Esi Edugyan: Celebrated by the West, Unheard of in Ghana

In her own words, she was sorting out “the pee and poo” of her new baby when the telephone rang. It wasn’t an unexpected hour for the phone to ring, but the news was quite unexpected or perhaps not expected at all: She had been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the most honourable literary award in the Commonwealth. And it’s not just a citation and a plaque to take home; the eventual winner bags a handsome 50 pounds ($82,000).

That was a harbinger of greater things to come. Three more nominations for other prestigious literary prizes have followed: The Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction award and the Governor-General’s award. Esi did not win the Booker, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, won. But she could sweep all three Canadian awards if Half Blood Blues, her latest work, triumphs over Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers.

Half Blood Blues, a story about racial dilemmas set in Berlin, Paris and Baltimore, is her second. The first, The Second Coming of Samuel Tyne, was selected by the New York public Library in 2004 as a book to remember. Esi has been reviewed by almost every important newspaper or literary journal. Here in Canada, she is an icon. Back in her home country, she is a virtual unknown. But she may be our finest literary treasure…at least at present…What is the name of that intelligent Ghanaian writer who got near being nominated for the Man Booker? Let Israel name him.

Esi is a rare breed in the world of letters. A first book is usually a mere knock on the door. The literary door is made of thick translucent brass. The hardest knock is usually not heard at all. When it is most audible, it is heard only by the person who is doing the knocking. Often the door is shut right in their faces when it seldom opens. Esi’s first didn’t have to knock; it was a knockout–to remember. The second knocked on the doors of Booker, and even on the doors of the Governor-General of Canada.

How are the mighty born? Esi is only 33, a new mother to a mixed race baby born to poet/novelist partner Steven Price. At 33, she looks like any 33 year old. And like every 33 year old young woman, she may have a craving for many things 33. Photos of her printed by the western press show a young lady with a searching look in her eyes. In her winter overcoat with long lapels, she could pass for any young person walking the asphalted streets of New York or Victoria…with or without a swagger or perhaps with a grin. But unlike many 33 year olds, her words make a booker sense. In her Victoria home in British Columbia, Canada, Esi houses what looks like a public library. She walks into the facility with a cup of tea, and ‘get lost in a book.’ She is either reading or has just finished reading. It doesn’t fall from the skies; perspiration and a painful discharge of energy go into the making of the mighty and the great. Throw in divine favour…for Christian measure.

The creative Ghanaian brain! We are a creative people. Mind you, Esi Edugyan is Canadian-Ghanaian or Ghanaian-Canadian, depending on where the moon shines on a particular windy summer. With a Caucasian husband and a mixed race child, Esi is probably a bit of many things colour. Connoisseurs wonder whether Half Blood Blues, the setting of which was shaped during her visits to Germany, mirrors these realities. Samuel Tyne is a story about a Ghanaian immigrant in the West. Reviewers have tried to establish a connection between Tyne and the complex dynamics of modern western immigration, which Esi’s Ghanaian immigrant family typifies.

There is such a thing as starting a book and finishing it. It is possible to develop the plot of a good story from an uncompleted structure in Kasoa, set in Brooklyn or say topsy-turvy Toronto, and embellished with realities of life in former apartheid South Africa. The human brain, no matter where it finds itself, has enormous power to dream dreams worthy of a booker. Yet, location, more than potential, counts a lot in the making of the African Great. Did Canada or the United States, where Esi took her first degree, shape her creative personality in a way that Kosoa will never be able to do? Still, many have won international awards from our local Ghanaian setting.

Setting, friends, setting (both in place and time), is important. Of course, a certain Mr Kofi Akpabli wrote about Ghanaian traditional soups and good old Akpeteshie, and won a CNN award for his efforts. The Pan African Writers Association in Accra is yet to reward Akpabli’s Akpeteshie, even though PAWA knows the local gin better than the CNN in Atlanta. Setting, my ‘brethers’ and sisters, is sometimes all the Booker there is.

The Canadian media wrote extensively on Esi before and after the Booker event in London. The media in Ghana saw no need to say a thing or two about an illustrious daughter booking her place on the global literary landscape. Oh Sylvan Historian… help us express a flowery tale more stweetly than our rhyme. The Nightingale that sings with throated ease is also a bird…with similar flying wings. Mazal Tov! Esi, Lechaiyim!!! Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin is a freelance journalist

He lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he works in partnership development and outreach management in the NFP sector.

Email: bigfrontiers@ymail.com