Losing the Plot by Derek Owusu

Derek Owusu’s Losing the Plot is a tender, rhythmic, fictive meditation on his mother’s journey from Ghana and subsequent life in the UK. The novel, written in verse, deals with familiar immigrant tropes: displacement, alienation and longing. But the narrative is not his mother’s alone: Owusu deftly weaves his own narrative voice into the plot. The narrative voice is multilayered, representing an intimate and often terse interaction between generations. Owusu intertwines the past, present and future, bridging temporal planes to present time as both a multidimensional and flat construction. 

Owusu is careful to consistently centre the matriarchal narrative in the verse, and does not allow his own to overwhelm. His interactions with the verse are literally sidelined in the form of sporadic sidenotes, interjecting his perspective on his mother’s unfolding narrative. For this reason, it is hard to engage with the verse in a linear or formulaic manner, and the reader’s eye and attention is haphazardly guided across the page. The reading experience is often fraught. But perhaps this was Owusu’s intention: to create reading conditions that mirror a complex and turbulent personal history.

Owusu’s use of language is also stirring and composite. The combinations of Twi, British slang and standard English point to the divergence and overlap of identities. Owusu uses language to locate the characters in different transient settings: who we were and who we are now.

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Canongate, 3 Nov