Review: Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie

Peace Adzo Medie’s Nightbloom, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2024, follows the lives of cousins Selasi and Akorfa as they grow up together in a small town in Ghana and then eventually grow apart. How each character chooses to remember shared experiences reveals how reality is subjective and memories unforgiving. In adulthood, the cousins move through life holding on to the memories of the bond they once shared with each blaming the other for things having gone horribly wrong in their relationship. Neither ever really moves on from the traumas that shaped the trajectory of their current existence. While Akorfa appears to be happily married with a successful career in the development sector in the United States, Selasi makes a name as a restaurant owner in Accra. Both of them lead lives their younger versions wouldn’t have envisaged. As the narrative delves into the reasons behind the souring of their relationship and Akorfa’s deep unhappiness at having to abandon her dream of becoming a doctor, the novel dives deeper into how the political shapes the personal.

As Akorfa faces discrimination from unexpected quarters in her first year at university in the US, she notes how she had never been lectured back home “on the contours of racism in America”. She remembers being told at pre-college sessions at the United States cultural center to keep her Ghanaian habits at bay but they “conveniently forgot to warn us that people would label us stupid because we were Black.” From a nuanced portrayal of how patriarchal family structures lead to foundational beliefs that strain female friendships, the novel, in alternating first person narratives, presents a revealing portrait of a globalised world steeped in hierarchies, replaying the West/Others binary through the two characters and the shape of their professional lives.

Though Akorfa has found personal and professional success in the US, the precarity of her existence in the country is constantly highlighted by her friend Ayorkor who, in one of the book’s most poignant sections, tells her that no amount of financial stability and political correctness would guarantee a racism-free life for her children. Akorfa is, in due course, denied a promotion which goes to a new joinee whom she had trained and described as someone “who’s one step above an intern”. Similarly, back home, Selasi has a run in with an important politician at her establishment, which leads to her being bullied and harassed despite being in the right.

In Nightbloom, Peace Adzo Medie achieves a critique of the neo imperial world order marked by the hegemonic economic and political monopoly of the rich countries of the Global North while previously colonised countries struggle with corrupt governments and political instability that are a consequence of past colonial rule and contemporary interventionist policies. The author highlights the hollowness of the promise of terms such as the American Dream for an immigrant of colour. The two different arcs of the characters with one of them living what some might deem the epitome of immigrant success with the other charting her own path back home in Ghana despite facing multiple obstacles, are not simple linear progressions. They represent how global inequalities shape domestic narratives of strife and how the personal is always already marked by the political.

Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.