New Novel Takes on the Customary Practice of Polygamy in Ghana

Book Title: MY PARENT’S MARRIAGE: A NOVEL
Author: NANA EKUA BREW-HAMMOND
Book Availability: AMAZON, BARNES& NOBLE, ETC.
BOOK SUMMARY (AMAZON)
Acclaimed children’s author Nana Brew-Hammond makes her highly anticipated return with this soaring and profound story about love and understanding told through three generations of one Ghanaian family.

Determined to avoid the pain and instability of her parents’ turbulent, confusing marriage, Kokui marries a man far different from her loving, philandering, self-made father—and tries to be a different kind of wife from her mother.

But when Kokui and her husband leave Ghana to make a new life for themselves in America, she finds history repeating itself. Her marriage failing, she is called home to Ghana when her father dies. Back in her childhood home, which feels both familiar and discomforting, she comes to realize that to exorcize the ghosts of her parents’ marriage she must confront them to enable her healing.

Tender and illuminating, warm and bittersweet My Parents’ Marriage is a compelling story of family, community, class, and self-identity from an author with deep empathy and a generous heart.

BRIEF BIO OF NANA EKUA BREW-HAMMOND
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of the children's picture book BLUE: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Daniel Minter. Named among the best books of 2022 by NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, The Center for the Study of Multicultural Literature, Bank Street College of Education, and more, BLUE is on the 2023-2024 Texas Bluebonnet Master List, has been honored with the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award® recognizing excellence in the writing of non-fiction for children, and is an NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature for Children. Most recently, it was named to the American Library Association's 2023 Notable Children's Books and nominated for a 2025 Georgia Children's Book Award. Brew-Hammond also wrote the young adult novel POWDER NECKLACE, which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”, and she edited RELATIONS: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices. Kirkus Reviews called the anthology "smart, generous...a true gift" in its starred review. Praising her newest novel for adult readers, MY PARENTS' MARRIAGE, the author Melissa Rivero called it "a propulsive read that will take hold of you with its honesty, determination, and heart," while the author Adrienne Brodeur said "I can't remember the last time I rooted for a character as wholeheartedly as I did for Kokui, a young woman who, having faced shattered illusions around her parens' union, is determined to shape her life and marriage around truth. Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond's is a rare talent."

Brew-Hammond's short fiction for adult readers is included in the anthologies Accra Noir edited by Nana-Ama Danquah, Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby, Everyday People edited by Jennifer Baker, and Woman's Work edited by Michelle Sewell, among others. Her writing has also appeared in Now2, African Writing, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Sunday Salon.

From 2018-2023, Brew-Hammond was a Pa Gya! Literary Festival Guest Author, and she was a 2019 Edward Albee Foundation Fellow, a 2018 Ake Arts and Book Festival Guest Author, a 2018 Hobart Festival of Women Writers Guest Author, a 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar, a 2016 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, a 2015 Rhode Island Writers Colony Writer-in-Residence, and in both 2015 and 2014, she was shortlisted for a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship.

Also noted for her personal style, Brew-Hammond's fashion sense has been captured by New York Magazine, Essence Magazine, BFA, TheSartorialist.com, Paper Magazine, and The New York Times, among many other outlets. Recently, she co-founded the made-in-Ghana lifestyle line EXIT 14, which was featured on Vogue.com.

Every month, Brew-Hammond co-leads a writing fellowship whose mission is to write light into the darkness.

REVIEW OF MY PARENTS’ MARRIAGE BY FRANCIS KWARTENG

Since Amazon’s page on My Parents’ Marriage represents an illuminating capsule of this book, I will not attempt a tedious lucubration of it here, in part because I don’t want to give anything away beyond this descriptive capsule. Readers will nonetheless have to explore this path for themselves. In other words, I want readers to plumb the epistemic and philosophical depths of this text for themselves, for perspectival tendentiousness may undermine, taint, or distort the utile vista of personal proclivities insofar as literary criticism. Thus, for reasons of simplicity, or the economy of expression, I will not attempt any exhaustive review here except to focus exclusively on my general impressions of this novel of beautiful writing.

I had just finished perusing Nobel laureate (2021) Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and I was looking for new material to read when Ms. Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond’s book, My Parents' Marriage, suddenly arrived, having already ordered Gurnah's Paradise and Afterlives (both of which arrived yesterday, August 2, 2024). I read My Parents’ Marriage paying particular attention to her erudite diction, her formulaic fealty to literary aesthetics, and her expert knowledge of Ghana’s customary practices. Ms. Brew-Hammond’s book is indeed one of the most powerful strands of literary realism I ever have to read in recent times. Among other observations, traces of prose poetry do appear here and there, thus enriching and serenading the literary and aesthetic palates of potential readers. And, as Ayesha Harruna Attah correctly, and even pointedly, puts it, My Parents’ Marriage is grounded in “powerful prose.” This is not a lazy statement of happenstance. It's rather a factual observation by an award-winning writer.

Of course, great writers like Ms. Brew-Hammond are the reason I stopped reading popular fiction in the first place and opted for literary fiction instead. A typical popular fiction is a potboiler for the most part. I used to read both genres in Ghana until I relocated to the US where I began intellectually investing heavily in literary fiction, however. Ms. Brew-Hammond’s is also probably the first captivating exemplar of literary fiction that I have read on the question of polygamy, in particular of the problematics of what constitutes a dysfunctional family. One can’t also escape the intellectual trappings of this rich text, either. Therefore, I wish My Parents’ Marriage could be translated into French, German, Swahili, etc. to capture an engaging dragnet of readership. As far as African languages, say, Swahili, and cross-language translation are concerned, Jalada Africa, a Pan-African writers’ organization, can assume this enormous charge.

My Parents’ Marriage also has indispensable implications for sociology, anthropology, patriarchy/gender relations, the political economy of class, post-colonialism, the immigrant experience, the political economy of post-independence development (development economics), birth control technologies, political dictatorship, land economy, testamentary jurisprudence (wills, probate inquiries, etc.), trust and fidelity in marital relationships, dysfunctional families, domestic economics, child-rearing practices, the collision between western and traditional cultural norms, and what have you. This is not reading too much into the book as these disparate allusions, although they are structurally interrelated, and although they ascribe wholesome meaning to the broader subtext of this penetrating text, represent subtle and not-so-subtle evocations unique to the narratological bulk of My Parents’ Marriage.

This book should be on the literature curricula of African institutions, on the curricula of African Studies, African American Studies, and English literature/language programs. This is not a book, though powerful in its aesthetic sophistication and realistic dimensions, merely about the cultural, traditional, and political intricacies of polygamy. It's a well-structured, layered, painstaking, labyrinthine treatment of several interlocking subject matters that should be of paramount interest to anyone interested in the human condition, especially in the arena of marital bliss and harmony. The text also entertains.

For readers’ information, I just don't like this book, I simply loved it. Ms. Brew-Hammond can indeed write, as she writes so powerfully, and so persuasively, that's, in that her mastery of English is beyond description. Moreover, this is not a work of experimental or speculative exercise, like the writings of Ben Okri, but rather the culmination of artistic and linguistic perfection. I am a "student" of global literature, of African literature especially, and I can say with authority that Ms. Brew-Hammond belongs in the pantheon of Africa’s best writers and literary giants. I look forward then to reading her entire literary corpus in the future.

This classic text is Ms. Brew-Hammond's gift to the world. I therefore recommend it to anyone interested in beautiful writing and aesthetic sophistication.