In 2020, poet and podcaster Derek Owusu won the Desmond Elliott prize for his debut novel, That Reminds Me, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative about K, a young Ghanaian man who’s grown up in Britain, which Owusu began writing in the wake of a mental breakdown. He now follows it with Losing the Plot, a playfully pointed title for a book that is very much a companion to its predecessor, not least in terms of its category-confounding form.
The paragraphs that make up its short, impressionistic chapters often float on the page like verses of an extended poem and elsewhere sit hemmed in by extensive sidenotes. There are sentences in (Ghanaian dialect) Twi, too – sometimes contextualised but rarely translated, their rhythms and cadences perhaps more telling and certainly more flavoursome than any half-captured meaning. While That Reminds Me focused on K’s experiences, here it’s the days of an immigrant mother that Owusu strives to record – or rather, her son Kwesi’s efforts to imagine a life whose lacunae she stubbornly refuses to fill for him. Those sidenotes accommodate his first-person commentary, spicing an otherwise enigmatic text with humour and hurt, respect and exasperation.
Thirty years earlier, his mother travelled from her home in Ghana to begin a new life here in the UK, descending through grey clouds on a plane that she told herself was guided by God. She found her way to Tottenham, working multiple cleaning jobs to make ends meet. Her isolation is crisply captured, as is the profound dislocation of life lived in a foreign culture. Even when she brushes her teeth, for instance, she is “out of time with her reflection, preferring the scrub and ease of a chewing stick”. All these decades on, she still struggles to see herself as British, still startles at an unexpected knock on the door.
The book ends with a funny, touching transcript of an interview between mother and son. “Don’t come into my life like that. Don’t penetrate into my life,” she objects as Kwesi attempts to learn the basics about her life before he was born. For all its vulnerability and tough beauty, Losing the Plot can feel challenging in places, its poetic inclinations thwarting a more straightforward reading. Yet those frustrations are eloquent in their own way, speaking to all that is destined to go unexplained – but not necessarily unfelt – between immigrants and the children they raise far from the place their heart still knows as home.
• Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu is published by Canongate (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
