Three elements have been consistent in Aguda’s work; her stories often feature a female protagonist, a supernatural or speculative catalyst and an interrogation or subversion of tropes and stereotypes about hysteria. Ghostroots, her debut collection of short stories, distils the themes Aguda has explored in her fiction over the past 15 years, while also celebrating the often-overlooked fourth element in her stories: Lagos. 

Lagos is a hellmouth, masking its dysfunction with a glamour of attractions and distractions as it corrupts the worldly and consumes the weary. No one is inherently good or bad in Lagos, ​the city ​only offers choices and karmic consequences. The women in Ghostroots, at different stages of their lives, must contend with their participation and by extension, complicity, in the corrupt political, cultural, gendered, and religious systems that benefit them in some ways and hinder them in others. Their motives and the consequences of their actions vary, but for each woman, the true dilemma lies in realizing that their choices can change them irrevocably—and in grappling with the person they become if they choose to act. 

In ‘Manifest’, the collection’s opening story, Aguda wrestles with the consequences of generational trauma and its compounding influence on mothers and daughters. The story’s protagonist is forced to contend with the possibility that she is a reincarnation of her murderess grandmother, a possibility that will lead to permanent estrangement from her mother. ​​​​​​Told in second person, you vicariously contend with the dysphoria of self-actualization that causes harm to your loved ones, despite all attempts to save you from yourself. 

Estrangement also features prominently in ‘Breastmilk’, where an otherwise ‘good’ man’s indiscretion has such a profound effect on his wife, she is unable to nurse their newborn son. In ‘Imagine Me Carrying You’, a mother harms someone and becomes so burdened with guilt and paranoia about future repercussions that she punishes herself by voluntarily estranging from her daughter, who is already estranged from her father. This is a story that cuts to the bone as many of us have a mother or know a mother who was cut down by grief and endures as a spectre, bound by duty to haunt a home her love once nurtured.  

‘Birdwoman’, ‘Girlie’ and ‘The Dusk Market’ shift focus from the tenuous dynamics of kinship and suburban grotesquery to the thaumaturgic powers of the itinerant market, a mainstay of the Nigerian Weird. The protagonists of all three stories are lost in different ways and seeking answers. Girlie is a child estranged from her mother, Felicity is seeking a reprieve from tragedy, Salewa is looking for a magical escape from her life. The market responds, only partly, with a provision that momentarily satisfies their hunger to belong. Felicity and Girlie end worse than they began, but Salewa, after persevering through doubt and despair, gets a second chance at a new magical life.