PenAfrican: Before we hit the ground
Selali Fiamanya
Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780008509606
- Mpush Ntabeni writes regular book columns for LitNet.
Before we hit the ground by Selali Fiamanya is a literary novel about migration, grief, memory, belonging and return. The narrative opens with a Ghanaian family in Scotland packing up a house after the death of their son, Elom. Rather than using bereavement as melodrama, Fiamanya presents grief as something embedded in ordinary life routines – the wiping of kitchen tiles, packing Tupperware, preserving photographs and deciding what belongs in storage, memory and the bin. The emotional restraint is one of the novel’s greatest strengths.
The movement between 2019 Scotland and 1980s Ghana quickly reveals the novel’s structural ambition. Rather than employing flashbacks merely to explain the present, Fiamanya constructs memory as an active force continually reshaping identity. Abena’s youthful encounters with Kodzo in Accra possess an immediacy that prevents the past from becoming nostalgic decoration. Instead, the reader gradually understands how migration transforms love into something negotiated across geography and language through the decades.
The strongest achievement of the book is its treatment of migration. Much contemporary migrant fiction concentrates on racism or economic struggle alone. Those realities certainly exist here, too, but Fiamanya is more interested in the quieter emotional costs of displacement. Scotland never becomes merely hostile, nor Ghana merely idyllic. Both countries are presented as incomplete homes. The contestation is about which identity has claimed a permanent place: “I didn’t come to this soil to set down my roots, I came here to plant seeds.”
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The strongest achievement of the book is its treatment of migration. Much contemporary migrant fiction concentrates on racism or economic struggle alone. Those realities certainly exist here, too, but Fiamanya is more interested in the quieter emotional costs of displacement. Scotland never becomes merely hostile, nor Ghana merely idyllic. Both countries are presented as incomplete homes. The contestation is about which identity has claimed a permanent place: “I didn’t come to this soil to set down my roots, I came here to plant seeds.”
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This declaration by Abena is the philosophical centre of the book. It distinguishes between belonging and purpose. Scotland becomes the place where children are raised; Ghana remains the place where identity is rooted. That distinction gives the novel an emotional complexity often missing from other diaspora fiction.
This tension is announced almost immediately after the death of Elom. His funeral becomes the catalyst for a profound disagreement between his parents, but the disagreement is not really about burial or travel. Abena experiences Scotland as a place where their life has happened temporarily, but not where life ultimately belongs. The death of her son strips away the practical reasons for remaining, exposing an emotional truth she has long suppressed. Kodzo’s devotion is genuine. Abena’s longing is equally genuine. Love cannot reconcile them, because they are mourning different losses. Kodzo mourns the son he has buried. Abena mourns the life she has postponed.
This distinction elevates the novel beyond conventional immigrant fiction. The real conflict here is not Britain versus Ghana, nor Europe versus Africa. It is between different temporal orientations. Kodzo looks backward through remembrance. Abena looks backward in order to move forward. It is as if their memories travel in opposite directions.
Equally compelling is the symbolic disagreement between Abena and Kodzo over Elom’s grave. Kodzo understands home through burial. He feels that their son’s grave should root them permanently in Scottish soil. Abena understands home through ancestry, language identity and memory. Neither position is privileged by the narrative. Instead, grief produces two entirely legitimate but incompatible philosophies of belonging. This moral balance is one of the novel’s most impressive achievements.
Fiamanya writes with remarkable confidence for a debut novelist, avoiding ornamental excess while remaining richly observant. Small details carry disproportionate emotional weight: the texture of kitchen tiles noticed only when leaving a house forever; cherries on iced biscuits becoming wounds; a plastic bag filled with Scottish soil handed to Abena before she flies home. These objects gradually accumulate symbolic significance without ever feeling artificially constructed.
Dialogue is another considerable strength of Fiamanya’s writing. Conversations rarely exist to deliver exposition. Instead, they reveal differing conceptions of family, masculinity, womanhood and class. Kodzo’s understated humour offsets Abena’s growing dissatisfaction, while Djifa represents a generation whose identity belongs simultaneously to the UK and to Ghana. Their dialogues feel lived rather than written, which is how it should be.
Abena is ambitious without being sentimental, loving without being submissive, and intellectually restless despite her limited educational opportunities. Her frustration during the Glasgow job interview illustrates how structural prejudice operates through small humiliations rather than dramatic confrontations. Her mistake in confusing poached pears and plums is pertinent, because the scene exposes how easily competence is mistaken for inadequacy when filtered through assumptions about race, class and migration.
Thematically, the novel belongs alongside works by writers such as Bernardine Evaristo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Yaa Gyasi, but its emotional register is distinct and unique. Where many migration novels foreground political confrontation, Fiamanya’s interest lies in domestic archaeology: the accumulated meanings of kitchens, recipes, photographs, accents and family rituals. History enters through everyday life rather than through historical spectacle. Behind everything is a scrupulous interrogation of personal identity, especially that of immigrants: When do we really become part of the identity we’ve adopted?
What I like most is the manner in which the book depicts how grief alters one’s experience of time and self-identity. The measured rhythm allows emotional depth to emerge organically rather than through dramatic revelation.
Before we hit the ground, though a novel about migration, is about much more: what parents carry across oceans, what children inherit unknowingly, and how memory can become a homeland when all else fails. Wonderfully, the book refuses to treat migration as a completed event. For many novels of diaspora, migration functions as a plot point: Someone leaves, arrives, struggles, adapts. Fiamanya, instead, demonstrates that migration is a condition that continues long after the journey has ended. The body settles, whereas the imagination does not. Home is a rehearsed argument, constantly debated between memory and experience.
The Akan concept of Sankofa, invoked repeatedly by Abena, provides the novel’s philosophical vocabulary. The proverb is commonly translated as “Go back and fetch it”, but Fiamanya refuses to reduce it to a sentimental return to origins. Instead, Sankofa becomes an ethical practice of recovery. Abena does not wish to recover a romanticised Ghana that no longer exists. She seeks to recover the self that migration required her to suspend. Scotland has fulfilled its purpose by raising her children. But it can never replace the homeland from which she departed.
This is among the novel’s most profound insights. Migration literature often assumes that identity gradually shifts from one nation to another. Fiamanya suggests something more psychologically accurate, that identity accumulates rather than replaces. Abena has become Scottish in habit, without becoming Scottish in memory. Her daily routines belong to Glasgow; her emotional grammar remains Ghanaian.
The novel expresses this through domestic objects. Food becomes perhaps the most persistent metaphor for continuity across continents. Recipes survive political borders. Cooking preserves language, memory and family history more effectively than passports. Throughout the early chapters, meals do far more than nourish characters. They become archives.
Abena’s extraordinary care with food reflects more than professional expertise. Preparing banku, okro soup, Tom Brown, bofloat and koko constitutes an act of cultural preservation. The kitchen is the only place where migration momentarily ceases and where her African heritage is allowed to reign supreme. Within it, Scotland temporarily recedes, while Ghana re-emerges through smell, texture and taste.
Earlier on in the story, food also shapes the courtship between Abena and Kodzo. Their relationship develops through her preparing breakfast for him when he visits Ghana, rather than through grand romantic gestures. Morning after morning, conversations deepen over porridge, dough and tea. The intimacy grows because nourishment gradually becomes conversation, and conversation becomes affection. It is an elegant inversion of conventional romance. Instead of using dramatic declarations, Fiamanya constructs love through repetition.
That slow accumulation of affection recalls the best traditions of realist fiction. Like in the novels of George Eliot, emotional transformation occurs almost invisibly until readers suddenly realise how completely two lives have intertwined. Kodzo’s proposal, arriving after weeks of breakfast conversations, feels simultaneously surprising and inevitable. It carries the awkward confidence of ordinary life rather than fictional romance.
The novel complicates domestic happiness from the start. Even during courtship, structural inequalities quietly shape every interaction. Abena’s educational ambitions repeatedly collide with social expectations. Her relatives assume that domestic service is her natural role. Potential employers underestimate her abilities. Even Kodzo, arguably the novel’s most sympathetic male figure, expects that marriage will naturally culminate in children rather than further education.
Here, Fiamanya demonstrates considerable subtlety. Kodzo is not presented as patriarchal in any simplistic sense. His expectations emerge from affection as much as tradition. He genuinely wants to protect Abena from hardship. Yet his protection simultaneously limits her autonomy. The resulting tension illustrates how love, even from benign patriarchal traditions, reproduces its limiting inherited assumptions.
Abena’s search for education gives the novel a compelling narrative thread. Her frustration arises not simply because opportunities are unavailable, but because of her added required domesticity. Scottish bureaucracy appears almost impenetrable. University systems become labyrinthine. Even successful conversations carry the constant possibility of misunderstanding. Migration here is revealed not only as linguistic labour, but as a frustrating burden to social mobility also.
Equally impressive is Fiamanya’s portrayal of generational difference. Djifa, raised largely in Britain, inhabits migration differently from her parents. To her, Ghana is a lost homeland and an inheritance waiting to be discovered at the same time. Her curiosity about cocoa farms, family histories and forgotten relatives contrasts with her parents’ painful memories. For Abena, return is recovery, whereas for Djifa it is discovery. This distinction prevents the novel from romanticising either generation. Neither possesses a complete understanding of identity. Instead, each inherits different fragments of a larger history and national identity.
Perhaps the novel’s most beautiful symbol appears just before Abena boards her flight to Ghana. Kodzo silently hands her a small plastic bag containing soil collected from Elom’s grave. The gesture is astonishing in its emotional complexity. He cannot accompany her physically, so he sends with her the land to which he and his son now belong. Scotland literally travels back to Africa in the form of earth. The image quietly reverses centuries of migration narratives. Instead of carrying African soil to Europe, the novel imagines European soil returning to Africa as an object of love rather than conquest. Few contemporary novels achieve symbolism this quietly powerfully. Nothing about the scene feels manufactured. The bag of soil emerges naturally from character, grief and circumstance. Yet it gathers within itself nearly every theme the novel has developed: memory, migration, burial, belonging and the impossibility of choosing only one home.
By the end of these movements, Before we hit the ground has established itself not merely as a family saga, but as a meditation on the emotional architecture of diaspora. It understands that migration rarely ends with arrival. Instead, every departure leaves behind another unfinished journey, one that continues in kitchens, cemeteries, family conversations and remembered landscapes long after passports have been stamped.
Naturally, I have a dog in this fight, because my recently published book, Multitudes, is about fatherhood and reverse migration from Scotland. Though we approach the topic from different angles, the themes are similar.
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