“It's been a difficult juggling act, to be honest.”
When I catch up with author Selali Fiamanya he’s walking around London on a break from recording the audiobook version of his novel, Before We Hit The Ground. Next week he has “the biggest exam of his career”, he’s also training to be a doctor.
The novel tells the story of a Ghanaian family over the course of decades, each member with their own hurdle to overcome as they find their feet in late 1980s Glasgow and cities beyond.
“I’ll be honest with you, I didn't really conceptualise it as a book until quite late in the day. I started writing short stories here and there when I was at uni, probably about ten to eleven years ago. And some of the characters from this kind of started back then. And then around lockdown, I started getting into more writing workshops and I submitted an idea for a short story collection back in 2021. My first editor, Margo, was like, “Yeah, I think this could be a novel”.”
Fiamanya began his short stories centered around the character of Elom, the son of Ghanaian migrants to Glasgow, Kodzo and Abena, the sister of Dzifa. The novel is similar to Fiamanya’s own family dynamic, his sister is in fact voicing the female characters of his novel, he tells me at one point during our conversation.
Although there’s a sense of familiarity to the familial structure Fiamanya has created, there’s a level of healthy distance too. There’s also a subversion of the traditional timeline; we begin at the end of Elom’s story.
“I was quite keen to put it [the end] at the beginning. I think part of it was basically like a plot device, quite a technical thing of just wanting to maintain an element of tension throughout, rather than just kind of following the family as they stumbled through. I wanted it to be a dramatic question, to capture people, to pull them through the story.”
You feel a sense of ‘stumbling’ through the family’s narrative, the back and forth of the timeline along with the change in perspective, spanning pre-marriage into later years of life for the ‘adults’.
You meet each character individually and know them as intimately as they know each other. Fiamanya's prose encourages an exploration of self, your own loved ones and how well you truly know your immediate family. It’s rich with music as well; something which changed with each decade of peeling back the family’s motivations.
“Music's my first love; it's the art form which resonates with me the most. It's almost like in the way that if you're writing a story, at some point the characters have to eat, because that's just what happens in life. You have breakfast, lunch and dinner, and obviously, if you had a story where people weren't having a meal, it would be weird for me. It'd be weird not to have music running through it, because so much of my life revolves around music, listening to it on the way to work, going to concerts, it being integral to lots of the really important memories in my life.”
It shapes a lot of Elom’s life too, we see him grapple with music as an angsty pre-teen, hearing seminal hymns from his parents and the church and framing key moments of his early adulthood. It’s Elom who drives the novel’s real narrative with his family circling his orbit.
“I was really quite unsure about it, so in the first draft, Elom was really foregrounded and the others had kind of quite minor roles…I was quite nervous about writing like a middle aged African (woman) or any woman with a life very different from my own. I was like, “what kind of right or knowledge do I have to kind of write this character?” He expands on working on the character of Abena.
But in the end, Abena became Fiamanya’s favourite character. “I really enjoyed getting into her mind, making her the person she is and digging into what drives her…I found that the most rewarding, actually, in the end, but I was very nervous about that at the start.”
Despite the novel being Elom-centric, the exposition of Abena was beautiful to unpeel. We meet her as a young woman in Ghana, seeking more than the cards she’s been dealt in life. Romanced into leaving her home to seek more in Glasgow, we see her grapple with the intersectionality of being a woman, black and a migrant.
But there’s always a return to home one way or another.
Living in Ghana for two years as a young child gave Fiamanya some grounding when it came to writing late 1980’s Accra.
“I had that experience of, like, going back and seeing it as being very different. So a lot of it was from my own experiences of Ghana. And then, you know, we do live in a Ghanaian British household, so there is always this kind of fabric of Ghana in the air, and lots of family is still there... So I was able to just kind of draw on all that.”
Flicking between Glasgow, Accra and London provides a heady but realistic pace to the world Fiamanya has built. We are exposed to each character's flaws, misgivings and joy in under 400 pages. It’s a visually compelling read, that sticks with you through each unwrapping of every new exposition of the family’s disposition.
“…Families, by and large, I do really feel like they try to love each other and want to love each other and do what's best for each other, but like, ultimately, we're all unknowable, and we have our own issues, and we we get it wrong sometimes, we only have like what's presented to us, and we can only try and act based on that.”
Before We Hit The Ground is available to purchase now from all good bookshops.
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