In The End, It Was All About Love
“Sooner or later, Berlin will punch you in the stomach.”
— Musa Okwonga (@Okwonga) January 20, 2021
Here’s a trailer for “In The End, It Was All About Love“, my novel based in #Berlin, out on @RoughTradeBooks on 26 January.
You can pre-order the book here: https://t.co/MjpemLlHEf pic.twitter.com/tBtqFgg622
One of the opening lines of Musa Okwonga’s book - In The End, It Was All About Love - could easily have been written about the book itself. A story so short, at about 120 pages, should not be able to pack such a punch, but it does so with a grace enviable to even Muhammad Ali.
The book is a semi-autobiographical story about a black British writer who moves to Berlin as an escape, for a fresh start, but who quickly realises that the city will force him to confront everything he has run from and more. In keeping with the best, it’s really about so much more than that. It’s about pain and loss, faith and hope; and, as the book’s title tells us, love.
There are three sections to the book, each opening with a poem, and each poem is a beautifully structured reflection on race and pain both personal and universal. It is through these three poems that Okwonga introduces us to the book’s ideas, thoughts on racism and racial oppression, and in the final poem, a candid letter to his father.
What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?
Some of these breezes, still thick with guilt,
Now speed refugees towards Europe;
Impatient to atone,
They toss yet more dark bodies into the foam.
In The End, It Was All About Love is a masterclass in secondhand writing. A format that can often feel weirdly impersonal and coarse is, in Musa’s hands, intimate and welcoming. By choosing to write in the second person, Okwonga firmly grounds you in the book. He forces you to become an active reader and it quickly becomes in your interest to care about what happens to the protagonist, because in many ways you are the protagonist. You live each section, each paragraph, each sentence as if you were there. When the protagonist’s heart is broken, your heart is broken. When he’s overjoyed, so are you. When he can’t sleep, neither can you.
Okwonga has said that he "wanted it to be a book which people experienced as a video game." The idea being that if you have no problem losing yourself and becoming invested in being a character with no connection to reality, you should be able to do the same with one so deeply rooted in the real world, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality. In this sense, the book acts as an alluring Trojan horse. The start of the book is universal. Anyone can imagine themselves moving to Berlin, finding a flat, eating cake, being broken up with, playing football, but as you progress you are suddenly confronted with racism, homophobia, the far-right. By connecting with you from the beginning, Okwonga creates a space where you feel welcome in his experience, and in a way it becomes your experience too.
I don’t know Berlin. I don’t know the cold or the harshness of the place. I can’t claim to identify with the vast majority of things that happen or experiences that the author shares in this book. The beauty of Okwonga’s writing, however, is that I felt them and will continue to feel them for a long time. His soft touch caresses and comforts you through each page, with his words so perfectly chosen and delicately arranged. The vulnerability printed in these pages is an invitation to open yourself up to the world and to others, and in each little section, each paragraph, there is something you can take for yourself, something you can bring to others and say “Look! This is what I mean!” One part tells of a late night phone call from a relative: “As she speaks, your conversation reaching far into the early hours of the next morning, you slowly begin to understand that maybe the most important work you will ever do is the work you didn’t notice, the type you did while you were running off somewhere obsessed with seeing your name on some imaginary bookshelf or festival billboard. It is the work of stopping and listening and caring, and you make a note not to get distracted from it too often in future.”
It is in the final, shortest part of the book that you are most handsomely rewarded for reading, and where Okwonga is most clear and open. His father was killed in a brutal revolution at the age of 40, when Musa was a young boy, and reaching that age has always scared him, he can’t see past it. His plan for that day has always been to go to a restaurant and eat and drink the night away, alone, but his mother wants him instead to go to Uganda to visit his father’s village for the first time in 35 years. And so he does, and in doing so finds a beautiful new lease on life, finally able to face and move on from the grief.
I could not recommend this book more. It doesn’t matter what you typically enjoy reading, or where your interests lie, as this a book so open and easy, as welcoming as your Nan. You will find moments of self-reflection in here that you never knew existed, you will read about feelings you couldn’t previously articulate. It is a book for journeying, for anyone who wants to move. It is a book for self-love and therapy. It is a book for overcoming, and for friends. Musa Okwonga says that “for some, home is a building, an actual place, but for you it is a feeling, the handshake of an old friend or the embrace of a new one, the first mouthful of a meal cooked with love.” For me, this book feels like home.
