I love looking at my mother’s old photographs. Unlike the must-have-a-thousand-photos-of-the-same-event pictures taken today with our ever present digital cameras, my mother’s photographs capture a rare moment—one photograph per event, per person. I am given a brief peek into what seems to be a vibrant, glamorous existence, the major details of which are hidden somewhere beyond the borders of the glossy photograph, making me want to lean in and check whether I will be able to see more of what my mother’s days were like.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond’s Powder Necklace gives me a similar feeling. She provides an amusing, vivid, close-to-home snapshot of the life of fourteen year old British-Ghanaian Lila. What initially seems to be a random collection of events—with unforeseeable and arbitrary plot shifts—turns out to be an extraordinary story of a particular time in the life of teenager who is struggling to find her identity—culturally, sexually, spiritually and socially.
Lila, born in London to Ghanaian parents (now divorced), has her life interrupted when her mother abruptly sends her to boarding school in Ghana for reasons ill-explained. She struggles to adjust to a different culture and a more difficult way of life, while searching for answers to the age old question, “Why?” Despite her maladjustment, Lila forms a strong bond with family and friends.
In a sudden shift of gears, Lila is back in London, and grappling with the inevitable adolescent issues of peer pressure, cravings for independence, sexual curiosity and search for meaning. Just as I am getting over a whiplash from the unexpected plot shift, Lila is whisked off to New York to live with her previously estranged father and his new family. It is here that Lila, in a series of somewhat rushed events, falls into an opportunity to write a book about her life. Here, she begins to appreciate the truth in her mother’s clichéd mantra: “Everything happens for God’s good reason.” She is able to retrospectively trace how seemingly random, unexplained and cruel interruptions and twists in her life have shaped her for and brought her to the beginning of an exciting path.
Powder Necklace reads just like Lila lives: full of arbitrary and ill-explained events that seem unconnected to anything before or following and then ends with a tie-together that makes you look back, nod, smile and say “So that’s what that was about.” However I find that although the arbitrary shifts are intended to describe the strangeness of fate, the author does not provide a satisfactory enough explanation for why such a strange variety of events and characters have been deemed relatable enough to include in the novel.
Lila narrates her experiences and accompanying feelings in a rather unsystematic manner, and with a jerky pace-stopping and starting, dawdling then racing-that seems more suited to a memoir than a novel. Upon reading the authors note, I find that she was essentially telling her own story-with a few altered details-and I immediately thought, as I do with almost every other contemporary Ghanaian novel that she should have written the book as a memoir.
I notice also with familiar frustration that like many other African works, it seems tailored to a Western audience. The slightly exaggerated descriptions and details about life in Ghana, as seen through Lila’s eyes, are clearly for the benefit of one who is a stranger to African living. The author, not unlike many other African writers, describes the idiosyncrasies of Ghanaian life with what appears to be a determination to bring shock and awe to the minds of non-Africans. The hawkers balancing goods on their heads, the pungent sulphur-garlicky smell of the airport staff, the sudden ‘light off’ tendency, the lack of water at Dadaba Secondary School, the red dust, the chicken being chased and beheaded, the thinness of the school mattress, the use of l for r—these are events that, while useful for educating, amusing, and amazing a non-African audience, are normal to Ghanaians and in some cases, slightly ridiculous (see: Dadaba Secondary School).
Nevertheless the narrative is extremely descriptive, and the author does not shy away from giving vivid details that others may have been uncomfortable with. The author is obviously extremely eloquent and strikingly adept at expressing confusing and hard-to-describe emotions. It is an interesting read for book clubs, lying in bed after a long day, that like my mother’s photos, would fill you with nostalgia for days past-even if you didn’t experience those days yourself-and leave you wanting more.