Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu review – tribute to an émigré mother

A son chronicles his mother’s experiences as she leaves her ancestral home in Ghana for a difficult life in London

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.

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