s death is reported not shown. This aesthetics of omission functions as an ethical stance. The narrative refuses to spectacularise trauma for readerly consumption and insists that suffering’s truth lies not in originating violence but in ongoing consequence.
While If We All Knew employs ensemble construction. Isioma functions as the gravitational centre. Not a protagonist in the conventional sense, but a moral axis around which other narratives orbit. Yet Pila’s treatment of her resists both idealisation and victimisation through a technique we might call competence as concealment. Isioma’s professional skill, emotional intelligence, and moral clarity are real, but they also function as scaffolding of suppression, a performed wholeness that forecloses vulnerability.
Chapter One establishes this duality immediately. Isioma’s interior monologue reveals irritation and fatigue beneath professional composure. “This guy should cancel, na!” Yet when confronted with the cab driver’s crisis, she moves seamlessly into doctor-mode. Please, call me Sir. I will arrange for you to bring your son in for treatment. This is not hypocrisy but compartmentalisation as survival, the capacity to bracket personal discomfort in the service of professional duty.
The structural irony of Isioma’s position emerges across chapters. She heals others while carrying unhealed trauma and counsels Adoo while concealing her own secrets, and mediates family tensions while managing unresolved grief. This creates dramatic irony where readers, after the Chapter Six revelation, understand that Isioma’s apparent wholeness is a performance sustained through exhausting vigilance.
The book’s most psychologically acute move concerns Isioma’s relationship to her own trauma. When she finally confesses to Terna, the prose remains remarkably flat. “I told him, Adoo,” she says simply, and we get no extended interior rendering of her emotional state. This stylistic restraint functions as characterisation. Isioma has lived so long in suppression that even in confession, she cannot fully access or articulate the buried feeling. The affective blankness is not a failure of craft but a portrait of dissociation.
Yet Pila complicates easy readings of Isioma as a victim. The decision to conceal the pregnancy and child’s existence, made jointly with Adoo, is presented as a rational choice under constraint, not moral failure. The story insists we understand the calculus of disclosure. In a culture where sexual violence shames the victim rather than the perpetrator, and where pregnancy outside marriage forecloses futures, and where family honour depends on daughters’ purity, silence becomes strategic survival.
If Isioma represents competence concealing trauma, then Adoo and Bisola embody dissolution through opposite means. Adoo through private abuse masked as romance and Bisola through public performance masked as success. Yet their narratives function as structural mirrors, each revealing different dimensions of how patriarchal structures collaborate with women’s self-silencing to produce erasure.
Adoo’s arc traces the classic abuse cycle with devastating precision, yet Pila’s innovation lies in rendering the psychological scaffolding of collusion. Adoo is an accomplished lawyer and financially independent and intellectually sharp, and recognises Elvis’s manipulation intellectually but cannot translate knowledge into protective action. The text captures this paralysis through internal dialogue that cycles between clarity and rationalisation. “There are days I wake up, and it’s like I am married to the wrong man.” Recognition. But she defends him to Isioma. “He didn’t mean it that way.” Denial.
This oscillation between knowing and unknowing reveals abuse’s insidious logic. It does not require victims to be ignorant but to alternate between moments of clarity and strategic forgetting. Adoo’s intelligence becomes a liability because she can articulate why she should leave, which means she also bears guilt for staying.
The fire scene in Chapter Five operates as both a literal and symbolic purgation. Adoo loses apartment and possessions and material security, everything external, forcing confrontation with the internal devastation she had postponed addressing. Yet Pila refuses to romanticise this destruction. The fire is not cleansing liberation but traumatic dispossession.
Bisola’s narrative provides a counterpoint. Where Adoo’s suffering was private, Bisola’s is spectacularly public. Yet both women are undone by enforced performance, with Adoo performing contentment in an abusive relationship and Bisola performing prosperity while drowning in debt. The social media apparatus functions in Bisola’s story as abuse’s structural equivalent. The Instagram feed demands continuous performance, and cessation means erasure.
Pila’s rendering of influencer culture avoids both moralising condemnation and uncritical celebration. The text shows how visibility becomes labour. Bisola is not simply vain but engaging in affective and aesthetic work that generates income in a precarious economy. The carefully staged photos and curated captions, and strategic hashtags are professional skills, and the narrative respects them as such, even while critiquing their psychological cost.
The funeral sequence in Chapter Twelve represents the book’s most brutal social critique. Mourners blame Bisola for Harry’s death, and online comments accuse her of gold-digging, and creditors seize assets, all this unfolding while she grieves. The public evisceration demonstrates how visibility that once validated can instantly invert into a weapon.
The novella’s title If We All Knew poses a condition that the narrative both affirms and complicates. What if disclosure were universal? Would collective knowing produce compassion or intensified judgment? The text’s answer is ambivalent, even pessimistic. Knowing doesn’t guarantee an ethical response.
The cab driver encountered in Chapter One establishes the story’s ethical framework through Isioma’s declaration. “We took an oath to save lives. And I think it’s unfair for money to determine who gets saved and who doesn’t.” This statement articulates the foundational moral principle. Life requires active witnessing of others’ suffering and a subsequent choice whether to intervene or look away.
Yet the narrative immediately complicates this ethic by staging Isioma’s moral inconsistency. She intervenes in a stranger’s crisis while concealing her own trauma from those closest. This contradiction demonstrates that ethics of disclosure are contextual and asymmetric. We can witness others’ pain more easily than reveal our own.
The structure of witnessing recurs across chapters as a narrative pattern. Character A observes character B’s suffering and must decide whether to intervene, and faces the consequences of choice. Adoo observes Isioma’s deteriorating marriage and forces a confession despite knowing it will cause pain. Isioma observes Adoo’s abuse and confronts her repeatedly, though Adoo resists. Each instance stages ethics as lived practice rather than abstract principle.
The book’s most sophisticated insight concerns the cost of moral action. When Adoo forces Isioma’s confession, the immediate result is a marriage crisis not healing. When Terna supports Bisola financially, he strains his own resources. The consequence of compassion under unjust structures is bearing the weight that should belong to systems, not individuals.
The therapy subplot in Chapter Four represents the story’s most radical ethical proposition. Structural change requires institutional intervention, not just interpersonal goodwill. Terna’s decision to seek professional counselling despite cultural stigma stages an encounter between traditional Nigerian family structures, which handle conflict through elder mediation and prayer and endurance, and Western psychological frameworks.
If We All Knew is saturated with Christian faith. Characters pray and invoke divine providence and attend church, and frame suffering through spiritual testing. Yet the narrative’s relationship to religious tradition is more dialectical than devotional. While faith offers characters solace and interpretive frameworks, religious community often enforces the very silences that cause suffering.
The theological architecture operates through a recurring phrase. “God’s timing is perfect.” This appears multiple times, spoken by different characters in various contexts and functions as an interpretive key that transforms suffering into test and delay into preparation. The rhetorical power of this framework is real. It makes suffering bearable by giving it purpose. Yet the text quietly interrogates this comfort by showing how divine timing language can function as a mechanism to discourage agency.
The church scenes in Chapter Four reveal religion’s double function. Sunday service provides community and continuity and spiritual nourishment, real goods that characters value. Yet the same space generates surveillance and judgment. Whispered speculation about Isioma’s marriage. Gendered expectations about wives’ submission. Pressure to perform familial harmony.
Aunty Dems embodies religion weaponised. She wields Christianity to delegitimise Isioma’s inter-ethnic marriage and to shame her for past trauma and to justify cruelty toward Chidinma. Her invocations of scripture and tradition function as domination through piety. Yet Pila resists an anti-religious reading through Aunty Dems’s redemption arc in Chapter Eight. Her illness and move into Isioma’s home, and growing attachment to Chidinma, and eventual apology demonstrate that religious frameworks can enable transformation as well as oppression.
The therapy subplot creates productive tension with religious belief. When Terna seeks professional counselling — overcoming his earlier conviction that therapy was unnecessary for those who couldn’t “solve their issues at home” — while Isioma initially resists it as another unilateral decision, the story explores therapeutic intervention as both resource and complication. Terna’s journey from dismissing couples therapy in movies to booking a Facebook-advertised session without consulting Isioma reveals how crisis erodes certainty. His willingness to “put his ego aside and embrace the discomfort” marks growth, yet his failure to involve Isioma in the decision reproduces the very communication breakdown that therapy aims to address.
The story’s answer is both. Therapy provides concrete communication tools that prayer alone does not offer—Dr. Gbenga’s presence in that tension-filled room represents professional frameworks for navigating “unspoken bitterness.” Yet therapy’s Western individualist assumptions miss how family and community and tradition legitimately shape what can be disclosed and when. Isioma’s reluctant agreement to attend, her resistance to having their “dirty linens” washed before strangers, reflects legitimate cultural tensions with therapeutic disclosure.
The eventual reconciliation occurs through hybrid means. Therapy-taught communication skills, plus Terna’s car accident, prompting spiritual reckoning, plus Aunty Dems’s apology, restoring family harmony. No single framework suffices, and healing requires eclecticism that draws on multiple resources without granting any totalising authority. The Facebook ad’s promise — “You deserve to be happy” — offers instrumental solutions, but the narrative suggests happiness emerges not from any single intervention but from the messy convergence of professional guidance, providential crisis, and restored kinship bonds.
The novella’s title If We All Knew acquires sinister resonance through its sustained examination of knowing as violence. Across chapters, the collective we, family and church and social media audience and market gossip, functions less as a support network than as a distributed surveillance apparatus that monitors, judges, and punishes transgression of respectability norms.
The gossip scenes are rendered with ethnographic precision. Market women discussing Isioma’s hidden pregnancy in Chapter Six. Church members speculating about marital trouble in Chapter Four. Online commenters eviscerate Bisola after Harry’s death in Chapter Twelve. The text exposes gossip’s gendered architecture. Women police other women’s behavior, particularly around sexuality, marriage, and motherhood.
Social media amplifies gossip’s reach while transforming its character. Online gossip achieves permanence and searchability that oral gossip lacks and becomes an archived record, retrievable years later, shaping a digital identity that outlasts immediate crisis. Yet the critique extends beyond blaming technology. The Instagram apparatus in Bisola’s storyline reveals how social media does not simply enable performance but structurally requires it. In a precarious economy where traditional employment offers insufficient income or stability, influencer work becomes a viable economic strategy.
The narrative captures social media’s dialectical character. The same platform that enables income and connection also enables instant collective punishment. When Harry dies and financial reality emerges, the followers who once validated Bisola’s lifestyle become a mob. “As soon as the storm came, they all vanished.” This single sentence, perhaps the book’s most devastating, captures the transactional nature of online relationships.
The contrast between online and offline community structures the moral vision. Online networks offer breadth without depth, with thousands of followers and zero accountability. Offline community with Isioma and Terna and Adoo, and Hadiza gathering around Bisola offers depth without breadth, few people, and sustained commitment. The restoration arc insists that healing requires embodied presence, not digital connection.
The restaurant’s opening in Chapter Twelve symbolically stages the transformation from surveillance to celebration. The same public attention that destroyed Bisola now bears witness to her restoration. Yet the scene carefully limits the audience because this is friends’ gathering, not a public spectacle. The text suggests that redemption requires smaller, deliberate communities rather than mass attention.
Hadiza’s narrative functions as a structural counterpoint to the Abuja-centred stories and introduces questions of region and religion, and corporate power that complicate the gender analysis. Her arc, diaspora return, and navigation of polygamous family dynamics and unexpected appointment as CEO, stages feminist possibility within a patriarchal institution rather than against it.
The CEO appointment scene stages the most confrontation with patriarchal succession. Alhaji Musa’s choice to appoint his daughter over his sons disrupts traditional inheritance patterns while remaining within patriarchal prerogative. This creates a complicated feminist victory. Hadiza gains position through merit, her business education and professional experience, and through her father’s will.
Yet the story complicates a triumphant reading through understating Hadiza’s response. She accepts the position but without celebration and recognises its provisional nature as interim CEO and its political volatility. Her pragmatism demonstrates feminist realism. Taking opportunities while recognising they do not constitute systemic transformation. One woman’s achievement does not liberate all women but makes her exceptional, potentially reifying rather than challenging the rule.
The market gossip scene and Dauda’s defence stage the limits of individual merit. Hadiza’s education and competence matter less to market women than her gender and perceived Western contamination. Dauda’s intervention with male authority overriding female scepticism reveals that her achievement still requires patriarchal validation to be socially legible.
If We All Knew emerges as a significant contribution to contemporary Nigerian fiction, not despite but through its limitations. This is a debut novel that attempts an ambitious synthesis. Ensemble cast and multiple storylines and social critique and psychological realism, and spiritual reckoning. While execution is occasionally uneven, the moral seriousness and emotional honesty mark substantial achievement.
The book’s enduring value lies in its documentation of a specific historical moment. Educated urban Nigerian women navigating between traditional family structures and modern aspirations, between religious frameworks and psychological vocabularies, between face-to-face community and social media networks. Pila captures this transitional moment with precision and empathy and shows how no easy resolution exists because characters must negotiate rather than choose and improvise rather than follow templates.
The treatment of trauma and abuse represents a particularly important intervention. By rendering sexual violence and intimate partner violence not as sensational plot points but as ongoing conditions that shape selfhood, the narrative contributes to necessary conversations about gender violence in contexts where such discussions remain culturally fraught.
The friendship network as a narrative centre rather than romantic coupling challenges conventions of relationship fiction. While marriages and romantic relationships appear prominently, the emotional core resides in female solidarity. Isioma and Adoo’s complex, sometimes strained but ultimately sustaining bond.
The restaurant’s name, Live ‘n’ Live Right, encapsulates the final wisdom. A colloquial phrase that nevertheless contains genuine insight. Living, existing, and getting by and surviving must be supplemented by living right, ethically and authentically, and with integrity. Yet the casual construction and commercial context acknowledge that moral clarity doesn’t elevate us beyond material concerns.
This is a pragmatic rather than a triumphant vision. Not revolutionary transformation but incremental amelioration. Not heroic resistance but quotidian perseverance. Characters do not escape oppressive structures but learn to inhabit them differently with more honesty and more mutual support, and more recognition of shared vulnerability.
In the end, Judith Dooshima Pila’s debut succeeds not by solving the problems it dramatises, how could it, but by bearing witness to them with honesty and care. It shows us women trying to live rightly in conditions that make rightness difficult to discern and building provisional communities in hostile landscapes and choosing compassion when judgment would be easier. If we all knew what these women have endured and how they persist regardless, perhaps we would approach each other and ourselves with more grace.
