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. 

 

 

The Cultural Tightrope

Michael - Thursday

Last weekend I drove the 900 miles from Johannesburg to Cape Town for a variety of book events here in Cape Town. Since then we've had events interspersed with trying to finish the final draft of the new Kubu mystery, Facets of Death, that needs to be done this week. To make it more interesting, we are in the season of 'load shedding' when the power utility turns off the electricity for hours at a time. All these activities are still underway.

Thinking about a discussion at today's book event, and issues we're addressing in the new book, I thought I might blog today about aspects of writing for readers outside the culture of the setting of the book. I had some ideas. I looked back through past blogs...and was reminded that Kwei Quartey had written a blog for murderiseverywhere several years ago on the topic, and he summed up my ideas pretty well, as well as having interesting ones I hadn't thought about. So I couldn't resist re-offering his piece. While the power lasts...

Kwei lives in Los Angeles and writes mysteries set in Ghana.  But the issues he discusses here are important to any author writing about a culture outside the reader’s home culture, and particularly relevant in South Africa (or Botswana for that matter).

His first book Wife of the Gods introduced a memorable new detective, Darko Dawson. That book met enthusiastic critical acclaim, and was followed by the quite different but equally intriguing Children of the Street. Michael Connelly said: “Kwei Quartey does what all the best storytellers do. He takes you to a world you have never seen and makes it as real to you as your own backyard.”
Since then he's added Murder at Cape Three Points, Gold of Our Fathers, and Death by His Grace.

Here Kwei talks about the issues he thinks about as he takes you to that other world.

The Cultural Tightrope

Writing outside the culture of my readers can be a balancing act

My Inspector Darko Dawson mystery series is set in the West African coastal nation of Ghana. The first in the series, WIFE OF THE GODS, was published in 2009, the second, CHILDREN OF THE STREET, in 2011, and if all goes well, the third, MURDER AT CAPE THREE POINTS, will come out next year. I grew up in Ghana, leaving in my late teens for the States, where both my writing and medical careers began. My late father was Ghanaian, and my mother is black American. Both were lecturers at the University of Ghana in the suburbs of Accra, the capital.

Slum housing at Agbobloshie, Accra

Luxury gated housing at Takoradi

            Like any mystery writer, I strive to create good plots and full, intriguing characters. However, the holy grail for me is to convey the Ghanaian essence authentically without confounding Western readers or relying on too much exposition. The fact is that I am writing primarily for an American audience. Although a certain niche of readers loves being transported to foreign lands via a good mystery, I need to bring them along with me for the ride and not drag them behind me in the dust. 

            In my novels, some aspects of Ghana’s nature cannot be extricated from the story. That was clear in WIFE OF THE GODS, where beliefs in witchcraft and traditional healing, apart from being part of the plot, highlight how Ghanaians are often comfortable with the coexistence of old and modern ways. However, whether to include certain tidbits of Ghanaian life in my stories can take some deciding. To shake hands the Ghanaian way, you finish up by snapping your thumb and ring finger against the thumb and ring finger of your fellow hand-shaker, while he (it’s more common among males) is doing the same thing at the same time. It’s characteristically Ghanaian, but some might argue that, cute as it may be, its inclusion in a novel doesn’t advance the story. Do I put that in a novel, and does anyone really care?

Big trade: Takoradi Harbor

Small trade: Sekondi Harbor

           Like the special handshake, extending a greeting to someone rather formally – good morning/afternoon/evening - is quintessentially Ghanaian, but I must be careful that I don’t overdo it. One of my New York editors crisply commented, “While I realize Ghanaians are more gracious than the average New Yorker, you need to take out some of the greetings and polite chit-chat.”

            Other Ghanaian-isms would seem odd or incorrect to my editors and readers and are probably best omitted. “I’ll pick you at the bus station” means, “I’ll pick you up at the bus station.” Affirmatives can be confusing as well. In response to the question, “This meal isn’t spicy?” a waiter might say, “Yes, please.” A Westerner could interpret that as, “Yes, it is spicy,” but the waiter more likely means, “Yes, you are correct. It isn’t spicy.”

Poverty meets the internet
Homeless youths use computers at a refuge

Pidgin English, popular among hip youth, educated or not, can be tough to decipher if one is unaccustomed. I have included it in my novels, but with caution. If I write “I dey go house,” I must use it in enough context that the reader understands it to mean “I’m going home.” Could readers take a whole page of pidgin? Probably not. In the same way, when quoting a character speaking in one of Ghana’s indigenous languages (English is the language of instruction and commerce), is the best approach a single word here or there with an obvious meaning in context, or whole sentences followed by a translation?

In this regard, Westerners often use the word “dialects” to describe the languages of different African ethnic groups, but in Ghana for instance, referring to the languages Ga or Twi as “dialects” is as ridiculous as saying that Swedish is a dialect of Norwegian.

    

While small traders ply Accra's traffic jams

... a once viable rail system rusts

            Ghanaians use a wide range of exclamations to express emotion. Several variations of “oh,” “ah,” and “ei” express indignation, excitement, sadness, or disapproval, depending on how they are said. They are a distinctive element of speech in Ghana, but tonally, they are difficult, if not impossible, to represent on the page.  

Pacing is important in crime fiction. If I were to accurately represent the true pace at which business is generally conducted in Ghana, my novels would be unacceptably slow for the average western reader. In reality, there’s a lot of “s/he’s not in, come back tomorrow” in Ghanaian life, sometimes delivered with a nonchalance that foreigners might take as rudeness. Although that is usually not the intention, it can be irksome. I do make use of this “delay of services” to some extent in the Darko Dawson series, but in general, Darko gets in touch with people and finds things out a lot more efficiently than he would in the real Ghana.

Neighborhood dirt track 

George W Bush highway
(courtesy of the US & China) 

Darko also lives more comfortably than he would in real life as a detective at his rank and salary level. Policemen and women in Ghana do not make much money. Even some chief inspectors, a respectable rank, live in cramped and dilapidated single-room barracks. Although the Dawson family has its financial constraints, it could be much worse. Nevertheless, I made a conscious decision that I did not want dire economic conditions to be so overwhelming in my novels that they distract from Darko’s raison d’être: solving mysteries.   

As the pairs of pictures illustrate, Ghana is an evolving country full of contrasts, progressing in some ways while coming up short in others, which is what makes it so interesting to me as a setting. My job is to portray all that complexity in a comprehensible and entertaining way, and keep my readers coming back to see how Darko, his family, and his country grow.

Kwei Quartey, MD

Discover more about Kwei and his work at www.kweiquartey.com