In The End, It Was All About Love E-Book

Musa Okwonga

• Herausgeber: Rough Trade Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love; only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father's death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy. In The End, It Was All About Love is a journey of loss and self-acceptance that takes its nameless narrator all the way through bustling Berlin to his roots, a quiet village on the Uganda-Sudan border. It is a bracingly honest story of love, sexuality and spirituality, of racism, dating, and alienation; of fleeing the greatest possible pain, and of the hopeful road home.

Leseprobe

IN THE END,IT WASALL ABOUTLOVE.

MUSAOKWONGA

THIS IS A JOURNEY IN THREE PARTS.

In the first part, you visit Berlin;in the second part, you visit Dr. Oppong;and in the third part, you visit the homeland.

PART ONE:Righteous Migrants

PART TWO:Black Gravity

PART THREE:Your Passport

PART ONE:Righteous Migrants

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of these gusts are proud that they filled those ancient sails.

You could hear them above Berlin on election night,

Hailing the arrival of the moonlight and far-right;

You could hear them whistling through the corridors

Of the Holocaust memorial, slapping its stone walls and floors,

Gasping applause.

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.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of this air is in the best of health,

Since it has forgiven itself:

I was simply swept along by the prevailing mood,

There was nothing I could do.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of these hurricanes remain enraged;

You can hear them in the chests of activists

Who stand across from fascists in Spandau:

They are the howls of every African child, woman and man drowned.

These winds have always resisted With every major and minor breath—

Whether forming storms that left the slaver’s ship a wreck

Or sending mischievous wafts to blow the hats from masters’ heads.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

None of them have retired:

They’ve migrated to Germany in their millions,

And you can find the righteous ones

Whispering through its capital city at weekends,

Slipping through a window to cool a queer couple after a long afternoon of love:

Or sighing through the barbecues at Tempelhofer Feld,

Content that there is still a world that knows how freedom smells.