Honey & Spice

“The smile he gave her was mainstream, pop, radio-friendly. The smile he’d given me was the single released after an artist had established themselves, found their voice, could speak directly to their target audience. The smile he’d given me had more R&B to it.”

In their first meeting, this image illustrates Kiki’s sense that she and Malakai have a special level of communication; this foreshadows their relationship and indicates their special fitness for one another, a convention of the romance genre. Kiki’s favorite musical genre is R&B, so this metaphor is expressive of Kiki’s character and voice as well as of Malakai’s attraction to her.

“Wastemen are aptly called so because they waste our time. Waste our energy. Our purpose. They sell us dreams and then take them away, so we end up chasing them as if it was ever a reality.”

This passage represents Kiki’s romantic advice to the listeners of her Brown Sugar show. As the reader will later discover, there’s an element of irony to Kiki’s knowledge of Wastemen because of what happened to her with Nile. The epithet of Wastemen represents how the Blackwell members often have their own names or labels for things that are specific to their community or of shared concern.

“Kofi was a cute, well-liked Ghanaian prince from south London and Aminah was a Nigerian princess from west. It was a Pan-African diaspora fairy tale waiting to happen, one for the ages, a pending peace treaty for the Jollof Wars, the West African cousin conflict that raged at weddings and birthday parties.”

Kofi and Aminah are set up as an opposites-attract love story, a foil to Kiki and Malakai, who are more complementary. The passage endorses pan-Africanism, a motif of the book, but also conveys Bolu Babalola’s voice and humor, along with her facility with metaphor and allusion, here to the so-called Jollof Wars, a friendly rivalry among West African countries that have distinct and varying ways of preparing this traditional rice dish.

“Romance was a waste of time, a form of manipulation utilized by boys who didn’t wash their bedsheets regularly. It existed, sure, but I wasn’t surrounded by anyone I believe engaged in it properly, with respect for the object of affection.”

This passage captures Kiki’s feelings about romance before she falls in love, when her only experience has been being manipulated by Nile and used by Zack. It’s the beginning point of her character arc and education, but also hints at what she wants her own romance to entail—respect—which foreshadows what she will discover with Malakai.

“I was used to my jagged edges scraping up against people, but Malakai seemed to click into mine, slot right into rhythm.”

Kiki notices right away that talking with Malakai is easy; she later recognizes this as a sign that they are suitable mates for a relationship. The image of him fitting her jagged edges helps convey this sense of compatibility.

“You lost control. I have never, ever known you to lose it like that. Even when you’re pissed off it’s like, measured. This was different. You let go.”

Aminah describes how she’s impressed with Kiki’s gesture of emptying her drink in Malakai’s lap when she thinks he was messing with her. Aminah, as the best friend, helps clarify Kiki’s character for the reader’s benefit, including this assessment that she is usually very controlled and doesn’t express her real emotions often.

“My show is more than just romance. It’s about…stopping hearts being broken unnecessarily. Preventing the mess that comes with it. Handling ourselves. Guys get away with so much and we’re supposed to accept it because we’re supposed to want romance, above all else.”

Kiki confides in Malakai about the purpose of her radio show, which helps establish and reinforce the connection between them. She also reveals motives that the reader will understand later come from being manipulated and heartbroken by a man. Learning how to handle the messiness of relationship and risk being hurt is part of Kiki’s character arc, but this also feels like a moment with the author is inserting a personal belief.

“I don’t want to give myself to someone who doesn’t know what to do with me. I…don’t want to lose myself.”

Kiki confides in Malakai the reason, or one version of the reason, that she is cautious about relationships. Women realizing and acting out of their own sense of worth is a theme in the novel, but this also captures Kiki’s character flaw of being wary of opening up to love. Questions of truth and value are of ongoing debate throughout the novel. Paradoxically, in revealing her feelings to Malakai, Kiki is increasingly opening herself up to him and building their intimacy.

“Lack of control. My life was clearly demarcated and I didn’t need anything to make it messy.”

When a fellow student asks, Kiki declines using her show for any agenda she deems political, and offers this reflection when Adwoa asks why she won’t get involved. Kiki’s self-isolation proves the internal obstacle that she needs to overcome in the course of the book.

“I made [the playlists] because it was fun for me, selecting a mood and seeing where it took me. It was me at my freest, allowing myself to move according to my own rhythm, going with my instincts.”

While Brown Sugar allows Kiki to express her thoughts and her voice, the playlists she makes for the show represent her most creative and liberated side. She eventually makes choices to expand her self-expression through the course of the novel.

“All we had to do was be strong. So, I was. I pressed everything down so my little sister, Kayefi, would be less scared, so my dad would have one less thing to worry about, so my mum didn’t need anything else to stress over. I would be strong. I would be the strongest, if that was the only thing I could do.”

Kiki reveals the source of her emotional barricades with this backstory she reveals to Malakai on their date at Sweetest Ting. The confidences they share begin to pull them together into relationship, along with the physical attraction, moving along the romance story arc.

“My smile had had enough of being trapped and spilled out, wide and brazen and messy, dripping everywhere. It soaked through my clothes and into my skin.”

Babalola uses frequent images of brightness and glowing to describe what Kiki notices about Malakai; the bright imagery reflects how she feels around him: optimistic, hopeful, and receptive. The spilling over is a metaphor for the emotion filling her after their first date, foreshadowing the emotional risks she will take by being with him; she is learning to turn from repressing her emotion to experiencing it, part of her character growth in the novel.

“When you were part of something like that, the intimacy could easily sour into something that would eat you alive. There was safety on the outside.”

In this internal monologue, Kiki reflects on why, at college, she has distanced herself from social factions and only mingled with her best friend, Aminah: She feels safer without having the intimacy, or complexity, or friendships. Part of Kiki’s character journey will involve not only opening herself up to love but also opening herself to new friendships.

“I was at the edge of the bed panting, everything I had tried to forget rushing to the fore, my mum being sick now mingling with being called blick, like being dark-skinned was a pathological as what was happening to my mum’s cells, but even worse, a scourge, somehow, a sin. A sickness and a sin.”

When Nile is attempting to manipulate Kiki, he claims her best friend Rianne used a racist insult, calling Kiki “blick,” a denigratory term for being dark-skinned. This example of colorism—Rianne is described as being more fair or having “caramel skin”—is used by Nile to try to divide the two girls. The comparison to her mother’s cancer cells illustrates how painful this discrimination is to Kiki, and its use here is only one instance of the racism her characters encounter, in both overt and subtle forms, from white as well as other certain other Black characters.

“I think maybe I’m trying to figure out what relationships are? How they can work and if I’m cut out for a real one. Trying to build a playbook to avoid failure. Just in case.”

Malakai’s confession to Kiki reveals his character obstacle and the journey he undergoes in the book about discovering how to have a real romantic relationship. The irony in this quest is that a solid friendship is building naturally between him and Kiki, upon which the attraction builds.

“He drew flirtatious stares and requests for photos, and Malakai, ever the ethereal prince, was always pleasantly game, smiling bright for each snap, accepting each compliment with grace.”

Kiki’s description of Malakai here, far different than how she perceived him when she thought he was a Wasteman, shows that she is falling in love. She all but compares him to a prince in her own fairy tale, and she sees the kindness in his character.

“Rianne and I had grown and all the places we used to fit into one another had been filled or had evolved, the gaps sealed. We might not ever be best friends again, but there was potential there. Hope.”

Reconciling with Rianne represents a turning point in Kiki’s emotional arc as she is able to finally confront and make peace with what happened in the past. She speaks of the relationship with the metaphor of construction to indicate that she feels she’s moved on and changed, but repairing that relationship leaves Kiki ready to welcome other new relationships, like a romantic attachment to Malakai.

“The newly re-erected protective bars around my heart bucked and bent. He’d disarmed me so swiftly, I never saw it coming. I needed to see it coming.”

This metaphor captures how Malakai is getting around Kiki’s guard, which she feels still needs to be in place—she is still resisting her attraction to him. The further metaphor of a battlefield shows that she is still thinking of this relationship in terms of a game she needs to win, in the ways that she earlier described being with Zack.

“My joy was barging against my gates of caution, demanding freedom.”

This image of happiness battering at her internal guards captures how Kiki’s walls keeping out other people are coming down, in large part because of what she feels for Malakai. The emotional vulnerability leads to their first scene of physical intimacy, an important step in the progression of their relationship.

“I’d been walking around like I’d swallowed a star: fiery, celestial, delightfully volatile, and beaming everywhere.”

This image captures the bright feeling Kiki experiences when she and Malakai first become intimate, expressing her happiness at falling in love. The beaming star is a contrast to the butterflies that signaled her attraction to him when she was trying to fight what she felt; now, though she doesn’t yet identify her feelings as love, Kiki is no longer holding back but feels free to share more of herself.

“The one thing I swore to myself I would never allow to happen. The minute I let my guard down, let myself get involved in Blackwell society, I was paying for it, and everyone else would pay for it too.”

Zack’s attack of Kiki on social media provides the conflict that drives the last act of the novel and forces Kiki to face her own emotional wounds. Her first instinct is to revert to hiding, thinking she can protect herself from being hurt and returning to her paradoxical belief that she can have influence on Blackwell society but still hold herself outside it. This belief about hiding becomes the last bit of emotional immaturity she needs to evolve away from in order to claim her personal power and also be fully in relationship with others.

“It low-key feels like you’ve had one foot out of this thing since we started. Like you’ve been waiting for a reason for it not to work.”

The fight in the last portion of the book that temporarily drives the couple apart is referred to as the third-act breakup, and this novel makes uses of that convention. Once again, Malakai shows that he has accurately taken Kiki’s emotional temperature, proving that he sees her.

“The sadness that had stiffened my bones fled, the rage made me feel supple, fluid, and I felt myself melting into someone I recognized more. I’d allowed too many men to drive me to contort myself into a diminished version of who I was and could be.”

The final step in Kiki’s emotional maturity, the epiphany to which she is helped by the intervention of her friends, is to realize that she chose to diminish herself by hiding herself and her hurt. She is motivated to stand up for herself when she realizes that she is part of a female collective.