If you were to write a history of your mother, who had left her ancestral home in Kumasi, Ghana, for London, the heartland of the old empire, how might you do it? One option would be to sit her down, as Derek Owusu’s narrator does in the epilogue of his novel Losing the Plot, and ask her direct questions. Yet this approach has limitations: when asked by her son Kwesi whether she was excited to be on the plane that brought her to Britain, the nameless mother replies with a terse “Yeah”. A follow-up question about what she thought of England elicits the no more revealing “I dunno. I didin’t think of it as anythin.”
This “factless interview”, in the narrator’s words, could never retrieve the intimate and difficult details of his mother’s life since that moment of arrival: I find a certain type of African mother to be as reticent about their lives as an uncooperative suspect in a police investigation. Instead, the extra colour the narrator wants is found through painstaking observation and a poetic imagination as the novel code-switches between a poetic voice and, in the footnotes, its demotic counterpart, also interpreting across English and the mother’s tongue, Twi.
After emigrating to Britain, the narrator’s mother lives an economically precarious life marked by indignities, where each day blurs into the next, stretching herself between three cleaning jobs and raising a family. “She stops calling [home] and spends more time with her brood of thoughts.” In her attempt to find meaning and identity – in her words, to “make life” in Britain – she joins an evangelical church. Yet though she sits right at the front, and is caught up in its Pentecostal pull, she refuses to do the bidding of the church’s leadership. From her purse, “she passes coins”, not the notes they expect. “The tithe took its toll,” the narrator writes.
After living in Britain for three decades, she struggles to see herself as British. Her attempts at connecting her children with home (“Whose home?” Kwesi asks) and their Ghanaian heritage are largely futile. When she offers them a taste of her childhood in the shape of a sweet bread, they are indifferent, “so she enjoys alone”. Yet in strange metropolitan Britain there are moments when she connects with others who share something of her “Ashanti soul”. Sometimes an “auntie” might step off her stool into the thick of a party, “moving her big bum back and forth to hip-life … ”
Although notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to declaring her love for her children, there is no doubting her deep affection. In one footnote, the narrator writes: “Listen, with Ghanaians, it’s impossible to tell when they love you. With parents I mean.” Yet she shows it in the most practical ways possible. She even studies youth culture, so that she can understand the world in which she is raising her children.
Although the world this woman inhabits is an unkind and alienating one, there are moments of tenderness expressed in simple yet moving ways. Sometimes she refers to Kwesi as son: “He prefers son to any other calling, loves the drop of tone through those three letters, sounding stretched but comfortable in their balance, a name he’s proud of, a lustrous designation so small but brilliant, a reaction of love touching his entire body when his mother summons him with such a small word capable of palpitating all the air around him.”
Owusu’s second novel, following the success of his prize-winning debut That Reminds Me, isn’t just a concise history of an African woman in London. In the final account, it is a love letter – sometimes dense, often moving – written by a son to his mother, “an immigrant woman who will die here alone and can only rise with the body of work her son has done well”. And by extension it is a living memorial to the millions of people labouring in care, cleaning and other low-paid work.
• Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu is published by Canongate (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
