Owning it like Afi
I learnt a lot from Afi Tekple:
“a bright young seamstress from a small town in Ghana, who is convinced by her family to marry a man she has never met.”
It’s perhaps not the most obvious premise for lessons in agency and self-respect, but I had so much admiration for the way she handled the expectations of her family and community.
Despite the voices telling her what she owed to everyone else, she navigated by the litmus test of what she could live with. She refused to be all things to everyone at the expense of herself.
I’m imitating her courage.
Partly for myself – but also for Ben.
If you decide to read my novel, All the Truths Between Us, you’ll meet Ben Wilkins. I’ve lived intimately with him for three years; I decided to introduce his first-person narration to the story when I started to rewrite the whole manuscript in 2020.
And he took up a lot of headspace.
There are so few depictions of Western Christians in mainstream contemporary literature, across all genres. When the promise of one comes along, it can be easy for those of us who are searching to find ourselves in the pages of a novel to pin all our hopes on a single character – and be disappointed if they’re not like us.
But that’s the problem with underrepresentation.
It leads to unrealistic expectations.
Ben doesn’t represent Christians. Ben represents Ben – and not even in his entirety. As readers, we share a particular snapshot of time with him in the course of his complicated life.
He wasn’t what I anticipated, and – sometimes – he wasn’t what I hoped for or admire. I don’t know what the wider church family will make of him. I think some people will root for and identify with him. I’m pretty sure others won’t.
I just know that I’m honoured to have written him.
Like Afi, I’m content to have made the necessary choices to create the only storyline I could live with in good conscience.
