Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
It seems that African writers are having a moment. The last few years have seen an explosion of writers who you’ll find labeled as African writers. They may be American, British, Nigerian, South African, Ghanaian, but they are all labeled as African writers. Is Yaa Gyasi, an exceptional young writer who came to America from Ghana at the age of 3 and whose debut novel, Homegoing, is about the legacy of the slave trade in America and Africa, an African writer? Helen Oyeyemi is British, with Nigerian roots. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche was born in Nigeria and educated in America and divides her time between those two countries. Dinaw Megestu is Ethiopian-American and Imbolo Mbue is from Cameroon but resides in New York. And Africa is a continent made up of dozens of countries. Should all these writers with all their different styles and stories be put into a single category, that of African writer?
Though you’ll find Taiye Selasi listed in the category of African writers, she finds this notion unsatisfactory. She describes herself as multi-local. She was born in London and raised in Boston to parents of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin. She has coined a description for herself and others like her – Afropolitan. Her preferred guide to identity is experience: “our experience is where we are from.”
This is useful context for reading her acclaimed 2013 debut novel, Ghana Must Go. The jacket describes it as “a sweeping narrative that takes us from Accra to Lagos to London to New York”, in other words an epic tale.
It is an epic story, not because of the geographical reach, but because every family story is epic in its own way. It is epic, not because of the backdrop or historical context, or the world around it, but because a family unit can be so far apart yet cross (metaphorical) miles to come back together. That is what makes the book both epic and universal.
The story begins with the death of Kweku Sai, a sudden but peaceful demise in the garden of his home in Accra. The family that he left behind comes together to bid him farewell, and it is in that coming together that we learn the story of one family’s reach for success and how it tore them apart.
The first third of the book is a kaleidoscopic narrative that flits between fragments of the past as remembered by Kweku. As he experiences his heart attack, we learn the details of his story. His emigration, marriage, career, births of his children and his ignominious fall from the heights of his success.
Nigerian Kweku Sai’s story is an American one. He comes to the U.S. where he meets Ghanaian Folasadé Savage. They marry, and she gives up pursuit of her legal career to look after the family as he becomes an accomplished and brilliant surgeon. One minute we learn about how his garden in Accra was created, the next about the difficult birth of one of his children. We learn that his wrongful dismissal from his Boston hospital shatters his sense of self-worth and he cannot bring himself to reveal this incident to his family. It’s not until a year later, when his son sees him being thrown out of the hospital he worked in, that Kweku determines he must leave them, because “She was the parent. He was the provider,” and by losing his job he has failed them as a provider.
The patriarch’s story of his life is delivered in a somewhat florid and jumbled unfolding. It is the story of the matriarch, Fola, that reveals the secrets of the family that was torn apart by the absence of their father and the profound repercussions of that decision.
Fola is left to raise her four children. It is their story that allows the book to shine. She manages to raise children who are, by all objective measures successful and accomplished themselves, the eldest son a surgeon like his father, another son an accomplished artist, a daughter “at the top of her class”, and the baby of the family who scrapes by with an acceptance to Yale off the wait list. But as we learn of the sacrifices along the way and the terrible scars they left we understand why this family has drifted so far apart from each other.
Fola makes a decision that she sees as the only option for a woman in her predicament, struggling to support her children alone. In a move she rationalizes as economic she sends her teenaged twins to live with an uncle of means in Ghana, a criminal thug. The ramifications haunt the children as they grow into adults and further rupture the family unit.
Selasi tells a captivating story about the essence of the experience she describes as Afropolitan. The children are multi-faceted in their identities. Born in the United States, they live the experience of any other aspirational family growing up in Boston, motivated to be high achieving and successful in school and bused to the better schools to reach attain those goals. And indeed they do reach those societal milestones of success professionally.
But who are they, as a family? Where do they belong? In high school Olu sometimes wonders:
“was there something about them that kept them in limbo despite their intelligence and all their hard work?...He knew, though they hid it, that his parents had suffered, perhaps were still suffering in some unseen way; that it lightened their burden to think that their children would not have to suffer…”
By the time the youngest, Sadie, is in college, she sees it like this:
“It is that they are weightless, the Sais, scattered fivesome, a family without gravity, completely unbound. With nothing as heavy as money beneath them, all pulling them down to the same piece of earth, a vertical axis, nor roots spreading out underneath them, with no loving grandparents, no history, a horizontal – they’ve floated, have scattered, drifting outward, or inward, barely noticing when someone has slipped off the grid.”
Ghana Must Go unpacks how a family restores that gravity, the bonds that tie a group of people who share a bloodline but have struggled to come together. It is an epic story of one family’s exploration of what it is that makes them a family. In that Taiye Selasi has given us a story that is about an experience that resonates, regardless of where you are “from.”
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 318
Genre: Fiction,
Themes: Family, Marriage, Immigrants,
Commitment: Poetic prose that you can admire
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