Los Angeles to London:
I began my journey at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time flying east into the evening. Having decided that Annie Ernaux’s short memoirs would be an excellent companion for the stop-and-go moments of travel, I started with Happening. It’s a book of ninety-five pages in which the author recounts her experience as a young woman trying to get an abortion in Paris during the early 1960’s. As the flight soared and floated across the North American continent towards Greenland and eventually the UK, my mind meandered through the memories of a masterful writer of memoir who states, “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth.”
Fiction vs Nonfiction:
This is the topic of a discussion I’ll have in Accra at Pa Gya! Literary Festival. But for now, I’m contemplating how novelists utilize their personal travel experiences and transform them into fiction and the manner in which nonfiction writers mine the episodes of their travel for essays. Nonfiction writers start pitching even before the journey; and as we travel, we conjure up ways to compose our experiences and perceptions into articles. I wrote flash nonfiction pieces during my time in Accra; but after arriving back in the States, I didn’t plan to write about my travels. Yet, my experiences demanded that I do just that.
The London Tube:
I spent three of my four days in England commuting from my hotel near Heathrow to Central London. The tube ride each way was one hour and luckily, each time, I was able to grab a seat on the train. Once seated, I dipped into the book a fly in the soup – a memoir by Serbian American poet Charles Simic. When I wasn’t looking at the wide array of humanity that fills the London Underground, I read Simic who at one point says, “What make both art and memory durable are the details -- the poetry of details,” and then he says, “I found Rollins, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk far better models of what an artist could be than most poets,” and he also says, “Every poem is an act of desperation or, if you prefer, a throw of the dice.”
London Review Bookshop
The bookstore is conveniently near the British Museum and Yakiniku Japanese restaurant. On the weekday that I visited the museum, it seemed just slightly less congested than the London Tube that formed the backbone of my daily commutes. In contrast, Yakiniku offered a brief refuge from multitudinous humanity. Once I arrived at the bookstore, I secured two signed copies of the same book – The Psychosis of Whiteness by Kehinde Andrews. I perceived my purchase as a bit of a bargain until the reality of the exchange rate reinforced the strength of the pound against the dollar. My plan was to donate one book to the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora in Accra, and to keep the other for myself. I’ve already read The New Age of Empire and Back to Black by Andrews – the first professor of Black Studies in the U.K.
Waterstones Bookstore:
A salesperson at Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus traveled between flights of stairs helping me find the novel No One Dies Yet by Ghanaian author Kobby Ben Ben. I was aware that the novel’s British publication would precede the U.S. debut by months, so I was determined to find the book while in London. My search amongst the alphabetical shelves yielded no results when I initially looked through books written by authors whose last name began with the letter B. A young woman with an accent that I perceived as Eastern European helped me find the last copy they had on site.
Ghana is Lit:
Ghana is many things to many people -- a tourist destination for travelers from numerous countries, a repatriation location for Ghanaians spread across the globe, a point of return for Black Diasporans from the U.S., UK, and the West Indies. The country is an investment locale for international businesspeople and a hub for social media influencers. The capital of Accra has an extensive literary community that came together to present two literary festivals during October – Pa Gya! and NYU Accra.
Itinerary:
When I travel, I treasure the manner in which literary festivals organize my days and promise an inspiring agenda. By avoiding the well-trampled trail of trendy tourism, lit festivals offer opportunities to mingle with locals and travelers alike. That had been my experience at AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) in Seattle earlier this year, and I felt the same in Ghana regarding my participation at Pa Gya! Literary Festival and the NYU Accra Arts Symposium. At Pa Gya! I was honored to facilitate both a writing workshop and a discussion. My workshop was titled Creative Nonfiction: Personal Essays and Memoir. During our time together, the participants and I read the personal essay “Childhood Memories” by Cameroonian writer Raoul Djimeli. Following the reading, the participants were eager to write and then share their own compositions of their childhood memories. The following day, I, along with Ghanaian writer David Agyei-Yeboah, facilitated a discussion on the topic Prose Choices: Fiction or Creative Nonfiction during which the participants had many questions about how and when a writer decides to write a fictional story or a narrative that remains true to lived experience.
Pa Gya! Literary Festival:
This celebration of language and the literary arts took place October 13-15, 2023. Their inaugural festival, held in 2017, was sponsored by the Writers Project of Ghana and the Goethe-Institut. This year’s event boasted many sponsors and included writing workshops and readings, as well as panels on a large variety of topics such as performance poetry, the short story, comic books, travel writing, mythology, and film.
Some of the ideas I took in while attending Pa Gya! included: UNESCO designated Accra the 2023 World Book Capital; missionaries dominated Ghana’s pre-independence publishing industry; South Africa is the only country systematically collecting data on publishing; there are few MFA programs in Africa, thus, creative writing workshops fill the gap; in the 1970’s, Kenya was publishing most writers on the continent until an anti-intellectual dictator forced writers into exile, leaving the country’s literary life crushed;
NYU Accra Arts Symposium:
New York University has maintained a study abroad program in Accra for almost twenty years. Writer Chiké Frankie Edozien became the university’s site director in the pivotal year of 2020. This year NYU Accra partnered with several organizations, including Writers Project Ghana, to present Reclaiming the Narrative: An Arts, Culture, and Ideas Symposium held in Accra, October 19-23. Keynotes were presented by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Chris Abani, Aminatta Forna, and Jennifer Makumbi. Presentations focused on a plethora of topics including, music and the novel, children’s books, African sexuality, translation, and working with agents.
Some gems I overheard at NYU Accra: We (African storytellers) have always told our stories; the Brazilian curriculum doesn’t teach slavery while the Angolan curriculum does; Zimbabwe teaches the Shona language and Shona literature; Writer Frankie Edozien knew that if he wrote academic books, many readers wouldn’t have access to them; most readers in Africa are middle class, thus there is a constant negotiation regarding access; African writers are curators of African humanity; all art is testimony, an act to remember, and to give witness;
The Library of Africa and the African Diaspora:
Its location is further outside of Central Accra than I had imagined. As I gazed at shops and sellers from the backseat of the Bolt ride share, I wasn’t sure if this was really my life experience. Or was I watching yet another video on travel to Ghana? The driver was taking me to Adenta Municipality which is located about ten or fifteen miles away from the central city. I was going to LOATAD to deliver the three books I was eager to donate – Memorial Drive, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, and The Psychosis of Whiteness. I convened with journalist James Murua at the library where the administrator, Seth Avusuglo, greeted both of us. Seth gave us an extensive tour of LOATAD which is not just a library, but also a museum and a cultural center for writing residencies. The tour began at the entrance with our contemplative reading of a poem titled “The Tenderness Manifesto” by Mbella Sonne Dipoko. Delivering a very detailed history of writers, books, and publishing, Seth led us through the library collection on the first floor that contains extensive first editions of books that are watched over by photos of a cosmopolitan collection of writers from Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean. He then guided us to the second floor with the same enthusiasm and attention to detail that involved his pulling books from shelves and describing why they were a special part of the collection. LOATAD is the brainchild of writer and cultural institution builder, Sylvia Arthur who founded a smaller library in 2018 before relocating to this site and founding the larger institution that we visited.
Accra to London:
Unlike my travel to Ghana, the return encompassed no overnight stay in a hotel to regain my composure. I began my twenty-four-hour journey on a night flight leaving Accra at 10:30 with a planned arrival in London at 6:00 a.m. I scratched all reading plans on this overnight flight since, like the other passengers, I wanted to get a good night’s sleep in hopes of arriving rested at my destination. I swallowed two melatonin tablets that assured that I drifted in and out of sleep during the seven-hour flight. The cabin was dark and silent. Even the children were sleeping. Occasionally, I woke up -- when the man at the window seat wanted to go the bathroom and when another gentleman in front of me stood up in the shadowy cabin and remained standing to stretch his legs for what might have been thirty minutes or so.
My six-hour layover at London Heathrow required that I change from one air carrier to another. So, I spent the first part of the six hours retrieving my luggage from the carousel, going through immigration, taking the large airport elevator, and then a train from Terminal Five to Terminal Three. While waiting in the long line to check in my luggage on air carrier number two, I read some of Annie Ernaux’s Look at the Lights My Love, an eighty-page account of her visits to the Auchan superstore where she observed the convergence of culture, class, and capitalism. In this book, Ernaux, chose to focus on a setting that is rarely described in literary works. For me, reading her book while I stood in line made the waiting time seem shorter. While describing a customer, Ernaux states, “Dilemma. Am I going to write ‘a Black woman’ – or ‘an African woman,’ though I’m not sure she is African – or simply, ‘a woman’? To write ‘a woman’ is to erase a physical characteristic I can’t not have immediately seen. In short it is, implicitly, to ‘whiten’ this woman because the white reader will, instinctively, imagine a white woman.” I found this quote interesting because I noticed that when I was writing flash pieces in Ghana in which I had to describe a person, I didn’t feel the need to say Black. But in the U.S., I constantly feel that necessity to describe skin color.
At the gate for departure from Heathrow to Los Angeles, I noticed a small group of passengers. Checking out the crowd, I got the sense that half of those assembled were Brits who lived in Santa Monica. Of the four planes I traveled on, this flight was on the oldest plane. It was as if the only thing missing from the seats were ashtrays in the armrests. Near takeoff, the flight attendant announced that since we weren’t a full flight, the pilot had okayed passengers changing their seats once we gained altitude. Most of us ended up with entire rows to ourselves where passengers could lift the armrests and lay down. I was sitting in the aisle seat on the right side of the plane, and both the middle seat and window seat remained empty.
My plans to sleep during this flight, especially after seven hours of flight the previous night and six hours of sitting around Heathrow, were dashed when sleep didn’t come. Stubbornly awake, I enjoyed my alertness by reading No One Dies Yet by Ghanaian writer Kobby Ben Ben. The novel is a murder mystery with some comedic moments. It offered an opportunity for me to wean myself from Ghanaian culture and society and reintroduce myself to the US by hanging out with a group of fictional gay African American guys whose experiences are narrated by two Ghanaians named Kobby and Nana. Now back home, I’m still reading this book; and I think I’m just at the point where the murder happens. In a chapter titled Fantes, the choral narrators state, “We will never know what happened to the brothers and sisters that went into the castle. But we see them return in the brothers and sisters who followed the Sankofa sign centuries later – what they called The Year of the Return, four hundred years since the first torture began.”
Accra October:
I spent the entire month of October either preparing for my visit to London and Accra or recovering from it. During the initial preparation, I did the usual last-minute purchasing of travel-size toiletries, made sure bills were paid, and so forth. Because I experienced no culture shock in either London or Accra, I knew that I would be its victim on my re-entry into the U.S. – which I was. The individualism of US society can be both a blessing and a curse. Back in L.A., there was no more immediate striking up of a conversation with the people around me; there was no longer that sense, as a Black person, that I and everyone around me were part of a common historical experience. There was no longer that curiosity from the people around me about who I was because, Black or not, the people in Accra definitely perceived of me as different from the norm. Out in public in Los Angeles, I am just anonymous me – writer, reader, and bit of a world traveler.
I enjoyed reading this, and two things stuck out: Firstly, how, when you were writing in Accra, you didn’t feel the need to add “black” to the description. This resonated with me as I only started describing myself as black when I left Lagos and moved to London. Secondly, the point you made about how travel experiences work their way into our writing is interesting; and how we make the choice between delivering it as fiction or non-fiction. This resonated with me because I’ve only recently started to explore non-fiction here on substack (whereas I normally write fiction) and find myself sorting through inspiration and categorising what format it should take. Thanks for this!