IN PRAISE OF MULTITASKING MOTHERS

(I borrowed this from my website blog on Mother's Day. Let's make this Mother's Week.) 

Mother's Day is a celebration of our mothers, motherhood, and the maternal bonds that form us from conception really. We have Anna Maria Jarvis to thank for this particular occasion. Jarvis founded the day in remembrance of her mother, Anna Reeves Jarvis. The senior Jarvis had been an activist of sorts who organized Mothers' Day work clubs to improve sanitation and fight against high infant mortality.

Anna Maria Jarvis (Image Wikipedia/Olairian)

Later on in her life, Anna Jarvis came to regret the commercialization of Mothers' Day. Indeed, in pre-Covid times at least, Mothers' Day is the busiest time for restaurants, not to mention flowers, cards, and chocolates, of which Jarvis took a very dim view.

Myself, when my late mother was alive, I tried to come up with a Mother's Day gift that was different from the customary fare. Since Mom had a green thumb (she could make a pebble sprout leaves), I sometimes got her an interesting plant like a rare cactus, or a unique Bonsai Tree. Another idea was to come up with a gadget she did not have, which was tough, because she was a master of gadgets. She didn't just find them in the craziest of stores or catalogs, she made some of them herself.

As detailed in  another blog, while my three brothers and I spent our summer vacations in the US, we grew up in Ghana on the University of Ghana (UG) campus, where my mother and father were lecturers in Sociology/Social Work and African Studies/Journalism respectively. My father was ultra busy juggling multiple work-related projects, while my mother balanced work and home life much more effectively. I'm sure that's often the case in many households. As kids, we took Mom's efficiency for granted. As adults, we look back in admiration at her deft time management. My mother brought up four boys while working full time as a lecturer, and did it all with grace and equanimity. I could be misremembering slightly, but somehow she always showed up on time to pick us up from school or sports (Dad was a different matter altogether.)

Mom was an amateur Thespian and a superb cook and baker--anything from okro (okra) stew to chicken paprika to the only carrot cake I ever eat. She held large dinner parties and somehow made it look all so easy. The art of entertaining is to appear unflustered while chaos reigns in the kitchen. 

The collapse of political and economic systems in Ghana as well as my father's death from pancreatic cancer are the major factors that brought my mother back to the US along with her four boys at different points. As I was getting admitted to Howard University College of Medicine, my mother was making her own transition to working as a social worker with the City of New York. Always adaptable and very smart.
In both my reading and writing life as a little boy, I always had Mom's support. She encouraged me to enter writing contests. She often brought home suggested reading from the library or a bookstore: "I saw this and thought you might like it," was the affirming message.

Mom had a great and full life, which came to a peaceful end on June 15, 2020. Covid-19 never got to her, by the way. Her female immune system probably indignantly kicked out the virus, who, I can assure you, is male.

Mom & Me, June 2019, Maryland

CULTURE CLASH: Writing Out Of A Diverse Life

Kwei--Wednesday

In an era when the American administration has done its best to seal the country off from foreigners and migrants including refugees, I've been reflecting on how exposure to people who look different from you and have different backgrounds can enrich your life. I was brought up in Ghana, which of course was a British colony. I came of age on the campus of the University of Ghana (UG), with its iconic orange-tiled roofs. Both my late Black American mother and late Ghanaian father were lecturers there, in Sociology/Social Welfare and African Studies respectively.

The Balme Library, UG (Photo: Kwei Quartey)

Ghana's connections to Britain, a lot stronger then than now, brought a large number of nationalities from the all over the Commonwealth of Nations. Apart from British citizens, there were Australians, Canadians (for some time, our next-door neighbors were Canadians), Indians, Jamaicans, Ugandans, South Africans, and others I've probably forgotten. Many were part of a memorable cast of characters--some amusing, others quite odd. I recall one British lecturer who wore a floppy hat and had a strange movement disorder and a habit of talking to herself. Whereas some of these professors might have a difficult time gaining employment elsewhere, the academic world can often accommodate such "unique" personalities who are sometimes both brilliant and bizarre. My primary school was much the same as the University--a mini United Nations of pupils.

Universities and colleges are often called "ivory towers," a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world. That was much the case with the UG. Quiet, clean, and rather lush, the campus was neither anything like the hectic urban life of Accra nor the rural sectors of the country, which at the time, accounted for most of Ghana's population. That's no longer the case, as only some 43% live in rural areas.

At the time, the University provided a perk to expatriates like my mother: a comped visit every 1-3 years (somewhat negotiable) to their country of birth. Not only them, but their dependents as well. That meant my three brothers and I got to accompany my mother to New York City for entire summer vacations. That an institution in a developing country could afford to extend such a fringe benefit seems staggering to me now, but back then, I took it for granted. I would venture to say we were a tad "entitled," which is an uncomfortable word in the modern zeitgeist. Additionally, because my mother was an American, her children were automatically United States citizens (jus sanguinis), making travel to the UK and Europe a cinch. 

My 2nd brother (R), Mom, and me (Photo by unknown)

In the face of all this, my father was uncomfortable about any blatant show of privilege, and he might have squirmed somewhat over the perks and our relative ease of travel abroad. Ironically, he had degrees from two American universities, but the hard way. No one ever paid his fare! But my pragmatic mother had a strong motive to travel, i.e. the ability to visit her mother ("Granny") in New York. Summers with Granny were truly wonderful. As much as my mother loved Ghana, I believe she felt her children should experience the American half of their cultural heritage. 

Moving Beyond The Ivory Tower

At the diametrically opposite end of traveling to her hometown of NYC, my mother as a sociologist and social worker took her students off the UG campus on field trips to remote rural areas, which experience her students greatly appreciated. Much of the goal of these outings was to explore how village life, culture and traditional belief systems could be used to advance development, reduce poverty, and shape social policy.

My mother also allowed us, her sons, to tag along on these trips, and there I felt the heaviness of my privileged circumstances in contrast to rural living conditions. I remember visiting one village where up 

to 80 percent of adults suffered from river blindness, or Onchocerciasis. This dreadful disease is caused by a parasitic worm called Onchocerca volvulus, which induces such intense itching all over the body that it's impossible to sleep. Eventually, the sufferer goes blind, and in villages were the affliction is endemic, it's common to observe children leading adults blinded by Onchocerciasis. 

A boy leads a blind Onchocerciasis victim (Photo: WHO)

At the time of that field trip, I had already decided I wanted to be a physician, but I believe this wrenching, seminal experience solidified my ambition by raising the curtain on what truly hellish suffering is like and making me want to do something about it.

Cultural Discomfort

Bart, one of my best childhood friends, lived down the road from us on the UG campus, an easy 4-minute walk between our homes, We had a lot of fun and adventure together, and I commonly stayed over for 

lunch and dinner and went on trips with Bart's family and vice versa. They were Dutch expatriates who had lived in Ghana for decades. Hanging out with them was a very different experience from visiting my father's relatives a world away in "real" Accra. My mother, brothers, and I were in the awkward position of not having learned, or been taught, my father's indigenous language, Ga. If he had spoken it to his children from an early age while my mother spoke to us in English, we would have been fluent in both. However, my father might have thought his wife would feel excluded by conversing in Ga with his kids. Already, by Ghanaian tradition, my mother as an American wasn't whole-heartedly welcomed into the affairs of my father and his side of the family, and my father was aware that she at times found that 

exclusion hurtful. In the end, the result was a sharp demarkation between our nuclear family on the one hand and the extended Ga family on the other.

At any rate, the inability to speak Ga fluently was (and is) a problem. My name, Kwei, is so quintessentially of the Ga people (my brothers and I don't even have English names) that any self-respecting Ghanaian would assume we knew how to speak Ga. Repeatedly explaining why that was not the case was (still is) a royal pain in the rear. We took formal lessons when I was a teenager, but there was

no immersion to go with it. 

There was something more profound to the language deficit. Language and culture are intertwined. Interacting with another language means engaging with the culture that speaks the language. My mother was the more present and assertive parent, while my father was more absent and self-effacing. I never had a strong sense that he was fiercely proud of his Ga heritage, or perhaps I never recognized it. Sure, he took my brothers and me to traditional events and family gatherings in town, but I always felt like an outside looking in. I wasn't standing with one foot on dry land and one in the pond. I barely had a toe in the water. And once those small nibbles of Ga culture ended, it was back to the comfortable ivory tower. These experiences were both a culture clash and a culture miss.

The Writing Paradox

While all this culture clash and diversity in my life experience are a bit of a muddle, that jumble is the very materiel and fodder for my writing. In truth, I constantly strive to grasp a culture I feel I just missed--a lost opportunity, in a sense. I have a theory that an author writes to exercise control over a world that's largely beyond control. Rather than run away from my confusion, I'm urged to wrestle with it. Each of my novels is an exploration of Ghanaian culture and an attempt to fully understand it. Mystery is the best genre in which to do it because the central question in mystery, especially murder, is why? Sure, the how is the mechanics of the matter, but what we all want to know is what intricacies of the murderer's mind compelled him to commit the crime. 

In one form or the other, the backdrops to my stories have some aspect of culture clash. In WIFE OF THE GODS, a young progressive female medical student challenges the age-old tradition of indenture servitude of girls to a fetish priest in return for his protection of the family against curses. In GOLD OF OUR FATHERS, illegal Chinese gold miners are in conflict with the locals. THE MISSING AMERICAN is where Ghanaian and American values meet like a river lagoon swirling with the sea at high tide. In funny scene in the upcoming SLEEP WELL, MY LADY, our protagonist Emma Djan, who has little or no privilege in her background to speak of, goes undercover as a wealthy woman and discovers why Mercedes Benz owners feel superior. Because that's what a Benz does. Apologies to all Benz owners. Full disclosure, I don't have one.

Finally, I think the well-worn maxim, "Write what you know" is inadequate. You should also write what you care about. If there's no emotion built into the foundation of your writing, it may seem flat. So, as long as I can write, I will continue to delve into culture clashes.