Author of Sweet 16: Bolaji Abdullahi

Genre: The Genre of Sweet Sixteen is Fiction

Number of Pages: Pages is Sweet Sixteen: 53

Publication Year: Sweet sixteen was published on February 1, 2017

Short Desciption: Aliya has to constantly remind her father that she is not a child but ‘a young adult.’ He does not always agree with her.

Summary: Sweet Sixteen – A Coming of Age Story by Bolaji Abdullahi

Sweet Sixteen by Bolaji Abdullahi is a short story which gives an account of Aliya’s relationship with her father. The text pokes into the innocence of teenage life which is being ignored by parents especially fathers. Through the voice of the protagonist – Aliya, the author projects the cluelessness of some parents on most of the challenges teenagers face in school and in the society such as body shaming, stereotypes – hasty generalization, religious bias etc. The text focuses on the basic facts of life rocking the world of teenagers as a result of development in technology.

The text is divided into seven parts (chapters): The Letter, The Drive, Work, The Gandhi Test, Dating, Stereotype and Beauty. These chapters chronicle Aliya’s conversation with her dad. The author uses Mr Bello to address different challenges faced by his coming of age daughter Aliya.
Aliya is the lead character in Sweet Sixteen. She is the only child of her parents – Mr and Mrs Bello. Aliya does not like to be addressed as a child because she feels the word “child” connotes stupid. She has always been attracted to adult issues probably because of her size which makes her feel like an adult trapped in a child’s body. Aliya is asthmatic and chubby but she hates being called fat. Her dad makes sure she always has her Ventolin Inhaler whenever he visits her.

Aliya’s mother was a nurse. Her presence in Aliya’s life was not profound compared to the relationship Aliya had with her dad. Aliya’s mom loved birthdays but because her husband did not see that as an achievement worth celebrating, she was constrained to celebrating other person’s birthday in the extended family. Mr Bello, Aliya’s dad had worked in different organisations as a journalist, Public relation officer and a related job in an international organisation which helps the poor in Africa. Through these jobs he had gathered enough experience and knowledge which he tried to pass on to his coming of age daughter who just turned sixteen.

In the first chapter, Aliya happily told her dad about her Valentine gift from Bobo – a teddy bear with an “I love you” inscription. Mr Bello wasn’t really impressed with the gift and cautioned her on the dangers of receiving gifts without knowing the motif behind it as she may find herself in a quandary to give back something to compensate for the gift. He reminded her that she was not a dumb girl who most boys like. Mr Bello further made her daughter realize that being smart didn’t necessary mean being academically sound. He left her to decide what to do with her to do with the teddy bear and Bobo. The chapter ended with Aliya receiving a special gift from her boyfriend on her long awaited sixteenth birthday.

As Aliya turned sixteen, she believed she had escaped being called a child and anticipated living an adult life. She received her first and best birthday gift from her lovely father – a 16–page letter, a birthday card and a portable digital camera. Her father dedicated a page to each year of her life to remind her of all he had thought her all through the years and also hinting on some issues that might be bugging his daughter. In the letter Mr Bello made Aliya realize that the outing they had when she was 12 was premeditated by him to discuss her sexuality. Aliya had just seen her first menstrual period at that time. Mr Bello was bothered about her First Lady getting hurt or assaulted and used the opportunity of visiting Aunty Gigis to enlighten his daughter about her body. Mr Bello almost had a heart attack when he thought that Aliya said she had had sex before. “Daddy, I have heard ‘sex’ before,” I said and rolled my eyes at him. “What? You have had what…” At the end of that ‘drive around’ he advised his daughter to allow his daughter not to allow anybody to touch her private parts.

Having excelled in Chemistry examination, Aliya returns home anxiously anticipated a discussion with her dad in order to clarify some of the ambiguous issues in his 16-page letter to her. Before delving into those topics, Aliya informed her dad of her desire to become a lawyer. It didn’t really come as a surprise to her dad as she seemed to have changed choice of career up to four times then from a pilot to musician/songwriter to a fashion designer to a doctor. She feared that her dad would shoot that down just as Sogo’s father insisted that Sogo must be a lawyer like him. Instead her dad made her realize that parents were not supposed to interfere in the thinking process and decision of their kids because it would hinder them from becoming independent individuals which was the essence of sending them to school. He backed that up from Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet which stated that “For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams?” “Their souls” referred to children. Parents should guide and direct the affairs of their children and not interfere with them.

80 Revision Questions on Sweet Sixteen by Bolaji Abdullahi

Furthermore, Mr Bello highlighted the importance of hard work for his daughter. He was impressed with his daughter’s performance in Chemistry and encouraged her not to get involved in cheating as an escape to success just like one of her classmates who she caught cheating in Physics examination. Mr Bello insisted that there was no justification for cheating, as failure can actually empower us in ways that success cannot. He condemned the girl’s parent’s attitude to the girl. He explained that parent should not compare their kids as each individual had different abilities therefore it was wrong to use one child as a standard for another. Mr Bello also bemoaned the attitude of the younger generation towards reading which had hindered them from uncovering the boundless wealth of knowledge and wisdom hidden in books. A situation predicted years ago by Albert Einstein.
Aliya continued her quest for clarity as she drew her father attention to the Gandhi Test philosophy. Mr Bello corrected Aliya’s notion about who Mahatma Gandhi and asserted that part of Gandhi’s teaching centered on the fact that one could tell that what one was doing was good or bad if one want other people to know about it or not. He summarized his point by stating that cheating and stealing were condemned by every society but what are considered cheating and stealing vary from one society to another.

JAMB Novel: The Life Changer – Chapter by Chapter Summary, Possible Questions & Answers

Aliya assumed that having turned 16 she could start dating and decided to test her dad’s view about this. Mr Bello wittily explained to his daughter that she was not matured enough to handle the pressure of dating and relationship which requires a lot sacrifices such as HAK, KOTL and 53X. He asked his daughter if she was to do such things assuming her friend Bobo demanded that from her. This question reminded Aliya of how Bobo jilted her and travelled out of the country with his parents which made her dad’s explanation clearer. He urged his daughter to focus on her studies as it wasn’t the right for dating so she wouldn’t derail from her vision. Stereotype is a set of ideas that people have about what someone or something is, especially an idea that is wrong. This idea is sometimes generalized to an entire race, ethnic group, religion, gender or a set of people. Aliya complained about how Rebecca said that all Muslims are terrorists. He used that opportunity to correct her daughter’s impression on hasty generalization which had become a common phenomenon in the society. He submitted that “It is absolutely wrong to ascribe to all people what some people do just because they belong to the same tribe or religion. A Muslim who kills another human being would have done the same if he was a Christian or a believer of any other faith. No religion approves of killings. Therefore, a killer is a killer, not a Muslim, Christian or Hindu.” He summarized his ideas here by telling his family that stereotypes could corrected depending on how individuals react to people with the wrong notion.

The last part of the text centers on beauty and the model of beauty that the society has created in our minds, a concept that we have unconsciously accepted as the norm. Aliya complained to her dad of being body shamed by Bunmi and her Biology teacher. Mr Bello condemned the teacher’s comment and promised his daughter that he would seriously look into that. He also explained to her that Bunmi might feel intimidated by her which could be why she always picked on her. He continued that people who bully others or ridicule them could be doing that because they felt intimidated by those other people, so in response they try to bully or mock them. He ended the text by telling his daughter a story which its moral lesson centered on transferring the knowledge she had learnt from her father to her children just he had done.

Sweet Sixteen used the first person narrative point of view to address teenagers who are mostly in the JAMB candidates’ brackets on the facts of life. The protagonist’s father is the opposite of most fathers in the society who have no time for needs of their children especially their daughters. The text gives an insight on sex education and the need for parents to help their children to learn about their body parts and exposure to sex as opposed to teenagers learning these through other means like peer groups.