All posts filed under: Features

Sun, sex and scandal in Black Diamond

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A set of twin babies wind up in a South African orphanage after their parents are killed. Lola is strong and beautiful and quickly adopted by a famous American actress. Grace is sickly and expected to die. She survives and is eventually adopted by an abusive church pastor and taken to live in England. The sisters grow into women as different as their new homes, Lola follows the Lindsay Lohan Guide to Celebrity Living, dating all the wrong guys, drinking like a fish and stumbling through one scandal after another. Grace is overweight, timorous and unlucky in love. What will happen when their worlds collide? Will they find love and happiness? And, can they survive the secrets of their past? While reading the first few chapters of Black Diamond I found myself doing that yelling-at-the-TV thing. Both Grace and Lola start out naïve, immature, manipulated by the people in their worlds. They learn every lesson the hard way (despite my yelled warnings) and it’s tough to watch them trusting and losing again and again. The …

8 Fantastic Book Quotes

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Sometimes you read a novel and you come across a sentence, a phrase, a thought, and it gives you pause. Maybe the author has used language in a unique/unusual way or revealed a character so sharply they’ve leapt up and become corporeal. Or maybe the line has resonated so deeply you see your own life in the words. When I have those moments I reread. And reread. Then wonder who I can share the words with. So I’m sharing them here. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Nicole Amarteifio talks sex and African cities

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Since it launched in March 2014, the web series An African City has attracted thousands of online viewers and scored a ton of critical acclaim for its bold approach to sex, its multifaceted female protagonists and its dazzling aesthetic. I spoke to the show’s creator and writer, Nicole Amarteifio about her creative process, feminism and what it takes to fulfill a dream.   I was born here in Ghana. But shortly after the December ‘81 coup my family decided to leave. First we went to England, then after about seven years we moved to America where I spent most of my life. Even as a child growing up in America I always knew that I wanted to go home, and home was Ghana. So shortly after college I made the move back.   I remember one of my first bosses out of college, she loved my writing. It gave me that confidence, that bounce in my step. I started writing poetry and poetry turned into a chapter of a novel. When I was in grad …

Summer Reading Black List

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It’s summer. Unless you’re truly unlucky you have a few days of freedom coming up. While you’re lounging in the sunshine, sipping on that Mai Tai, you should read a book. Here are five fantastic suggestions: Kabu Kabu by Nnedi Okorafor A young woman, desperate to catch her flight out of Chicago’s O’Hare accepts a lift from an illegal Nigerian taxi, a kabu kabu. Never mind that the taxi is far from its proper environs. She soon finds herself sharing the ride with a procession of unusual and unsettling characters. Award winning-author Okorafor deftly combines everyday life with African folklore, juju fantasy and mystical realism to produce a remarkable collection of short stories. Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore by Walter Mosley After starring in hundreds of films, super porn-star Debbie Dare has been disillusioned for a long time and is starting to phone it in. Then, one day, not only does she unexpectedly pass out having the most intense orgasm of her life (and first in years) while filming a scene, she also returns home …

The problem with Ghana Must Go

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Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go is not a page-turner. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, sometimes it helps to take breaks while reading a book, it gives you the mental space to process the themes and concepts. That said, it took me over six months to finish this novel and I eventually did so not out of a compulsive desire to know the outcome, but out of obligation to my book club. The story opens when Kwaku Sai, once a feted Boston surgeon, suffers a heart attack in his garden in Accra. He dies alone, regretful of his estrangement from his family. His departure sends ripples across the country to Sade, the wife he abandoned decades before, and over the ocean to his four children in America. Slowly, his death reunites the disjointed family and exposes the issues that drove them apart. The writing is magnificent. Selasi explores family and love and guilt and forgiveness finding the words to ground intangible emotions and experiences. But is it too magnificent? Many a time I found myself …

Melancholy and magnificent: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

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I found I couldn’t read The Twelve Tribes of Hattie as a straight shot. The narrative was so relentlessly bleak I had to take the odd break to remind myself that joy exists in the world. But I returned to the novel eagerly each time, partly because the story is compelling, but largely because the writing is flawlessly beautiful. We first meet Hattie, the title character, at 17-years-old. She’s holed up in the bathroom of her rented house, fighting to save her twin babies from pneumonia. The children, Philadelphia and Jubilee, have been named to reflect Hattie’s hopes for life in the north. She “wanted to give her babies names that weren’t chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and hope, reaching forward names, not looking back ones.” When the babies die, Hattie’s optimism leaves with them. Her grief is compounded by disappointment in her husband. He turns out to be a self-defeating man who drinks his pay cheques and sleeps around with women who …

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Americanah opens with a hair salon and a major turning point. Ifemelu has decided to close her hugely successful blog, break up with her Black American boyfriend, sell her apartment and (after 13 years away) return to Nigeria. She tells herself there’s no specific cause for the move, just “layer after layer of discontent that settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her”. But while she sits in the hairdressers having her hair braided for this monumental trip home, she thinks of the Obinze, “her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself”, and it’s clear part of her homesickness is the longing to see her former flame. Impulsively she fires off an email to Obinze informing him of her return. Cut to Obinze who receives her email as he sits in Lagos traffic. From his reaction we know the feelings are mutual, which is complicated since he is now a husband and father. Amidst the turmoil Ifemelu and Obinze fall …

There are no easy options for the Geezer Girls

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Frankie Sullivan is one of the most ruthless Geezers in London’s deadly underworld. When the women he employs to traffic diamonds refuse an order he arranges their murder and shifts his nefarious attentions to their daughters. In a world where money talks and even arrows are crooked, fifteen-year-old Jade Flynn and three other girls are dumped in the St. Nicholas care home for children and forced to participate in Frankie’s illegal ‘special community projects.’ It takes a tragedy to lend them the courage to run. For 10 years they stay hidden. But now The Geezer has found them and he is royally pissed. Still, he might let them live if they do one last job… The Good The drama launches like a bullet from a gun and rockets along for all 435 pages. Jade and her fellow musketeers spend most of those pages battling for their lives and I admit I had to put the book down a number of times while I mustered the strength to endure their latest disaster. There is a real …

Chibundu Onuzo talks love in The Spider King’s Daughter

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“She doesn’t treat anyone like an equal. That’s the way she’s been brought up. She’s like her father; but she still manages to have moments of kindness.” Chibundu Onuzo is defending the protagonist in her debut novel, The Spider King’s Daughter. She sits opposite me in an airy delicatessen in London Bridge, a fork dancing in her hand, her youthful face animated. She’s supposed to be eating a plate of mushroom pasta, but after I suggest her story of friendship across Nigeria’s economic lines cannot really be a friendship when the rich man’s daughter, Abike, insists on referring to the book’s other central character as The Hawker, denying him an identity beyond his poverty, Chibundu launches an earnest defence. “She was raised in a very unhappy home. I applaud Abike for all her humanity,” she insists. Chibundu is softly spoken and self-effacing. There can’t be many 21-year-old university students who find themselves juggling essay deadlines with promotion for a published novel, and there are certainly no others who can claim to be the youngest female …

Murder mystery in The Woman He Loved Before Me

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It’s not easy to write a story in multiple voices and keep each one compelling and distinctive. Dorothy Koomson deserves plaudits for pulling off that feat alone. We meet Libby first. A post-graduate beauty therapist who could do more with her life but is happy as she is thank you very much. At least she’s happy until she meets Jack, trips over his stunning good looks, falls for his charms and moves into his lavish Brighton home. For about two seconds everything is perfect. The tone in Libby’s opening is lyrical and quixotic. Fanciful with a whisper of something dark, like a shadow beneath the surface of a calm lake. You keep reading trying to pinpoint what has you uneasy. You’re not sure but Jack has too many secrets and once Libby begins to prod at them, to ask questions about his deceased first wife, you begin to wish she’d just pack her bags and get the hell out of there. And then you meet Eve, the dead wife. Turns out she kept a diary. …