Celebrating a new generation of Ghanaian Authors (Part Two)

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Nana Kwabena Owusu in This & That

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In the second part of this series showcasing a crop of new Ghanaian writers, we continue with three more authors, just as we did with part one, which featured Ayesha H. Attah, Nii A. Parkes and Boakyewaa Glover.

Wife of the Gods

In a shady grove outside the small town of Ketanu, a young woman–a promising med student–has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Eager to close the case, the local police have arrested a poor, enamored teenage boy and charged him with murder. Needless to say, they are less than thrilled when an outside force arrives from the big city to lead an inquiry into the baffling case.

Detective Inspector Darko Dawson, fluent in Ketanu’s indigenous language, is the right man for the job, but he hates the idea of leaving his loving wife and young son, a plucky kid with a defective heart. Pressured by his cantankerous boss, Dawson agrees to travel to Ketanu, sort through the evidence, and tie up the loose ends as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

But for Dawson, this sleepy corner of Ghana is rife with emotional land mines: an estranged relationship with the family he left behind twenty-five years earlier and the painful memory of his own mother’s sudden, inexplicable disappearance. Dawson is armed with remarkable insight and a healthy dose of skepticism, but these gifts, sometimes overshadowed by his mercurial temper, may not be enough to solve this haunting mystery.

In Ketanu, he finds that his cosmopolitan sensibilities clash with age-old customs, including a disturbing practice in which teenage girls are offered by their families to fetish priests as trokosi, or Wives of the Gods.

Wife of the Gods by Dr. Kwei Quartey is another book which also expands the genre of books written by Ghanaians into the murder mystery arena, like Tail of the Blue Bird from part one of this series did. Reviews of Wife of the Gods draw parallels to McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which based on its popularity means Kwei Quartey’s character Inspector Darko is here to stay. Readers who want to get a feel of the novel can read an excerpt on the publisher’s website. The second in the Inspector Darko mystery novels is also on its way, Children of the Street in July 2011 (you can view the trailer of the new book on the author’s website).

Dr. Kwei Quartey was born in Ghana and grew up in Accra on the campus of the University of Ghana, raised by an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, both of whom were university lecturers. Even though his professional writing career began after he became a physician, his desire to be a writer started at a very early age. Kwei Quartey now lives in Pasadena, California. He writes early in the morning before setting out to work at HealthCare Partners, where he runs a wound care clinic and is the lead physician at an urgent care center.

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Buy: Wife of the Gods on Amazon

Definition of a Miracle

Eight -year-old Zaara and her family move to Ghana when her parents get tired of life in the U.K. A precocious child with Cerebral Palsy, she finds herself thrust into a society where her disability is not understood and is attributed to a spiritual cause. As a result, she’s taken to various charismatic crusades and other spiritual prayer houses in search of a seemingly elusive healing.

Her Christian mother and Muslim father who’d lived harmoniously in the past, start squabbling incessantly, to the extent that Zaara and her siblings fear their family is disintegrating. Going through culture shock, she searches for her place in a society where she’s often stared at and talked about, as she discovers her inner strength and comes to terms with her disabilities.

This story is about triumph in the face of adversity, a powerful theme in any book and it seems Farida Bedwei the author delivers well on it, most undoubtedly beacuse she borrows from her experiences battling Cerebral Palsy. The customer reviews of the book on Amazon all point to a well written and thoroughly enjoyable book. Nana Fredua Agyeman whose ImageNation blog has a wealth of interviews delivers again with an interview of Farida Bedwei which provides insight into the book. Read an excerpt of the definition of miracle from this website to get a feel of the novel yourself.

Farida Nana Efua Bedwei was born in Lagos, Nigeria. She developed Cerebral Palsy when she was 10 days old and spent the early stages of her life learning how to cope with it. She lived in the Caribbean and Britain until her family relocated to Ghana, when she was 9, where she was home-schooled until 12, when she went into a formal classroom setting. She’s now the Head of IT for a fast-growing Microfinance company in Ghana.

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Buy: Silverbird Lifestyle (Accra Mall); Amazon.com

Powder Necklace

To protect her daughter from the fast life and bad influences of London, her mother sent her to school in rural Ghana. The move was for the girl’s own good, in her mother’s mind, but for the daughter, the reality of being the new girl, the foreigner-among-your-own-people, was even worse than the idea.

During her time at school, she would learn that Ghana was much more complicated than her fellow ex-pats had ever told her, including how much a London-raised child takes something like water for granted. In Ghana, water “became a symbol of who had and who didn’t, who believed in God and who didn’t. If you didn’t have water to bathe, you were poor because no one had sent you some.”

After six years in Ghana, her mother summons her home to London to meet the new man in her mother’s life—and his daughter. The reunion is bittersweet and short-lived as her parents decide it’s time that she get to know her father. So once again, she’s sent off, this time to live with her father, his new wife, and their young children in New York—but not before a family trip to Disney World.

Powder Necklace is loosely based on the life of the author, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, during secondary school in Ghana and in some ways it is similar to Definition of a Miracle, in highlighting how the experiences of the authors influence their work. However Powder Necklace is about overcoming a different type of adversity, finding who you are and where you belong.

Powder Necklace leads the reader through a journey of discovery of the realities and complexities, both sweet and bitter, a multi-cultural descent can bring in life. Nana Ekua reaffirms this with her own review in the reviews section of her book on Amazon. Here is a snippet;

It tells the story of a heroine I’m so proud of — a sharp, honest young girl making the turbulent journey of adolescence across three continents It offers a new perspective on important issues that need fresh examination including: what it means to grow up American/British/etc when your parents are trying to raise you as a good African/Jamaican/Trinidadian/etc

There is an interesting interview of Nana Ekua on ImageNation which she says more abut her motivations for the book. As I was finding information on Powder Necklace I came across something which put a smile on my face. Ayesha Haruna Attah’s profile on GoodReads, a social network for readers worldwide, shows her as a fan of Powder Necklace and making Nana Ekua a favorite author. It is nice gesture to see our authors supporting each other when they can.

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond has written for AOL, Parenting Magazine, the Village Voice, Metro and Trace Magazine. Her short story “Bush Girl” was published in the May 2008 issues of African Writing and her poem, “The Whinings of a Seven Sister Cum Laude Graduate Working Board as an Assistant,” was published in 2006′s Growing up Girl Anthology. A cum
laude graduate of Vassar College, she attended secondary school in Ghana . Powder Necklace is loosely based on the experience.

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Buy: Silverbird Lifestyle (Accra Mall);

Tags: arts, authors, farida bedwei, ghana, kwei quartey, lifestyle-feat, lifestyle_featured, nana ekua brew-hammond, writers