Written by Sowmya Gopi
The God Child takes us through the journey of Maya, a Ghanaian kid who grows up in German society. Growing up in Germany and the U.K. during the 1970s and ’80s, with frequent visits to Ghana, Maya is brought up in a wealthy, educated home and fluent in both English and German. She understands that her mother is of royal lineage, and that her father is eventually planning to return to Ghana, but does not fully have any knowledge of either of her parents’ family histories. She feels like an outsider in both European and Ghanian society and in the communities where she lives and attends school. After Maya’s father leaves the family, Maya’s mother takes care of Maya and her cousin, Kojo, and tells them stories of their royal ancestors. She finally finds a friend who shares her restlessness and struggles to fit in.
The author does an admirable job of capturing the dynamics of a splintered family and Maya’s fractured sense of identity. We see a young Maya struggling to fit in with her white friends and an adult Maya who no longer feels a part of her hometown.
The novel’s frequent leaps between place and time are often what slows its pace. Some characters just disappear and reappear in the plot, which totally spoils the flow of the book. Other than the frequent leaps, the story is rather interesting and one of a few handful works that explore Afro-German relations.
The God Child is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
Have you read The God Child? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
‘Meditative, gestural, philosophic: a brave reinvention of the immigrant narrative … Unprecedented’ – Taiye Selasi
Maya grows up in Germany knowing that her parents are different: from one another, and from the rest of the world. Her reserved, studious father is distant; and her beautiful, volatile mother is a whirlwind, with a penchant for lavish shopping sprees and a mesmerising power for spinning stories of the family’s former glory – of what was had, and what was lost.
And then Kojo arrives one Christmas, like an annunciation: Maya’s cousin, and her mother’s godson. Kojo has a way with words – a way of talking about Ghana, and empire, and what happens when a country’s treasures are spirited away by colonialists. For the first time, Maya has someone who can help her understand why exile has made her parents the way they are. But then Maya and Kojo are separated, shuttled off to school in England, where they come face to face with the maddening rituals of Empire.
Returning to Ghana as a young woman, Maya is reunited with her powerful but increasingly troubled cousin. Her homecoming will set off an exorcism of their family and country’s strangest, darkest demons. It is in this destruction’s wake that Maya realises her own purpose: to tell the story of her mother, her cousin, their land and their loss, on her own terms, in her own voice.
