Nana Awere Damoah - Truth Floats

Truth Floats opens with a metaphor. A spider, “working tirelessly”, spins an elaborate web in a corner away from prying eyes. The web will take some time to make, but that's fine, because the pay-off in the end is well worth the initial investment. Nearby a fly is working hard, too, but it works for the present while ignoring the implications of the future. In its genial, unobservant way, the fly quite accidentally stumbles into the web, becomes trapped, and then the spider emerges, victorious, and ready to eat.

It's a nice opening story, and it's tone sets the scene for Nana Awere Damoah's short story, Truth Floats. We learn, quite quickly, which character corresponds with the spider and which with the fly, and from there it's clear how the story will progress. Suspense has thus been removed – the other aspects of the story must carry the weight. That leaves characterisation, which is to say the personalities of Kweku (the spider) and Akoto, his university room-mate and friend (the fly). Add to that Adoma, Akoto's fiancee:

The only one advantage his friend Akoto had over him. The prettiest girl he had ever seen in his fast life. Her neck was like ringed sausages, earning her the name Ama Konfe, the girl with the beautiful neck. When she smiled, her cheeks reformed into two dimples, which could hold two pebbles with ease. Her lips parted to reveal teeth set neatly by each other like footballers arranged in a defence wall before a free kick

She's beautiful then, but that's about all we learn of her, except that she's also quite stupid, and so is Akoto. The spider-nature of Kweku is about all we learn of him, but we do discover that his nickname is “Spiderman”, and he enjoys cackling to himself when contemplating dastardly plots. And that there's a backstory to his name and family history, which is by far the best (and shortest) part of the story.

Scratch the characters, then. Plot? Kweku and Akoto are friends; Kweku is jealous; Akoto leaves the country for three (!) years without ever bothering to wonder why his fiancee doesn't return his letters and without visiting his home even once (!!); Kweku convinces Adoma to marry him; Akoto comes back and learns of the betrayal; Kweku is shunted to the sidelines; and then everyone lives happily ever after, except for Kweku, who ends up alright anyway.

Whew. Not much plot then. But what we do have – and lots of it – are little sayings, proverbs, the sort of folksy, earthy wisdom endemic to a novel like Don Quixote, or, you know, someone's grandfather. Some I recognised and some I did not, and I expect that a few of them are explicitly related to Ghanaian culture, for they do not seem to translate well. Here is a smattering, taken from a single page:

“Only in the community of pregnant women does an over-matured coconut drop of its own accord”; “it was with patience that the experienced hunter killed an elephant”; “a bedfellow in sowing the seed should be a part in the harvest”; “It was only the coward who was scared by the scarecrow”; “A tooth lost its respect and place in an aching jaw and a gold nugget could never sparkle besides charcoal”

And so on. Some make sense, and are worth considering, but others do not. Of course, it's certainly true that there are proverbs for any situation, and many mutually exclusive or contrary proverbs exist, which renders them all interesting bubbles of thought, but they shouldn't be substituted for a coherent statement. “Look before you leap” is a cautionary statement, while “He who hesitates is lost” recommends immediate action. Both have their place, but both disagree. What can we make of a story filled with such quips?

The result is that Damoah uses these sayings as shorthand to avoid making any statement of his own. The story is filled to overflowing with them, rendering much of it oblique and a tad ridiculous:

”Adoma, the head is not a coconut that you can open to see what is inside it. Though he is my friend, I cannot explain all his actions,” Kweku said, looking at the beautiful girl before him. Ah, such a beauty, Kweku said to himself the umpteenth time. How true it was that only a toothless cat would not lick his lips when a mouse was playing near his nose. Kweku was enjoying the game he was playing with this beautiful mouse and his lips were getting worn out from all the licking!

What to make of this? It's not saying much, but my there are a lot of words.

When Adoma told Akoto later that the customary rites were not even performed, Akoto knew he had Kweku by the scruff! Legally, the notice for marriage from the local authorities was valid only on the basis that customary marriage had been done. And also, the pastor of the church where the wedding was held had not been licensed by the municipal authority to perform marriages! Therefore, the marriage between Adoma and Kweku was null and void! The fact that Akoto was a lawyer played no small part in the investigations! Indeed, knowledge of the law had triumphed over trickery!

In the end, what we have is clumsy writing reinforced by the laziness of using proverbs as a substitute for critical examination. It is clear the author is attempting to link the initial metaphor of the spider and the fly with the story of Adomo, Akoto and Kweku, but the conceit fails. Had the plot been presented without the fluff of the metaphor and the sayings, there might be something here – but it wasn't, and that's all there is to it.

Part of the critic's job is to critique the story that exists, and not the one the author wishes had made the journey from his mind to the page. By the same token, respect must be given to the motives, reasoning, and impetus for execution of the writer; that is, I must judge according to the merits of the story, and not the merits of what I like. It's unfair to criticise the latest cop thriller for failing to provide a coherent social analysis, just as it is unfair to expect thumping action and oozing sex from the likes of W. G. Sebald or Hermann Hesse.

In that vein, I must take Truth Floats both for what it is, and what it wishes to be, while acknowledging where and how the failures have occurred. Truth Floats very much wishes to turn an ordinary story into a larger metaphor, and Damoah's constant use of proverbs, and the unsophisticated vocabulary and grammatical structure of the narrator, indicate a desire to universalise the story, to have it function as a stand-in for all manner of problems and situations. To become a metaphor, in other words. In these, Damoah fails, because the individual pieces, which are weak on their own, mesh together poorly and leave a confused piece which feels rushed while simultaneously runs to far too many pages considering the shallowness of its themes.

Truth Floats by Nana Awere Damoah is a short story from StoryTime's publication, African Roar (edited by Emmanuel Sigauke and Ivor W. Hartmann). This review is part of a series intending to examine each story from the collection, in an effort to broaden awareness of both the project itself, and the excellent array of authors contained within.

Author	Nana Awere Damoah
Title	Truth Floats
Nationality	Ghanian
Publisher	StoryTime
Availability: ---Amazon US

See Also

Other titles in the African Roar series include:
---Tshuma, Novuyo Rosa - Big Pieces, Little Pieces
---Tubosun, Kola - Behind the Door
---Musodza, Masimba - Yesterday's Dog
---Morocco-Clarke, Ayodele - The Nestbury Tree
---Tapureta, Beaven - Cost of Courage
---Hartmann, Ivor W. - Lost Love
---Mlalazi, Christopher - A Cicada in the Shimmer
---Nwokolo Jr., Chuma - Quarterback & Co.
---Sigauke, Emmanuel - A Return to the Moonlight