I can’t remember ever having taken such a long time to
read a novel! It has been so terrible that I cannot even recollect how long I
took to read Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go.
I suspect I might have taken well over three months with long stretches away
from the story. A busy schedule would be the easiest scape goat but I must
admit I found the text rather a slow read especially the early pages. But
please do not mistake me, the novel isn’t boring in the sense of the word!
There has been an increase in stories of immigrants
and Ghana Must Go adds to the
statistics. I sincerely pray that African writers are not striving to whet the
appetite of some Western fetish for a certain type of literature. Ghana Must Go is a story of Kweku Sai a
Ghanaian married to Folasadé Savage. Between them, they have four ‘talented’
children: Olu, Kehinde, Taiwo and Sadie. Olu takes after his father by becoming
a distinguished surgeon whilst Kehinde is a famous artist. Taiwo and Sadie have
their brilliant set of skills and the reader could easily mistake the writer
for projecting near perfect children until the story unfolds and we unpack the
various sets of character for each. In the pair of twins, Kehinde and Taiwo,
the reader catches a glimpse of some African mythos but this is hardly explored
any further.
In this story, it is tragic what befalls Kweku Sai at his
place of work. The stark reality of subtle racism and him being a victim of
capitalism in which he is sacrificed to appease a hospital benefactor speaks of
the unfair treatment of immigrants of African descent. Having worked so hard to
earn a reputation and honour, Kweku Sai is unable to reconcile himself with the
job loss nor manage the patriarchal expectations and he results to putting up a
face until the day his son, Kehinde, witnesses the father being ejected from
the hospital in humiliatingly embarrassing circumstances. The event is devastating
for both the son and father and Kweku Sai decides to abandon the family.
Kweku Sai’s job loss and his failure to confront the reality
speaks of his tragic character. He spends a lot of money on his lawyer hoping
to win but miserably fails to get reinstated. Having squandered his savings and
with no energy to seek for a job elsewhere, he chooses to go back home – Ghana.
The wife, Savage, is left with the difficult duty of bringing up the children
single-handedly. One cannot fail to empathise with her especially being privy
to the fact that she forsook an opportunity to pursue law at Yale in order to
support Sai and to bring up their children. Sai’s loss of a lifetime career is
catastrophic but not as devastating as Savage’s sense of betrayal when Sai
walks out on her and their children. The formidable sense of kinship that has
been established in their family teeters on the precipice of tumbling down
overnight.
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| Image courtesy of google.com images |
Fola’s being left by Sai rekindles bitter memories of
her childhood and the trauma of the loss of her mother and later father. The tropes
of leaving and being left begin to manifest more emphatically in her life with
the departure of Sai. Fola sends Kehinde and Taiwo to Nigeria hoping that they
would attend a better school only to expose them to the destructive life of sexual
abuse of children in the hands of their uncle. Although she had best intentions
at heart, this act fractures her relationship with her daughter, Taiwo, irreparably
since the latter blames the mother of negligence. Sai’s family bond disintegrates
further and the siblings appear to have no human connection with each other. It
is clear that the family is deeply wounded and traumatised but no one is
willing to confront the reality.
When the death of Sai happens, the family has to
confront its demons and travel back to Ghana to lay the father cum husband to
rest: to seek to heal and hopefully rediscover the meaning in life as they reconnect
severed bonds. Throughout the text, the reader feels that the writer glosses
over character’s hurts, emotions and aspirations. There is a sense of shallowness
in the way particular events, occurrences and experiences are handled. For instance,
it is not clear whether Sai remarried or not. Fola’s emotions, dreams and
achievements are masked throughout and overshadowed by those of the children
and the husband alike. Indeed, Fola is not given an opportunity to deal with
her tragic childhood and neither does she get a chance to be openly angry with
her husband; to confront him in person and pour out her anger. The children too
are not allowed to explore their lives deeply and one feels as though the writer
barely attended to their individual reticence.
The novel’s title is borrowed from a historical
political tiff between Nigeria and Ghana in which Ghanaians were expelled from
Nigeria in 1983. However, I didn’t read anything much into this since there is
more focus in the novel on the religious conflict and killings in Nigeria.
In any case, my thoughts about the story are all
jumbled up. I cannot help it now that I spread my reading of the story far and
wide. However, one thing is clear for me: immigrant literature symbolises for
us tropes of leaving, being left – never ending acts of departure. In all this
the reader is warned that nothing is permanent and although we might remain
forever nostalgic about destinations or pasts that we have come from, futures
we may never behold as ours, we cannot ever really feel at home in either of
the places we depart from or arrive at since we are always on the move. In fact,
one can argue that each one of us is an immigrant of sorts in our various
spheres of life. This is a largely symbolic novel reflecting the tribulations
of an immigrant family and their efforts to reconnect severed relationships in
a bid to live normal lives. There is an intense sense of rootlessness,
insecurity, pressure, yearning to belong yet at the same time severely
alienated. However, is there really anything ‘normal’ and what in essence is ‘normal’
anyway? Ghana Must (just) Go!!
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