As far as the writing goes, it does not get much better than Selasi's poetic prose that belies a deep emotional intelligence that makes her characters feel real. I came away thinking that I had met many Kwekus and Taiwos, and did not want to stop reading about their lives. From the very first page, there are some passages that you want to just scan and frame and mount on your wall for their lyricism and intelligence and honesty. her description is painstaking and detailed with a poetry and grit that reminds of Toni Morrison. She loves language, sometimes a bit too much, giving her this tendency to over-describe and launch into (albeit gorgeous) paragraphs that do very little to advance the story. Even so, I think you'd do yourself a great disservice for not reading because of that.
One thing that grated, though, is how Selasi missed some of the more Nigerian details. It is hard to get past her mixing up mainland and Lagos island (no, Ikeja is not on the island) and I don't know anyone that eats jollof rice and egusi (maybe some poeple do, but it's an unusual combination). Also, I don't remember a woman ever calling her son okunrin mi like Fola (I think) did; it is usually something like oko mi ("oko" can mean husband, so this means something like "my dear").
I know a book is memorable when it leaves me with more than just a story, but an idea that I am grappling with days after. It is hard to read Ghana Must Go without thinking about the burden that a lot of immigrants living in the Western world face to be great. The Harvard graduates, those with high-flying jobs, those that made good on
the other side in the way that gets celebrated at dinner tables back in home
countries, parents dropping nugget after exaggerated nugget of their sons’ and
daughters’ success in classrooms or offices full of white people. I wonder if
by focusing on the most successful among us we are not reinforcing the deeper
minority problem of having to work twice as hard as anyone else to get
anywhere, to achieve something, to be seen. Even among ourselves, we have
internalized the notion that we must be extraordinary for our stories to count.
The Western world teaches us what and who to celebrate, and because we must be
extraordinary to get noticed, we in turn do not easily forgive ordinariness, and tacitly accept the idea that many of us need be ignored for the few -- and there are always too few -- stars who arguably do not see their due, their achievements often filtered through a racial lens.
Selasi may not have meant for
this to be so, but I found her novel negotiating with the idea of the
extraordinary. Kweku Sai was an extraordinary surgeon, but his life took a left
turn and he fell from grace. Taiwo, the beautiful writer and lawyer, and her
equally extraordinary artist twin Kehinde, are haunted by a horrific incident
at the hands of an uncle in Lagos demonstrate in different ways a gift for
self-destruction. Baby Sadie, a student at Yale, shares this gift with her
siblings. Olu is the perfect son with anxiety issues that you can just tell
will be the bane of his relationship with his long-term girlfriend-turned-wife
Ling. None of the characters in her ambitious, well-done novel are
insulated from life by their degrees and accomplishments. Even overachieving immigrants get in their own way sometimes.
It was also very affirming to read a story of immigrants from a writer of African descent that deals with issues that
many of us tend to see as Western. I grew up in a Lagos where
want is laid bare: early morning strivers leave for work as early as four in the
morning so as not to be late for a nine o’clock start at the office; the markets always teeming with people; the street children playing hopscotch between
traffic jams and the police chasing them off the streets. The issues that are readily comprehensible, and therefore immediately deserving of sympathy, were those to which the matter of concern is not directly oneself; like being widowed, being arrested by corrupt police and without just cause, being battered by one’s husband, or being robbed of one’s possessions. It is not that too many of us are without human kindness, but many of us have
trouble understanding more quiet afflictions that affect the self; issues of
depression, bulimia, and suicide are often treated with a wave of the hand, a
tired dismissal, more personal failings than real problems deserving of
sympathy.
I don't read reviews of books that I plan to read, but I did go back and check out what some folk have been saying about the book. It has been amusing to see journalists marveling over her cheekbones and cosmopolitan upbringing, and bringing up her much-talked-about essay on Afropolitans. In a way, the hubbub made of her appearance and her background reinforces her depiction of the immigrant family in her novel, one that peels away the impressive armor and questions the humanity within.
