Onliest child

I don't know if all grade schools do this, but instead of making each child responsible for themselves, the parochial schools we attended had a way of designating one child from each family to be the responsible party for such routine business as bringing news home, purchasing lunch tickets, and so forth. The term used was "oldest and only": If you were an only child, or if you were the oldest of several in the same school, you were on the hook to see that these jobs got done.

I wasn't the oldest; I was the second-oldest, and only a year younger than my older brother. So for seven years, any time "oldest and only" came up, I tuned out. Not entirely, I don't think; there must have been days where it was something interesting enough for me to bring up at home if my brother forgot to. But for the most part, I was like "Oh, he'll take care of that."

Of course, after eighth grade, he moved on to high school and suddenly I had to pay attention. I hadn't really considered what had been asked of him until his responsibilities became mine and I realised I was terrible at them. More than once, I was pulled out of class because my younger brother was standing there beside the lunch line unable to eat because I'd forgotten to purchase lunch tickets for the three of us as I was supposed to. (The youngest children always went to the cafeteria first.) I'm sure there were bigger messes I made that I've forgotten all about now.

That's what the last 19 weeks feel like to me: a flashback to that eighth-grade year. There were good reasons for assigning monshu the responsibilities he had, and though I had some idea what was involved, I didn't appreciate enough what it would mean for me to have to take them all on. And belatedly I recognise that I might never be able to give them up again.

Digested but not forgotten

As much as it came close to being a slog at times, as I neared the end of Search sweet country, I began to feel a bit farklemt at the thought of having to say farewell to the various characters. I was in a Thai restaurant at the time and wondered if I should wait for someplace a bit more quiet and private, like home, but I had only a few pages at that point and waiting for me at home was a hurried dinner and a condo meeting.

About halfway through, I figured out that the complicated relationship between Kofi Loww and Adwoa Adde was the narrative thread on which the novel hung and, when that resolved, I knew we'd entred the denouement and the rest of the chapters would simply be tying up the stories of the rest of the cast of characters. The conclusions to their stories are satisfying without being too too neat and Laing ends on a hopeful if melancholy note. The heavies retreat into the background, the ordinary people get on with their lives, and Accra abides.

At times the writing veers close to cliché (particularly the way he treats abstract qualities as concrete objects and in the recurrence of metaphors rooted in Ghanaian cuisine), but at its best it's still vibrant and fresh. Despite being published forty years ago, the work doesn't feel especially dated, but I wonder how much that's due to my basic ignorance of Ghanaian popular culture (so that a reference to a popular song or a style of dress would be equally foreign to me even if it were current). I'm going to be curious to look back in a year or so and see how much of it sticks with me.

So what next? I'm reading Woodrell's harrowing Outlaw album while I decide. I'm leaning toward Yaşar Kemal's sequel to İnce Memed, which should be a quick read and appropriate to my state of mind. There are some other things in the hopper--Atwood, Hulme, Maraire, the balance of Os Maias--but I feel like they may be better suited to cooler weather.