African diaspora, Nigerian women’s fiction, Transnational identity, Silence as strategy, Yoruba cosmology, Trickster logic, Mythology.

This paper explores how contemporary Nigerian women’s fiction navigates diasporic identity, mythological frameworks, and survival strategies through silence. Further, it positions the novels’ protagonists as modern trickster figures who negotiate intergenerational trauma, migration, and cultural dislocation across Nigeria and the United States, and highlights the transnational dimensions of Black diasporic experience. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s assertion in Lose Your Mother that “loss remakes you” and that return exposes both the world “to which you no longer belong” and the one “in which you have yet to make a home”, this paper argues that The Edge of Water and The Tiny Things Are Heavier present precisely this Hartmanian condition of diasporic unsettlement. In each novel, Nigerian women move between Nigeria and the U.S., while inhabiting the liminal space Hartman describes, in which migration, memory, and longing produce fractured identities that cannot be reconciled through return. Within this territory, the protagonists embody tricksters who navigate rupture through mythological frameworks and adaptive silence that echo Yoruba cosmology and broader Black diasporic folklore. Likewise building on Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s critique of Western “body-reasoning”, which imposes hierarchical male/female binaries onto societies where they did not originally pose as structuring categories, this paper reads the heroines of the two novels through a Yoruba-informed understanding of identity, agency, and social navigation rather than rigid gender archetypes. In this frame, the trickster is not confined to masculinity; rather, the trickster’s fluidity, adaptability, and relational intelligence become traits fully available to women, though often overlooked in Western scholarship. Thus, the protagonists enact a trickster logic that emerges not from gendered transgression but from culturally grounded strategies of survival shaped by silence, intuition, and nonlinear movement. Their silence operates as a tactical mode of negotiation, and allows them to maneuver intergenerational trauma, familial obligation, and the dislocations of Nigeria/U.S. migration. Furthermore, the characters embody the mythic flexibility that defines Yoruba trickster epistemologies. Contemporary Nigerian women’s fiction therefore reveals a shared language of loss, renewal, and diasporic reinvention. The novels place their protagonists within Hartman’s teachings of historical rupture, yet demonstrate that the process of remaking the self relies on trickster strategies, positioning this flexible, world-shifting mode of survival as a form of agency that women not only inhabit but exemplify.