Writing has always been my way of navigating gaps in my knowledge, and working out my frustrations with life, my identity and my relationships. But as the idea for The Rest Of You<\/em> began to take shape and I explored my protagonist Whitney\u2019s experience of living in London, I realised that I was missing something – life in Ghana. I would have to do more than just write a story, creating the characters how I saw them and inventing scenarios for their lives. I would have to take a journey to the past, and in the process, let go of what I thought I knew about my own family history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that was more than a struggle. I was writing during lockdown, in the midst of a global pandemic, where our relationships with one another as a society were being tested, challenged and in far too many cases, mourned. But I threw myself into the research that at the time, was to be a follow up novel to The Rest Of You<\/em>, specifically set in Ghana. It was only later, after a turning point conversation with my agent, that I realised the past and the present needed to live in one book to be fully understood. Hence the dual narrative of present day London and mid-90s Kumasi, Ghana that now makes up The Rest Of You<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have visited Ghana three times in my life; a fact I held a lot of shame about in the early years of my adulthood. But growing up, we didn’t have the money to fly the whole family over very year, and so much of my extended family resided here in London, that it became less urgent to visit Ghana as the years went by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thankfully, it was my writing of this book that took me back there for the third time. Thanks to an Arts Council England grant, I travelled to Ghana in 2022, this time alone and in my thirties, with a plan to do as much \u2018research\u2019 as I could. What that really meant was multiple conversations with various aunts and uncles, professionals, and people with lived experience of growing up in Ghana in the 60s, 70s and 80s, leaving to live in the West and eventually returning to Ghana during their retirement years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So many gaps were filled for me within those conversations – about why people leave their homelands, why they return, and what impact this has on (often) the children they are trying to make better lives for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Subsequently, I was able to fill those gaps in for my main character, Whitney too. I know what it is to be Black British, how that culture is a melding of the first generation African and Caribbean cultures that persisted and transformed here in Britain. I grew up surrounded by Ghanaians in church and in my family, and went to school with people from across the African diaspora and beyond – all of us children of people who had migrated from somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s one of the few incredible things about growing up in London – you grow up with the rest of the world too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the experience I wanted to put on the page for Whitney – how her Black British culture was ingrained, and what bridges she needed to cross emotionally to close the gap between what her Ghanaian heritage meant to her identity, and what it meant to her elders. And naturally as the author, I learnt a whole lot about myself and my somewhat fractured relationship with the past too. I found myself piercing together old memories after new conversations with my elders, and examining how I felt about them now. And how my elders felt about themselves, about decisions they made that inevitably impacted the generations that came after them.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n I thought about Whitney, what she would do with what she had discovered about herself; the alternative timeline of her life in Ghana, and how we truly move forward from the past. Not by ignoring it, but through acknowledgement and acceptance. Letting go of what no longer serves us, and finding our own imperfect ways forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/vervebooks.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/IMG_5011-1024x683.jpeg\")
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