SmokeLong Quarterly

Can you talk about the evolution of the concept of “good” in the story? It’s one of the through-lines, but it’s not the same at the end as at the beginning, right?

The protagonist’s mother expects a specific kind of “goodness” of her daughter, a Christian “goodness”: Don’t love a girl, don’t steal (fair enough), don’t be too curious or lean so much on your own understanding, read your Bible, pray every day. These ideals chafe against the narrator’s conception of the world and how she insists on moving through it and learning about it. She has a different view of what it means to be good. All the chaotic things she does are her ways of making sense of her humanity, and that restless desire in itself, to want to do something with this human life she’s been given, that is good. The last paragraph reveals a facet of her perspective on this—the tumult of her relationship with her mother, her mother’s fraught manner of relating to her, she sees it all as love, she sees it all as good. There’s a poorly baked thesis I have about love and goodness being one and the same thing, but I’ll leave that to the reader to help me think on.

There is repeated reference to “sameness” in the story. Sameness as progression, or an invitation, or a mercy. And, of course, that repeated phrase “Everything is as it was.” How is the reader supposed to understand that invocation of sameness? Ironically? Disingenuously? Earnestly?

The story explores how things, human beings, never quite change. And that lack of change can be a good thing, as with this story where despite each storm, the love/good between them remains the same, they both remain the same. Perhaps they’ve been looking in the wrong places for what needs to change.

There’s a way that you’ve constructed some of your sentences, such as “Need always is” or “Everything is as it was” that harkens to biblical rhythms and cadences. Everything overtly religious in the story seems tinged by suspicion, but then the language of the story is itself written with a nod to religious language, and the story is earnest, not suspicious. Can you talk a bit about that? 

I grew up in an intensely Presbyterian household and I’m still reeling from the wound of it! But one thing I’m grateful to Christianity for is all the material I have now to work with. Years ago, I often read the Bible in Akuapem Twi, and anyone who speaks Akuapem Twi can attest to the poetry of the language, much more so when put to scripture. I draw from that. I draw from all those impassioned sermons, the beatitudes, the exorcism sessions, the “revivals,” the hymns, the creeds. I suppose it was unconsciously done in this story. I did not set out to make my sentences harken to biblical cadence, but I’m looking back on it with fascination now that you’ve asked this question. The kind of sentence or voice I find myself using in each of my stories depends on what the work demands, and in the case of “Good,” a world sagging with the weight of religiosity, there’s no better irony than writing it in the word(s) of the Lord!

Particularly within the house, there is a focus on where everything is placed in relation to everything else, an idea echoed in the use of the “everything is as it was” phrase. Why was it important to give so much of your flash space over to detailing the placement of things in relation to one another?

The bamboo cane remaining in the same place for over sixteen years says a lot more than I could ever say in pages and pages of story. Each paragraph felt to me like ekphrasis of a photo (Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie comes to mind). How do the kids say it? One photo is worth a thousand boring words?

Could you talk a little about the challenges and rewards of writing for an audience that may not be familiar with the objects, settings or cultural references used in a story like this? It was refreshing to see you didn’t feel compelled to explain every Ghanaian reference or word.

It’s okay to not be familiar. Your reading of the work without context is an important kind of reading experience, too. It’s also a good opportunity to learn something new. You cheat yourself if you only engage with things you know. As for me, I’ve shown you the world. The rest is your job.