Book Title: Allow Me to Introduce Myself
Author: Onyi Nwabineli
Genre: Fiction
Year of Publishing: 2024
Publisher: Magpie, an imprint of Oneworld Publications
Reviewer: Oriyomi Anthony
Synopsis:
In the first twelve years of her life, Anuli Chinasa lived under the glare of benign and rabid social media users, held there by her stepmother’s ferocious appetite for recognition and validation. The result? An emotionally wrought and anxiety-ridden adult who seeks escape in alcohol, binge shopping and financial domination. Her troubles notwithstanding, Anuli was determined to stop her stepmother from continuing to earn off her and that her five-year-old stepsister would not be used the same way she was. This played out in an intense adventure of blackmail, betrayal, friendship and allyship.
Review
The internet and its offshoots, including social media, come with numerous benefits. What with the opportunities to acquire education, connect with new and old friends and generate revenue they present. This income generation potential is the catalyst behind the nascent content creation industry, where everything and anything is content, and everyone is a content maker. Subsequently, intimate and special moments or milestones that would ordinarily be kept private have now become fodder for public consumption. While it is not a problem what an individual chooses to share about his/herself, it becomes an issue when unwary or innocent people are thrust to social media spotlight without their consent.
This is the core of Nwabineli’s Allow Me to Introduce Myself where the protagonist, Anuli, is unwillingly subjected to a performative existence by Ophelia, her stepmother, from childhood till teenagehood. It had started as an honest attempt by Ophelia to keep Anuli’s grandparents, Makuochukwu and Arinze, in faraway Nigeria abreast of their granddaughter’s development in the United Kingdom. This was to help them recover from the loss of their daughter, Kainene, Anuli’s mother, who had died in childbirth. From an innocent picture here to a blog post there, before Ophelia knew it, she had thousands of followers who could not get enough of what she was sharing and were demanding more.
Having never recovered from years spent growing up in the shadow of a dead sister and soon finding that social media offered a chance to finally be visible and also make money, Ophelia became engrossed in milking all she could from this Anuli-based newfound popularity. In due course, exclusive mother-daughter moments became content to be carefully curated for the public. It did not matter that Anuli was getting increasingly uncomfortable with all the attention or that she was beginning to act out. These were just tantrums to be quelled or so Ophelia thought. Anuli’s father, Nkem, who could have shielded her from this unwanted publicity, was more concerned about pleasing his new wife, as he could not contemplate raising Anuli alone. It was not surprising then that Anuli rebelled and unravelled spectacularly.
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Highlights
Nwabineli’s Allow Me to Introduce Myself did a beautiful job in unshrouding an unpopular topic society would rather ignore: how celebrity parents and other influencers commercialise their children on social media. As I read, I pictured several content creators who now make content off their children, managing standalone social media accounts for them, and subjecting them to photo and video shoots they have no business with. And I wondered if they knew that while the public’s adoration and brand endorsement gigs may be flooding in today, they could be unwittingly laying the foundation for a dysfunctional and unmendable relationship with their children or worse still be setting up the children for years of physical and emotional turmoil?
Nwabineli writes beautifully, she tries to capture every emotion and describe every scene. After a while though, these descriptions got tedious and at some point, I neglected the book, only going back because I wanted to see it through.
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Overall, Allow Me to Introduce Myself is a timely book that I think everyone should read. It gives readers a different perspective of social media fandom and urges the reader to question every appearance of a child on an influencer’s timeline. It will get you asking if that little celebrity child consented to having their pictures splashed on Instagram or if having strangers make disparaging comments about a child’s weight, beauty or other physical features is worth it to their parents? You would also start questioning if it is okay for members of the public to download pictures and videos of celebrity children as though they are relatives, especially paedophiles and other unsavoury characters who trawl the dark web to gorge on these pictures to satisfy their weird desires.
Importantly, Allow Me to Introduce Myself will make you take a pause before you share your personal or other member of your family’s picture on the internet, because at the end of the day, why should the public know what you or your children are up to?
