Understanding My Parents Bedroom by Uwem Akpan
My Parents Bedroom by Uwem Akpan is a short story that appears in his 2009 collection titled Say You're One of Them. The story deals with heavy subject matter — it's narrated by a young girl in Nigeria who witnesses her mother being intimate with a man who is not her father. The narrative takes place inside the parents' bedroom, which is where most of the tension unfolds. The story is written from a child's point of view, which makes the impact harder to ignore. Akpan uses an innocent narrator to describe scenes that a child would find confusing and disturbing. The girl in the story doesn't fully understand what she's seeing, and that gap between what she perceives and what's actually happening creates most of the emotional weight in the piece. Akpan is known for writing stories from the perspectives of children caught in difficult circumstances across Africa. His collection features multiple narrators — each one a child dealing with poverty, violence, or family breakdown. My Parents Bedroom fits into that pattern, but it stands out because it deals with infidelity and the confusion it causes a child.
I've assigned this story in classes before, and students usually react strongly to it. The blunt way Akpan presents the situation without softening it is what makes it stick with readers. There's no easy resolution at the end, and that's intentional. The story doesn't give you comfort — it gives you the raw experience of a child trying to process something adult and painful. If you're looking to read the full text, it's available through various online literary databases and some educational platforms. It's also included in the printed collection Say You're One of Them, which you can find on Amazon or through book retailers. Some schools and universities also carry it in their course packs. One thing to note about reading this story: it works best when you let the child's voice do the work. Don't try to analyze it to death right away. Sit with it first. The emotional effect is more powerful than any literary device you might catalog from it. After that, you can dig into how Akpan builds tension through structure and what the setting itself represents in the narrative.
