Sex, murder and colonisation

No One Dies Yet ★★★★
Kobby Ben Ben
Europa Editions

History and hedonism; colonialism and queerness; mystery and murder: Ghanaian author Kobby Ben Ben tangibly infuses societal injustices with social commentary in his debut novel, No One Dies Yet. 

Set in 2019 — The Year of the Return — which observes 400 years since the first slave ships left Ghana for America, Ben Ben says he “wanted to tell a story that focused on the preserved slavery side but also the queer aspect”.

“The Ghanaian government was doing this return programme to encourage African Americans to explore their heritage,” he explains. “And because so many African Americans, and so many people of the diaspora who were queer, came to Ghana during that year, the black and queer voices needed to be heard.”

Ben Ben employs the gay, black American characters of Elton (“he's sexually motivated and craves being desired”), Vincent (“curious and condescending”) and Scott (“condescending because he wants fancy things in life”) as instigators to portray The Year of the Return from a queered historical perspective.

The novel is told through the lens of dual-narrators Nana and Kobby who serve as the Americans' guides to Ghana: Nana is homophobic and representative of traditional African customs and religious beliefs; Kobby a contemporary, sybaritic urbanite.

“These two narratives represented different kinds of Ghana and even Africa. I wanted to compress these two vast ideas of what the African novel is and merge them together. I wanted to write two characters that represented two versions of what the African novel could be,” Ben Ben says of his decision to employ two antonymic narrators. “The narrative was to throw light on the Other, queer or return narratives.”

It's a readerly misconception that Nana is named for Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo, yet Ben Ben was intentional about naming Kobby after himself: “I realised I ended up really hating Nana. So I thought 'Oh, who else than myself?' I looked around me and didn't think anybody was better or [more] fashionable or wiser. There's lots of things that he might share with me, others he does not share at all. I wrote him to have more beautiful parts than I do in real life.”

Elton, Vincent and Scott's journey to Ghana's preserved slavery sites and exploration of the country's queer climate aside, the plot is driven by a slew of grisly murders committed by an anonymous serial killer. Yet imminent death becomes personal when the threesome are told that one of them will soon die...

“I want the shock factor. I love it! I love it in books,” says Ben Ben of the haunting forecast of death interspersed with murderous killings. 

“People think No One Dies Yet is a murder or a thriller story and, in essence, it is that. But it's also a social commentary,” he says, likening his novel to the first season of the HBO series The White Lotus: “It had that murder in the beginning. It had all the social commentary on colonisation and American hegemony. 

“I wanted to add another element that would make the novel propulsive,” he adds of Elton, Vincent and Scott's forewarning. “So if I created the impression that a murder was going to happen, it would give people the opportunity to flip the pages. I want to be able to make readers think that they might be getting a murder story and then give them something else, something more than they bargained for.”

As much joy Ben Ben as garners from shock factors and the inclusion of repellent murders, he also enjoys writing a saucy sex scene... Exhibit: the following passage between Kobby and Elton (Lady Chatterley's Lover naysayers, read no further): 

“Ready?” I croon hoarsely, suggesting an urgency for things to move along. Elton crosses the counter, unzips my pants and goes down on me ... We take things to the room. We fuck and flip, fuck and flip. Where his nails have dug for blood, his lips follow. I spank him even if he doesn't insist. 

“I love sex scenes!” Ben Ben enthuses. “There's just so much darkness in the novel and there are times in the novel — that's why I call them interludes — where I would relax and make the characters interact with each other sexually.

“A lot of the novel deals with the queer aspect of Ghana's history so how best to portray queer themes than having queer sex — and graphic queer sex!” he laughs. 

“I also did not want to write the kind of sex that I read in romance books because this was not that kind of novel. I wanted to write good sex and bad sex in a literary, elevated way so readers could view sex as honest and brutal as it is.”

His explicit depictions of queer carnality have been met with cries of “Oh my God, the sex scenes are very hard!”. To which he retaliates: “You're also having sex! The only reason you don't see it is because you are not the voyeur to that scene. If you were the voyeur, you'd know you're having graphic sex as much as everyone is, down to the hiccups, down to finding the right tempo.”

Sex transcends physicality, with Ben Ben pronouncing his decision to include social analysis in a work where someone dies at the end as “edging” the readers: “I give readers the hint that someone might die but I don't talk about the death and I take them through long — and sometimes excruciating! — social commentary of things that I love before I give them the murder.”

Ben Ben adds that he didn't want to write a novel that feels like there's one particular main character, owing to the themes he was interested in exploring: “Certain characters were main characters more than even the narrators themselves because the narrators are just looking at the outsiders and describing them,” he says of the omnipresent Nana and Kobby.

He concedes that the friends were “really hard to write because I'm not African American and I also want to write portrayals that are true. A lot of Ghanaians read it and say that this is exactly how African Americans act in Ghana. But some African American readers are, like, 'Kobby, we are not like these people'.” He compares black Americans' response to their depiction in the novel to seeing yourself captured on camera: “You never really know how you look until somebody takes a photo of you.”

As for the character he most enjoyed writing? 

“That's like someone asking you who your favourite Sex and The City character is! I'm a Samantha,” he grins, before responding with “Yaa: she's a black, British woman who has been struggling to get her voice heard and succeeds. She realises that, to get what she wants, she has to use her accent as a currency. She's also one of the most incorrigible characters and the one who moves the social commentary on neocolonialism. She was so fun to write and she made me laugh.”

Didn't think neocolonialism could be punctuated by humour? Then you clearly haven't read Kobby Ben Ben. 

Yet.