Love Always Wins

The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer and editor Nana-Ama Danquah

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Photo Credit: Liang Siheng, Yaddo 2024

Nana-Ama Danquah’s groundbreaking memoir, Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression was hailed by the Washington Post as “A vividly textured flower of a memoir, one of the finest to come along in years.” A 25th Anniversary edition was reissued in 2023. A native of Ghana, Ms. Danquah is the editor of four anthologies: Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women; Shaking the Tree: New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women; The Black Body; and, Accra Noir, as part of Akashic Books’ popular noir series.

Ms. Danquah earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Her poetry, short fiction, essays, books reviews, and feature articles have been widely published in newspapers, journals, and magazines. Her short story “When a Man Loves a Woman” was a finalist for the 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing.

As a celebrity ghostwriter, Ms. Danquah has penned numerous bestselling titles, and as a political speechwriter, she has written addresses and keynotes that have been delivered at the United Nations General Assembly, Westminster Palace, Chatham House, the World Economic Forum, and other high-level conferences.

Ms Danquah has been the recipient of awards by the California Arts Council as an Artist-in-Residence Award, and as an Individual Artist. She was a Pauline and Henry Louis Gates, Sr. fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and she was a fellow at the Corporation of Yaddo.

Ms. Danquah is based in Southern California.

1. What are you reading now?

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I loved all things Judy Blume. And in my teens, I also read Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange. I hid most of my books from my mother, who thought that I read too much and needed to spend my time on other things, like cleaning the house.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time? 

I can reread the same book of Sharon Olds’ and be just as blown away by the poems as the first time I’d read them.  The same is true of Ai and Adam Zagajewski and a list of other poets that would be much too long to write here. I used to never re-read books of prose but I’ve recently started re-reading some of the books read in my twenties because I think there were a lot of layers that my youth and inexperience kept me from fully grasping. Take James Baldwin’s work for instance. I grew up as an immigrant who lived in a small suburban town and whose family did not speak English at home.  My parents are Ghanaian, so they knew as much about racism as I did, which was very little.  Of course, that knowledge expanded as I got older, but it wasn’t until I was on my own and fully out in the world that I started learning—through personal experiences, and by reading—about the history of racism, as a well-considered and organized system, something that was deliberately woven into the very fabric of the nation. But it isn’t just race, it’s gender, and class. I’m not as blind to some of the things I was then. Baldwin’s work has a very different resonance now than it did when I was in my twenties. As does Atwood’s. As does Marquez’s.

In times of great difficulty, I turn to poetry. The work that’s included in the collection Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness edited by Carolyn Forché offered me greater understanding of resilience, humility, pain, loss, grief, human cruelty.  I’ve returned to it so often this past year that it now has a permanent place on my bedside table.

Lisboa, Portugal 2023.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I love a nice kaftan or wrap dress. And it has to be colorful. I love all shades of orange, blue, red, yellow, purple and green.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

A few days ago, I watched a video of André De Shield’s Tony award acceptance speech, in which he gave three pieces of advice. I’ve seen the video several times before and thought it was valuable advice, but for whatever reason, his words landed differently this time. I’ve been making a lot of changes in my life and what he said was extremely relevant, just what I needed to hear.  He said, “One; surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming. Two; slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be. And three; the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next, so keep climbing.”

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

I have terrible, debilitating pet allergies, even to so-called non-allergenic breeds, so I’ve had to love animals from afar. Curiously, I’ve been told by family members that when I was very young, I had a dog that I loved and was devastated by its death. I have no actual memories of this, but there are a couple of childhood photos that seem to confirm, at the very least, the presence of a dog in my life. If one were to go in the direction of Freud, one might wonder if the allergies were psychosomatic, brought on by childhood trauma. Or is that just my writer’s imagination hard at work again? Hahaha. Household pets aside, whenever I travel and go on safari, I am always mesmerized by gazelle, the power, speed, and gracefulness with which they move.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

I promised myself when I was younger that I would not get married and I would not have children. I wanted to be nobody’s wife and nobody’s mother. Every day I thank the heavens that I am a mother. My life is so much richer and more beautiful because I had my Darling Daughter.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Both. I sing everywhere, not just the shower.  And I dance in nearly every room of the house…except the bathroom, because it’s kinda dangerous. I enjoy Pilates and yoga and using the rebounder.  

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

If you’d have asked me this question even 7 years ago, I would have answered with a bunch of achievements. I hope I publish X book by Y time; or, I hope I make one bestseller list or the other. These days I care more about getting the writing out than whatever comes next. I just want to write, and I hope that I can continue doing that for many more years to come. I’ve also become extremely protective of my reading time after I realized not long ago that the majority of what I read was manuscripts and books that I was editing, reviewing, or blurbing. Add to that all the books that I read because my friends and/or colleagues authored them and you’ve turned a hobby that offered escape and joy into an overwhelming and often burdensome task, a chore. These days the books I read because I want to far outnumber the books I read because I must. I hope I continue to reclaim all the things about writing that I loved and that were so lifesaving in my teens and young adulthood but, since becoming a professional writer, have been tainted by capitalism.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

This is a topic that I’m very passionate about, so I might get longwinded. I am grateful for every kindness that has come into my life, from the kindness of the people in front of me at the drive-thru coffee shop who paid for my order this morning to the random guy who walked by me yesterday at the Target and said, “Smile, it’ll get better, just hang in there.” For him to say that, I must have truly looked the way I felt. The thing about kindness that makes it so beautiful and life-changing is that it’s not mandatory; it comes from the heart, from a space that is pure, and it is received by the heart, in a space that is pure. It is a deeply sacred exchange, no matter how seemingly minor or momentary. I’ve been fortunate enough to recognize and receive all the kindness that comes into my life—and I am very committed to paying it all forward in ways large and small to my friends and to those who have not yet become my friends. 

I’ll tell you about two extraordinary acts of kindness that I was blessed enough to receive. One act ensured that Darling Daughter and I always had a roof over our heads. From when I was a young nursing mother until I was able to purchase my own property not too long ago, my former landlord, Gideon, let me rent in his properties whenever I was living in Los Angeles, which was more often than not. He did this even though I had poor credit, no reliable or steady source of income, was often broke, usually late with my rent, and painted my apartments in the vein of Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul (which made it costly for him to return the unit to white after I’d moved out.) We’ve known each other for over three decades now.  He is more than a friend, he is like family. In fact, when Darling Daughter and I traveled to Israel, it was Gideon’s family that warmly received us, and made us feel welcome.

This second act of kindness still blows my mind. My immigration attorney, Warren, paid all of my application fees and fines (totaling nearly $2000) and also deferred the payment of fees for his services because I had no money, was in a desperate situation, and would have been deported had he not stepped in to help.  “I have never done this before,” he told me. It was our first meeting, a free one-hour consultation that I nearly did not attend. “But I believe you’re a good person, and you will pay me back.” I did pay him back. He is a dear friend, and we get together for lunch from time to time. 

Without the kindness of those two individuals—and those are two of many, many instances—my life would not be what it is today. I will be eternally grateful that they saw past the flaws and shortcomings of my circumstances; they saw my humanity, my heart.  And their belief in me made me that much more determined to be worthy of it.

I spoke earlier of poetry; one of my favorite poems is Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.  In it she writes: “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside/ you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

How true that is.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Love.

I love the life that I am creating, and I love the people who are in that life; I also love the people who, by my own design are not in that life because at this age, I now know that some people must be loved from afar.

Like so many other people, I grew up hearing that “you can’t live on love alone.” I disagree. I think—no, I know—that love is an energy that manifests, attracts, that conspires to help us fulfill our needs. Love is an energy that connects us to the divinity within ourselves, and the divinity within others. Love is an energy that heals, it is a magnet that pulls us back to the truth of who we are, who we want to be, who we are capable of becoming.

And, quiet as it’s kept, love always wins.

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