Sharon Dodua Otoo
In Conversation
This week we spoke to Sharon Dodua Otoo about her playful, immersive and highly imaginative debut novel about four women in four centuries whose stories all converge in the here and now.
Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.
(No spoilers, we promise)
NA: Can you give us some insight into your background? Who is Sharon, and how did she discover writing?
SDO: Ok so I'm the oldest of three children. Three of us are really close in age, so three children within the space of two and a half years. We grew up in London, in Ilford to be precise, and me, my brother and my sister all shared a bedroom. The way I remember it was that I was always one who was telling the bedtime stories. I would talk and talk and talk until we all fell asleep. I was the storyteller because I always really loved reading. I read Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, I read all the books, but I often felt like this specific experience I was having - the fact that when I was at home I was basically in Ghana but when I went to school it was a completely different experience – I felt like that wasn’t reflected in the literature I was reading. And so I began to write stories and found a way to process my experience, primarily through short stories and poems.
Then fast forward to when I moved to Germany, which is around 16 years ago now. When I moved to Germany, I was a single parent, and I was very active in the Black German community and political movements. I found it difficult to balance my political life and my paid work, with my writing and looking after the children. I decided that I wanted to try and make everything fit together better and my solution was to approach my political work through my writing. What I wanted to do was to have stories where people like me, where Black women, were main characters.
The first character I wrote was for a novella called the things I'm thinking while smiling politely…
NA: Oo that's a stunning title! But just to pick up on your last point, do you think positioning Black women as main characters is a political statement?
SDO: I do. In Germany, for sure. Literature tells the story of a nation - it gives different layers and different perspectives of what a nation is, and Germany has always traditionally positioned itself as a white nation. This sounds very racist, and maybe it is, depending on your definition of racism, but I would say it’s also a little bit out of ignorance. Many people in Germany just don't have a general awareness of Black history in Germany and the generations of Black people and people of African descent that have lived here. So part of that gap is in the literature and in poetry and in songs. What you do hear are the pity stories. So there's, for example, a very famous children's book that has lots of cautionary tales. It's very out of date and they don't sell this book anymore, except as an example of bad literature. But one of the tales was: if you make fun of Black children, as a punishment, you'll be dipped in black ink and you’ll turn into a Black child. So those are the types of things that people in Germany have grown up with.
Most stories about Black Germans cater to this image of the Black experience needing to be pitied in some way, but there are so many people who have grown up in Germany, who speak only German, and who are Black - those stories were really missing. And one of my aims when I started to write was to place the Black experience within Germany, and focus on things that everybody experiences, like relationship breakdowns or stress with your children. I wanted to tell these kinds of stories from a Black female perspective.
NA: You say you’ve always been interested in stories, but when did you start considering yourself as a writer? I ask because many people who write usually have a moment when the identity starts to feel like something they can legitmately claim for themselves.
SDO: To be honest, I was writing for a long while, but I didn't consider myself a writer, until I won a literary prize. I always had a little bit of this impostor syndrome but I won this literary prize in 2016, for a short story and it was the first short story that I had written in German. After that, I was like, Okay, Sharon, you can't keep saying you're not a writer. Then from that prize, I also got an agent, I got a contract with a major publisher in Germany, and that's when I really felt like I could claim the title.
NA: I’m really interested in the fact that you write in German. Based on some of your earlier responses I feel like I know the answer, but I'm going to ask you the question anyway… why German?
SDO: So up until that short story that I mentioned, I'd always been writing creatively in English, because English is my first language and it’s the language I feel closest to emotionally. Whereas in German, there's always a slight disconnect, as I haven't been socialised in this language and I don’t have a deep history with it so there's always a risk that I might overshoot the mark somewhere and I'm not confident that everything I'm writing in German is going to really hit the spot. But I wrote this short story, because I'd been asked to write a text about critical whiteness and I didn't want to write that as an essay because I thought there'd been enough nonfiction texts about this subject. I wanted to try and write it as a short story and use satire, and it was important for me to write it in German because I wasn't just talking about critical whiteness in an academic sense for all contexts, I was really trying to say, “this is what it means within Germany.” So for that, I needed to use certain everyday concepts that are in German and references that people would understand straight away, because they were familiar with it. It wouldn't have worked as well if I'd written it in English and then had it translated because I wanted to use certain phrases that there isn't really an equivalent to in English.
I wanted to write a story that was set in Germany and set in the German discourse around identity, so that’s why I opted to write in German.
NA: I obviously don’t speak German so the version of your book I’m reading was translated to English. How was the translation process for you, particularly as somebody who speaks English? When you read Jon Cho-Polizzi’s translation, did it feel like a different story?
SDO: It was really fascinating for both of us. So I’ve known Jon for a while, and we were in contact throughout the translation process. I have a lot of respect for him, and I think he did a great job but I think, regardless of who translated, including me, it will never be the same as the original.
I wouldn't have finished translating it myself because I’d be constantly going over it, trying to find the right words. So in the end, I have to say, I'm really happy that someone took that job away from me. He put a lot of effort into researching things as well so I was really grateful to him.
NA: How many languages has your novel been translated into now? What’s the latest count?
SDO: So it was Dutch, Italian, English and Japanese for the first round, and the latest contracts have been Slovenian, Arabic and Turkish.
NA: Wowww! That’s so exciting – congratulations! And can you tell us more about your novel. In your words, what is Ada’s Realm is about?
SDO: So the version I tell when I speak about the book is that it's really the story of a young woman who lives in Berlin. This is a woman who was born in London but as a very young woman moved to Ghana and spent her formative years in Ghana because her mother died so she grew up with her aunts who she calls mothers. She then learns at some point that she has a half-sister who lives in Germany. So in 2019 we meet Ada who is living with her sister, but needs a place of her own to live because by now Ada is pregnant and separated from the father of her child. When the reader gets to this part of the novel, which is the second part of the novel, the reader knows a lot more about what's going on than Ada herself, because the reader recognizes similarities between this Ada and past Ada’s that were introduced earlier on. So by the second half of the novel the reader understands that the past is really affecting the present. And that's what the novel is about, really. It’s about how events in the past, particularly traumatic events in the past, affect the present day.
The historical part of novel is in the first part, and it takes place in three different geographical areas, and three different times. So it takes place in West Africa in 1459, because my parents come from present day Ghana, then England in 1848, because I was born and raised in London, and then Germany in 1945 because I have four children, and they were raised in Germany. That's how the three geographical areas are linked with my experience, and that's why this novel is written in this way.
NA: This is a huge idea and very ambitious, especially for a debut novelist. How long did it take you to write?
SDO: So I'm going be honest, and say I overestimated myself. I thought it was a great idea and I don't know how other writers do it, but I don't really plan anything meticulously. I kind of have a vision and then I try to map it out with notes, and then I just go with the flow. I started writing and it took me a long time to finish ‑ it took me five years, and that included breaks where I just had to take some time out because it was getting too emotionally intense.
NA: And at what point did you know that you'd achieved what you’d originally set out to do?
SDO: That's a great question. I can't honestly say that I did. I sometimes admit that the book isn't actually finished. I had a deadline and my editor was brilliant, and we worked right up until the last minute, and then I finally handed it in. Now I’m just interested in seeing what people make of it.
Sometimes people read it and tell me things that make me feel like they really got what I was trying to do. Sometimes people read something completely different into it, and I think that says as much about them as a reader as it does about me as a writer. I try not to take it too personally if readers don't like it, but I can't honestly say that I think it’s finished.
But having said that, I wasn't going for 100% because I think that would have been very hard. I think I was going for 95%, and I would say I got 95% of what I wanted down. So that's still good.
NA: It's more than good - it’s brilliant. And if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be?
The first thing that pops into my head is keep going. Set small and achievable writing goals, recognise them as achievements, reward yourself, and keep going.
Born in London in 1972 to Ghanaian parents, Sharon Dodua Otoo is an political activist and novelist living in Berlin. After having published several newspaper articles and two novellas in English, she wrote a short story in German which was later awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2016), one of Germany’s most renowned literary awards. She is politically active with several civil rights organisations, including the Initiative Black People in Germany (ISD), a Black queer feminist organisation called ADEFRA, and Phoenix. Ada’s Realm is her first novel.
You can read an exclusive excerpt of Ada’s Realm here.
