Literatea is an interview series which brings together prominent and emerging voices in African writing, editing, publishing, translation, marketing, distribution, and retail to discuss the craft of bringing African storytelling to the continent and the rest of the world. From award-winning novelists and poets to literary agents and editors, from indie publishers and booksellers to prize juries—Literatea pours the first cup and stirs the conversation.
In this conversation about historical fiction and uncovering hidden stories, Ayesha Harruna Attah sheds some light on the writing and spiritual processes that guide her award-winning writing.
Ayesha Harruna Attah is the author of five books: Harmattan Rain (Per Ankh Publishers), nominated for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Saturday’s Shadows (World Editions), shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013; The Hundred Wells of Salaga (Cassava Republic Press, UK; Other Press, US), finalist for the 2020 William Saroyan Prize; a young adult novel, The Deep Blue Between (Pushkin Children’s), selected as a 2021 The White Ravens book; and Zainab Takes New York (Headline Accent), a rom-com.
Educated at Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and NYU, Ayesha has degrees in biochemistry, journalism, and creative writing. A 2015 Africa Centre Artists in Residency Award Laureate and Sacatar Fellow, she is the recipient of the 2016 Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship for non-fiction. She is the 2023-2024 Literature Protégée for the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative and is being mentored by Bernardine Evaristo. Her work centres on remembering what has been forgotten. She currently lives in Senegal and loves books, long walks, green tea ice cream, and staring at the ocean. She runs a small ice-cream shop in the village of Popenguine.
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ABA ASIBON: Some people describe writing as a spiritual exercise. Others would liken the process to a sequence of mental gymnastics. How would you describe your frame of mind when you’re in the thick of writing?
AYESHA HARUNA ATTAH: I used to be in the group that thought with a solid plan or a map and more than enough supplies to keep me alive during the writing journey, I was good. This way of thinking got me through my first three books. Then along the way, I got into the former camp. I still have something of a map when I begin writing—because old habits are hard to break—but more and more I am leaning into the intangible, to that sweet faraway place where dreams are made. I also take as many notes of my reality—sounds I’m hearing, conversations with friends, birdsong, really, anything—and all of these become my guides as I am writing.
AA: I hear you when you talk about leaning into the intangible. I tend to be a go-with-the-flow sort of writer too.
Speaking of taking notes on your reality, your body of work reads like a time machine through some of Ghana’s most pivotal historic moments. As a fellow Ghanaian, I sincerely appreciate you giving life to these moments in time that are so rarely spoken about in our society.
Where do you find the courage to approach these sometimes very contentious and polarising moments in our history?
AHA: Thank you!
I believe my courage comes from a place of curiosity. I want to know why things are the way they are. And by asking why, layers begin to unfold and places, things, ideas that were once in obscurity are lit up, and maybe these are the contentious and polarising moments that you speak of—things that somebody wanted to keep hidden. Indigenous slavery, for instance—this topic came to me because I wanted to know why my ancestor couldn’t be remembered by her name and was called “the slave”. From that one question, a world opened up and it was too interesting not to write about.
AA: Wow, I did not realise you had such deep personal ties to the subject matter in The Hundred Wells of Salaga.
You certainly overturn the obscure in that story—indigenous slavery, forced marriage and a story set in Northern Ghana—a part of the country rarely featured in Ghanaian literature.
How much of your writing would you say is borne out of obligation to bring to light specific narratives and how much of it is borne out of simply telling a story that appeals to you in the moment?
How does one balance the two?
AHA: My writing often starts with the latter—the urge to tell a story about a specific person or event. As I am working out the kinks of the story, piece by piece I begin to realise what the big narrative arcs are. I do not think I have ever set off with an obligation to write about “issues” or “themes.”
For instance, I was once approached by an editor to write for young adults. I let the character guide the pace and tone of the book, instead of my idea of what a young adult book should be. This is probably why some of the feedback I have received is that the book reads as if it were written for anyone, not just for young readers.
Story always comes first for me. As I am writing, of course, I then pay attention to the issues that are important to me, such as women’s rights, telling a more nuanced story about the African continent and its people, seeing the connections between all people and things.
AA: Well, as a fellow MoHo—Mount Holyoke College—alumnus, it comes as no surprise that you highlight strong female leads who thrive even when the odds are stacked against them.
Given the uncertain times we now find ourselves in at a global level—politically, economically, and socially—has the “relevance” of literature changed at all for you and how do you think it is shaping—or will—shape your future work?
AHA: Oh hi, fellow MoHo!
[Self-insertion of patriarchy: RN: Y’all are lame!]
AA: Shush!
AHA: A question I keep asking myself is how to be of service in these strange times. Everything does feel uncertain right now, doesn’t it? I have thought of the words of ancestor writers like Toni Morrison, for instance—who said, “this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilisations heal.”
So now, more than ever, literature is needed. Storytelling is as old as humanity, and I think that is not going to change, in spite of where the world seems headed with so-called artificial intelligence. Maybe how we tell our stories will shift, but we are always going to need storytellers.
AA: “No room for fear.” That’s a heavy one.
I was recently speaking to a writer-friend about the dilemma of being a writer on the continent and the difficult decisions we sometimes have to make between fighting the system or remaining neutral just to hold on to the already limited opportunities at our disposal. What are some of the ways that activism has shown up in your career, both within and outside of your writing? Have there been notable consequences of this activism?
AHA: My activism is the big issues I pay attention to or the big questions that the characters lead me to ask. For instance, in The Deep Blue Between, one character talks about the fact that we used to believe we had gods in our waterways so we would take good care of these places. When we took on Christianity and Islam, we lost our old gods, and now in places like Accra, we cannot even begin to describe our city’s river. It is why practices such as Galamsey prevail. I am passionate about doing what we can to save our planet, because it is all we’ve got.
Outside of writing, my activism is often linked to literacy. In the village I live in—Popenguine, Senegal—I have opened a small library to bring the world of books to the children. Of course, with any endeavour that one undertakes, there are risks, good and bad. With the library project, for instance, we have sometimes had trouble getting people to understand its relevance. But I am an optimist, so in spite of setbacks, I keep moving.
AA: Kudos on the library and I really do hope more and more people buy into your vision of bringing literature to children across the continent. It appears then that the challenge with literary platforms like libraries is not just an access issue but also an issue of appreciating the relevance of such spaces. I have heard people challenge the Western concept of a library within our context, arguing that our traditional methods of storytelling were never static or confined.
What are your thoughts on why we have struggled to sustain libraries within our contexts and what other creative means should we be exploring to keep the art of storytelling alive?
AHA: Libraries are so important—as physical spaces and as repositories of knowledge, which means even our oral traditions of storytelling can be considered libraries. Even our grandparents are walking libraries.
Also, some of our most ancient stories are inscribed on stone, so we cannot be reductive about African storytelling. We should be archiving our lives as much as we can—through the visual medium, on paper, by recording audio stories. For instance, as I was doing research on my current book, I learned of how a snippet of a song was used to connect an African-American woman with her ancestors’ village in Sierra Leone. All because the song her grandmother used to sing to her was recorded. It was captured in a beautiful documentary, called The Language You Cry In.
AA: Fascinating example of the power of archiving through diverse media. I have found myself stuck behind a few offshore paywalls in my quest to access Ghanaian history for the purposes of my writing. Ironic, if you ask me.
Given how rooted your work is in history, what has been your experience accessing the data and material you need? How do you know where to look? And once you have figured that out, what does the process of harvesting typically look like?
AHA: I used to ask one of my friends doing her PhD in the United States to send me articles at first. Now, after publishing a few books I have had the chance to meet some generous librarians who have provided me with access to their resources.
There are free materials I also use. I especially love scouring newspaper archives. You can learn so much about a society from its news media. It is one of the reasons why I do not use ChatGPT—
[The patriarchy rears its head again: RN: Here, here!]
—You miss out on the interesting ad on the side telling you what shoe polish was used in a certain year, when you ask A.I. to give you exactly what you are looking for.
I love the word “harvesting.” It is wonderfully descriptive. Although, sometimes, there is not much to harvest, and you do a lot of digging and end up nowhere!
AA: I would love to further explore this idea of dead-ends in the course of doing research for your writing. Where do you often go from there?
Again, I think about The Hundred Wells of Salaga, which explores a little known (and I suspect, poorly recorded) aspect of Ghana’s history—indigenous slavery—and wonder what the process of harvesting must have looked like for you. What unconventional research means have you had to employ because of dead-ends?
How do you often strike the balance between staying true to history and maintaining your creative freedom as a writer?
AHA: For The Hundred Wells of Salaga, harvesting meant looking through praise poetry, accounts from European travellers, missionaries from the Gold Coast, and things like that. The biggest dead-end was actually the family story—my great-great grandmother’s story. I visited Salaga to learn more about her, but no one would speak of her. The way I got around it was by going within. I could do all the research around what indigenous slavery could have looked like, but to find the heart of her story, I had to find the thread that connects me with my father, and he to his mother, all the way back to this ancestor. Family soul-searching, if you will. It meant looking at how we view the world. One such thread is that we are all people collectors. For instance, my great-grandmother had a resident madman who would only calm down in her presence.
It is a dance, writing historical fiction—I try to do as much research as I can to bring alive a place and a time, but ultimately, the story has to come first, so if I need to make something up, I do so.
AA: The resident madman: fodder for upcoming work?
AHA: Haha. Perhaps.
AA: In Harmattan Rain, The Deep Blue Between, and Zainab Takes New York your characters straddle Africa and the Diaspora. Can you share why you take such an interest in telling stories from these two different vantage points? What are some of the things you believe about your characters and, in essence, we (Africans) gain or lose when we shuttle between these two realities?
AHA: I write these two realities, because I’ve lived on the continent and I have lived abroad. This is a classic case of me writing what I know.
What we gain is another way to understand the world, another perspective. And I believe there’s power in always being able to flip things on their heads to better understand ourselves and our relationships.
What we may lose is possibly the fact that we veer toward writing one type of story, possibly because it sells more or speaks to one audience more, instead of making room for the many stories that want to and need to be told.
RÉMY NGAMIJE: I wonder what your thoughts are on writing so-called “frivolous” African characters and stories versus the “serious” literary ones. Do you see a difference between these two types of storytelling?
I ask because historical fiction is seen as being serious. But, sometimes, not all of history is like that, and it is filled with ordinariness and joy and love and care and fun that is not always so…”heavy.” Does that make sense?
Is this a consideration you have when you approach your writing?
As in: I am going to write something serious.
AHA: Yes, it does make sense. When I am writing, I am mostly guided by the characters and the story they want me to tell. Sometimes, those stories are light, other times, the stories are of a certain gravitas.
We probably associate the latter emotions with more serious writing, and things of a lighter nature with “frivolous” storytelling, which is unfortunate.
It is probably why when I thought the world as we knew it was ending, I wrote Zainab Takes New York. At that point most of the work I had written was quite heavy, and I needed to inject more fun into my body of work.
Even as a reader, there are days when I need lightness, stories that make me laugh and forget about life, and there are days when I need depth to understand life’s rougher periods. And I want to make room for all of it, as you so aptly put it—even for ordinariness and joy and love and care and fun!
RN: More and more I wonder if the “frivolous” label we attach to certain stories is a reflection of the writing, in that it is careless or without skill or craft, rather than the themes that are addressed within the writing. I think joy, love, care, and fun are deathly serious topics in the world that we live in for a great many people, especially those who are deprived of them or refused the right to exercise or practice them. I also think a lot of the “serious” writing that is sold to us as universe-collapsing literature really ain’t that deep.
I guess when I write, for example, I do not differentiate between the serious and the frivolous because, to me, everything is funny until it is not, and everything is serious until it takes itself too seriously and then becomes amusing.
AHA: Yes, it truly ain’t that deep sometimes.
RN: Your publishing journey mirrors that of many writers from the continent. I think of it as: serious debut, second serious book, and then, finally, the third fuck-you book wherein the writer is tired of performing to the academy. Now, I do not think that that is what you were doing. But I wonder whether you felt you had to “earn” the right to write Zainab Takes New York.
I feel as though continental writers still need to prove themselves before they can write the things they really want. Is this something you sense too?
AHA: I do not know if my journey falls into this pattern you describe. My first book was Harmattan Rain, which spans fifty years of Ghana’s history, and is a book with all the feels: first loves, politics, intrigue, family secrets being spilled, a not-so-holy pastor, three generations of a family. So ambitious!
With it, I set off to write a book that showed what life must have been like for my grandmother, then my mother, and I sprinkled in some of my life experience at the time—I was 23!
RN: Positively a prodigy in continental cultural age!
AHA: With the second book—Saturday’s Shadow—it is the same.
The Hundred Wells of Salaga is my third novel, and I often say it is the book I wrote all on my own, because I did not do it with a mentor holding my hand, like with the first book, or in an MFA programme, for the second one. By the time I got to Zainab—yes, the pressure to prove myself is probably still there to some extent—it felt like I had been in the game for a while, and I could just write what the muses sent my way.
RN: Has there come a point where you are not mature or skilled enough to write the story that is in your head? And, if so, do you just give it time and wait for the moment you are, or do you brute force your way to any version of the story?
AHA: Definitely! That is why some books take longer to write than others. What happens is often I will brute force my way through, and end up getting feedback from early readers that the project is not quite cooked. After feeling bad for myself for a few days, I abandon whatever it is, then work on other things, sometimes even for years, then I come back with fresh eyes. Most times, I say, “What was I thinking? It definitely needed more work!”
RN: What is your relationship with early readers? I think I tried the process once and it was so unpleasant that I never repeated it again. And, with that in mind, how do you know when the right moment to come back to something you have put on pause?
AHA: In the past, my early reader was my mum, who was a sharp editor and a voracious reader who gave good feedback. Then, I got an MFA, which provided me with a lot of early readers. After that, I was part of a workshop of three, sometimes four, people. At other points, I felt like I did not need to have an early reader and passed on work directly to my agent. And that is when you just know you have written something so dope, all it needs is some copyediting here and there, and it is good to go. That rarely happens to me, though.
On when to return to work that has been paused, I think it is the same impulse that makes me write anything in the first place: when I cannot stop thinking of whatever it is!
RN: With so many artists living in precarious conditions, I wonder how you go about creating the necessary stability needed to produce work of your scale and depth. This is something that is rarely acknowledged within the literary community: that it is just impossible to be a half-decent storyteller when all you are thinking about is survival. It is pretty easy to tell someone “just write.” But that statement is so loaded.
So, then, as a writer working on the continent, too, how do you ensure your writing process is not subjected to destructive bumps and shocks?
AHA: You are spot on about the precariousness of living as a writer, especially on the continent. I have had to be creative about how I earn a living. It often involved freelancing as a translator or copy editor, fellowships have helped, too.
I have also learned to live frugally and, yes, this even means choosing to plant roots in a village instead of in a big city. Of course, the added quiet I get from this only helps the writing. But I know not everyone can move themselves to a new place or live the freelance lifestyle, so for many African writers, it means getting the writing done while holding a full-time job which makes production a much slower process.
RN: What an interesting route to take: avoiding the cost of living in a metropole as a way of providing stability for your writing practice. Of course, it makes sense, even though the pressure to be at the literary centres of the world is great. But appearances at things like literary festivals help, no? And, also, access to literature shortens the distance to the so-called centres, right?
AHA: They do help, and that was a big part of my mentorship with Bernardine Evaristo—
RN: Flex!
AHA: —who made sure I left the comfort of Popenguine to meet other writers. We went to the Edinburgh International Book Fair and to Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago, for instance. I have met many incredible writers, such as yourself—
RN: My work here is done!
AHA: —because I left my village. It is so important to make literary friends and to also read the work we are all working hard to create. These connections do come in handy, for many different reasons. One of them is creating a circle of writers you can call on when you need feedback, or even simply, moral support. I do think that there’s a delicate balance in being “out there” and in getting the work done. For me, the writing comes first.
RN: You have been to some of the most interesting literary festivals. But…but…my sister, where is the Doek Literary Festival o?
AHA: Yes! You tell me. My bags are packed and ready to go. And especially since someone very dear to me lives in Namibia now. I have all the reasons to be at the Doek Literary Festival.
RN: Say less!