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. She’d say, she’d make life, what that means, he’s never known, looking back, what she sees, he needs to let go, let her be.
Losing the Plot is a jumpy, episodic account of a woman who moves from Ghana to London: confusing and playful; jarring and poetic; this reads like a love letter from the woman’s son (who acts as narrator, providing explanatory footnotes throughout), and while the whole is difficult to parse — and especially with untranslated passages in the woman’s native Twi — that would seem to be the point: how could a young man, born and raised in London’s Tottenham neighbourhood, possibly understand his mother’s immigrant experience at an intimate level? Although quite short (I read it through twice, back to back), author Derek Owusu has created something weighty and intriguing here, and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
She was sent away, told Auntie would watch her from now, because the house was too small and she was the eldest, she’d had more life with family, her arguments not allowed to conclude even though when she lands, new documents will read her younger than every sibling.
To begin at the end: the Epilogue is called a “factless interview”, in which the narrator interrogates his mother and she laughs and evades and passes on his questions. I’ve read where Owusu says this is not an actual transcript of an interview with his own mother, but it serves to underline how unknowable we can be to one another, and especially if one chooses to be unknowable: she won’t even answer questions about her first job (Ah, are your immigration officer?). So while we see some events from her point of view — singing at a pentecostalist church, sleeping beside a rough man, taking off her shoes to leave no marks in her apartment building’s hallway — it’s through the interruptions of the narrator that we learn she became a British citizen before his birth, that she has worked three cleaning jobs, married two Englishmen, birthed two children, and lived in London for thirty years. The main body of the novel is jumpy and hard to follow, and some shorter chapters read like verse:
The binding piece shrivels, though she
returns to it every day; she’ll mother every
piece of him, even if parts must be taken away. Will she stroll through another childhood with dusty and deserting feet.
Will she cry when hands reach, will she
let her son suffer her defeat.
(Those are the line breaks as they appear in my electronic ARC.) While the footnotes often make the son sound kind of tough, and as though he’s talking to another tough character about his mother, the love he feels for her (and from her) is never in doubt:
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.
Everything about this simply feels truthful; capturing the shape of what can’t be known is a skillful feat.
