Losing the Plot

Derek Owusu

(Canongate, 2022)

Review by Ming Ho

‘Being an immigrant is stress’, says Kwesi, the narrator, in a footnote to Derek Owusu’s biographical novel that explores the experience of his Ghanaian mother coming to the UK as a young girl. ‘He’s always wanted to ask what she hoped to achieve, “without me”, without displacement, without history, a sentence without words to follow, a life without a plot.’ The book takes us on that journey, gradually unveiling through fragmentary glimpses a life remade in an alien environment, a family reared on unspoken memories and hardships.

Brief, non-linear chapters offer sensual vignettes of mood and place, expressed through a heightened, poetic register: food that signals the hospitality of fellow Ghanaians, the urban bustle of loan shops and bookies in Tottenham, the nostalgic scent of Red Door by Elizabeth Arden, the perfume his mother wore when she first came over and which her adult son now gifts her.

Kwesi interjects in the margins with comments, explanations, and tangents in a conversational London vernacular, reflecting on his (often frustrating) relationship with his mother. His first language is English, but now and then he references her mother tongue, Twi, summarising the sense of her accustomed phrases, while noting that he cannot translate them directly – just as the hinterland of her past cannot be fully understood.

Throughout, there remain the twin constants of his mother’s religious faith and her relentless toil in multiple cleaning jobs. The book is divided into three sections (Landing, Disembarking, and Customs and Immigration) which mirror the transition from Ghana to England, from migrant to resident – though perhaps never quite to belonging. As Kwesi says, recounting a discomfiting episode in church, ‘Finally, she sees and knows no matter where she goes, she will be surrounded by distance, every place she settles a different version of the same thing.’

It’s a slim volume, but not an easy read. Evoking the elusiveness of its subject, the syntax sometimes obscures rather than reveals, its poeticism at times a little laboured. This is a work that demands you take time to immerse yourself in it, surrender to its rhythms, images, and digressions.  

In the Epilogue, the author shares the transcript of a preparatory interview with his mother. It’s more accessible than what has gone before, but less illuminating – demonstrating why the novel found its necessary form.

‘Son, she calls, before he closes the door. 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.

He forgets annoyance, every anger an act when love struggles to escape.

Yes, Mum.’

An odyssey in search of acceptance and unspoken but ever-present love, Losing the Plot is an exhortation to ask the questions and tell the stories of our migrant parents before it’s too late. 

https://canongate.co.uk/books/3938-losing-the-plot