LET THE TRAVELS BEGIN (AGAIN)

 Now fully vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, I am once again ready to travel, and this season will be a busy one. Of course, it was impossible to do any travel during 2020 to travel to Ghana to research the third Emma Djan novel called LAST SEEN IN LAPAZ--that's Lapaz, Accra, not La Paz, Bolivia. However, having to stay home in 2020 facilitated my finishing Emma #2, SLEEP WELL, MY LADY in record time, as well as starting on LSIL, which I'm scheduled to turn in to the editor on or before July 1, 2021. The deadline looms large!

Now that I've passed the halfway point writing LSIL, I know which areas of research I need to focus on. In addition to the standard visit to Ghana, I need to travel to Nigeria and Niger, because substantial portions of the novel take place in these countries. You can get an idea of my itinerary from the map below, which is numbered in sequence according to the destinations during the trip.

So, for your reference, I will be in Lagos and Benin City, Nigeria, for ten days in July; Niamey and Agadez, Niger, for eight days; and Ghana for the remaining four weeks or so.

My destinations in West Africa (edited, original image Shutterstock / Porcupen)

I went to Nigeria as a small child but remember little to nothing about the trip, so Nigeria will be a new experience for me, as will Niger. The issue with these two countries is that neither scores high in the safety category. The US Department of State puts Nigeria at its Level 3 warning: reconsider travel; and Niger earns a Level 4: do not travel.

Then, why am I going to these two countries? I considered not doing it, but anyone can do Google and YouTube research. I believe I owe readers a lot more than that. Being "afraid" to travel somewhere is not going to cut it. On the other hand, I'm not throwing caution to the wind. I've secured a guide and escort to be with me at all times in both countries.

The unofficial jacket cover copy will help you understand what I'll be looking into during my travels.

When Nnamdi Ojukwu’s daughter Ngozi elopes with boyfriend Femi, Nnamdi appeals to Emma Djan and her detective agency boss to investigate Ngozi’s whereabouts. Weeks later, Femi is found murdered at his opulent residence in Accra, but Ngozi is still nowhere to be found. How is she connected, if at all, to Femi’s killing? As Emma digs further, she discovers Femi was part of a horrifying network of sex traffickers in Europe and several West African countries. Migrants from Ghana, Nigeria and other West African countries are duped into thinking they are on their way to success and riches in Italy. But once there, they are manipulated into prostitution with little chance of escape.

As successful as Femi has been, he has made a lot of enemies, all of whom have had possible motives to murder him. The question is, which one of them did it? Not only does Emma have to hunt the killer down, she’s in a race against time to find Ngozi—that is, if she’s still alive.

As you can see, LAST SEEN IN LAPAZ tackles the complex and uncomfortable subject of human and sex trafficking with scenes in Ghana, Nigeria, and Niger. The West Africans one sees on TV attempting to cross the Mediterranean, sometimes perishing in the process, depart mostly from the shores of Libya, but they originate primarily from Nigeria, and to a lesser extent from Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Agadez, in Niger, is the legendary transit spot for migrants before they make the hellish trip to Libya across the brutal Sahara desert, which is fraught with danger from armed gangs, the intense heat, and the threat of dehydration. Needless to say, I'm not going to Libya.

Migrants crossing the Sahara packed into a pickup truck (Shutterstock/Torsten Pursche)    

Many migrants get stuck in Agadez or Libya because they find they don't have enough money to proceed. Sometimes, it takes months to gather the wherewithal to continue on. During that time, they may be subject to physical and sexual brutality, particularly in Libya. If and when they get to Italy--surprise, surprise. Contrary to the glowing picture painted of making tons of money working in a store or being a travel guide, migrant women discover they will be working as prostitutes for the "madam" who paid for much of their arduous journey. Now they owe her money--lots of it. The madam is often a woman who has been a prostitute herself. The blatant disregard for human life in this trafficking world is quite stunning.

Migratory routes from West Africa to Libya

Regardless of the present, this region of Africa holds a long and storied past--periods of epic achievements in culture and learning on the one hand, but strife on the other. Apart from researching for my novel, I'm hoping to make a connection with aspects of West Africa's history.

In addition, there'll be something new: I will be vlogging my journey, allowing for any slow or absent Internet connections I might encounter in different locales. My vlogs will be on YouTube. It's going to be quite an adventure.

ANOTHER YEAR OF THE WOMAN?

Kwei Quartey

There have been several "years of the woman," including 1984, 1992, 2012 and 2018. I believe 2020 will be my personal Year Of The Woman.

By the end of 2017, I had completed my fifth Darko Dawson novel, Death By His Grace. In it, Darko's new sidekick is a young female cop, Mabel Safo, who has been transferred to the Criminal Investigation Headquarters in Accra after she has been sexually assaulted by her commander. My original idea was to have Mabel continue with her own series while Darko was in the background or on a parallel track. However, in what would turn out to be a wise decision, my editor urged me to develop a new series separate from Darko. I don't believe it was by accident that I created a female detective. She had been developing in my subconscious, and although I didn't know it so early on, she was to be shaped by the events of 2017-2019.

Many important women's moments occurred in the period between 2017 and 2019. Time magazine's 2019 Person Of The Year is a diminutive but fierce Swedish teenage girl called Greta Thunberg. Beginning in August 2018, she made the world sit up and pay attention to climate change in a big way.


The steely gaze of Greta Thunberg (Shutterstock/Aaron-Schwartz)


In politics, Spain’s new Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez  appointed a majority-female cabinet in June 2018. In that same year, more than 100 women were voted into office in the U.S. House of Representatives. New Orleans swore in LaToya Cantrell as the first female mayor in the city’s history.

In entertainment, Ava DuVernay, director of A Wrinkle in Time and a close collaborator with Oprah Winfrey, joined the “$100 million club” of directors with films surpassing $100 million in earnings, and Jennifer Lee, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and codirector of Frozen, is named chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios.


Ava Duvernay and Oprah Winfrey, two powerful women in entertainment (Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock)


The Me Too Movement

Undoubtedly, this was the most powerful of women's moments. Me Too (or #MeToo) exploded onto the scene in 2017 when The New York Times (NYT) and The New Yorker first reported that dozens of women were accusing American film producer Harvey Weinstein, formerly of The Weinstein Company (TWC), of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse over a period of at least thirty years. In fact, credit for the name Me Too goes to Tarana Burke, a black female activist and advocate who created the term more than 10 years ago in 2006 to remind women, in particular those of color, that they were not alone in their experiences of sexual assault.


Tarana Burke (Lev Radin/Shutterstock)

On October 15, 2017, American actress Alyssa Milano, crediting Burke for the origins of Me Too, tweeted, “If all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, then we give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

On January 1, 2018, as a crushing tsunami of sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein and many other powerful men broke the dam, Hollywood celebrities founded the Time's Up movement against sexual harassment and gender inequality in the workplace.

Later, in September 2018, during a particularly cringeworthy congressional hearing, an anguished Christine Blasey Ford testified to allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school.


FICTION IN THE ME TOO ERA

(A tidbit of interest: J.K. Rowling, has once again topped Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s highest-paid authors. Rowling, the fantasy author and well-known outspoken feminist, raked in $92 million in 2019, the magazine reports.)

Cultural shifts are reflected not only in real life--news, articles, and non-fiction books--but also in fiction. Three recent novels, Milkman, by Anna Burns; His Favorites, by Kate Walbert; and Those Who Knew, by Idra Novey, have Me Too episodes within their pages. No doubt, there are other books that tackle sexual assault and there will be more to come. Fiction in the right hands--from Morrison to Atwood--can awaken us to ideas, experiences, and truths about which we heretofore knew little or nothing.

Writers of fiction should be sensitive to cultural phenomena, which may play major or minor roles in their novels or contribute to the milieu of the work in subtle yet important ways. Me Too planted a seed of new awareness. As I wrote The Missing American, in which Ghanaian protagonist Emma Djan makes her debut appearance, that seed grew and began to flower. In an interview with Terry Gross, Meryl Streep observed how women have learned to look at the world through male eyes, but men have difficulty doing the same thing through female eyes. With Me Too, I found the impulse to learn to do that compelling. 

Things happen when the time arrives, when we are ready. Five years ago, the Emma Djan of 2020 could probably not have been created, but she's here now. I like Emma a lot. I find myself relaxed and soothed around her while in retrospect I realize I was tense and jumpy with Darko--perhaps the inherent male tendency to compete with another male--a remarkably prevalent characteristic across many animal species.

What will happen to Me Too in 2020? I believe the movement will progress and mature into something much more powerful than we have seen. From 2017 to 2019, the ground was being prepared for 2020, and Emma Djan arrives at the perfect time early in the year. It's no wonder that 2020 is my Year Of The Woman.

Kwei Quartey