local news
Brown
continued from page 1
they were still doing corporal punishment.
They were still spanking kids, and that was
a foreign concept to me. And there was the
heat: it was hotter than I’d ever been before
in my life.
what was different about life in north
Carolina?
It was a working class community with a
lot of factories. People were making good
money for a long time but then if a plant
closed down everyone would be in crisis. It
was an integrated town but it had all-black
areas and all-white. It was a culture based
on violence. The moment the sun
went down people would start
fighting. So moving into that cul-
ture it’s very difficult not to be
violent. I wasn’t willing to go all
the way, so I decided to stay com-
pletely away.
when did you start thinking
about violence?
My conscience about these kinds of issues
was developed pretty early by my dad being
in the church and everything I saw. At uni-
versity I started thinking ‘what’s the differ-
ence between me and some of my friends—
smart, talented friends who didn’t go to col-
lege’. I’d had several friends who were
murdered; some murdered each other. So I
was in school but a lot of my friends
weren’t. What was the difference? And I
started thinking about families and strength
and resilience, and about young black men
in particular.
how does poverty hurt children?
Marginalized and disenfranchised people
live in a state of engaged trauma. What I
mean is that people can be living in a con-
stant state of stress, for example poor kids
living in communities where there is a lot of
gang violence. If you grow up in a violent
community you might have seen people
murdered, and seen people put in prison.
That’s normal to you.
Say you are a young person whose father
is in prison and your mother is working all
the time. Then your grandmother dies. To
some people that might be a natural transi-
tion. But for these kids it’s a catastrophe. If
it takes away the only stability you have, it’s
going to take you a lot longer to overcome
it. Or if you have post traumatic stress dis-
order you might be totally shut down
...violence is taught and
learned and reinforced. And it
can be unlearned
already. You might have no response and
just be flat.
It’s a myth that you can raise any kid by
yourself. Even two parent families it’s a
struggle every day. So you often have sev-
eral single women raising children, and one
of them is caring for all those children, and
allowing all the other mothers to work.
Anything that happens to her impacts all
these other families. And an arrest or a
death has a huge impact far beyond one
family, but for multiple families and for
generations.
what do you say to young people who
think that reporting crime is snitching?
If you shoot at somebody you shoot to
kill, especially when it’s random. So, if you
witness this and say nothing, why are you
protecting somebody who has no regard for
human life? If that person will shoot
somebody else, then they will shoot you
as well. That person doesn’t need your
protection.
Snitching is a really a misconstrued
concept. It’s a code that relates to street
life. If two people commit a crime and
one gets caught, then snitching is telling
to save yourself. That’s what it’s really
about. But if you witness a crime and
don’t tell that’s just not being a good cit-
izen.
These are codes of masculinity that
come from the streets. But they get
warped when you start using street
codes for non-street things. If you
don’t live in that world these rules
don’t apply to you.
what’s the connection between trauma
and violence?
There is so much connection between
trauma and domestic violence, particu-
larly in the Black community. When you
talk about slavery you talk about violence.
We’re still dealing with the residual effects
of that violence. From the beginning of time
violence has been used to control people,
dominate them and to get somebody to do
what you want them to do. To really under-
stand somebody you have to understand not
just where they are now, but where they
have been. It’s the same with violence in
our communities.
what are you working on now?
Right now, I have been working on a proj-
ect with Pastor Cliff Chappell called LEAP,
Leadership Empowerment Action Project.
That’s with Black churches and domestic
violence. We are working with men and
women trying to put a dent in some of the
violence in the black community.
Andrae Brown
The most important thing is to recognize
that violence is taught and learned and rein-
forced. And it can be unlearned. People are
not just violent. So to stop it, you have to
figure out where the root of that is coming
from and address those root causes of vio-
lence. If you are coming from pain you
have got to heal that pain. If your violence
comes from feeling isolated or marginalized
then you have to stop that marginalization
and heal that trauma. We spend a lot of time
trying to punish violence but very little try-
ing to heal the trauma and the root causes.
How well do we deal with sex education?
Not very well, because most of us don’t
handle sexuality very well when we were
teens. That includes sexual identity issues
as well as sexuality. We leave kids out here
alone to deal with sex and relationships
themselves.
Contact leaP of Faith at 360-281-5205
Read the rest of this story online at
www.theskanner.com
Quartey
continued from page 1
tSn: Here at the Skanner news we get a
lot of books by African and African
American authors but very few are pub-
lished by mainstream publishing houses. So
what was your journey in getting this pub-
lished by Random House – it’s your
second novel?
Quartey: Yes, the first was “Wife
of the Gods.” It’s been a long journey.
I guess I should go all the way back to
childhood, when I started writing
novellas and short stories. I was very
much stimulated by the number of
books in my house. My parents were
both university lecturers in Ghana,
and I was educated by the number of
both fiction books and non-fictions books in
the house. So I always wanted to write, and
the mystery genre has always been my
favorite. I had a number of characters – one
James Bond-ish type guy, I always had a
group of kids who went around solving
mysteries. So it really started then and real-
ly persisted all the way through my teens. It
took a back seat to medicine, which I stud-
ied and got my MD at Howard University.
So it wasn’t until after I got out of med
school that my writing was rekindled. And
that’s when I started sending out stuff to
multiple agents and getting back rejection
letters – of which there were probably hun-
dreds.
For a while I was writing stuff based in
Los Angeles, some thrillers, and nothing
was really gelling. And it just happened that
at the turn of the millennium, around 2000,
I was in Paris and just for a couple days and
I was in hotel rooms, and I came across this
program on French TV which dealt with a
local detective in Ivory Coast who’s trying
to solve a mystery in a village. And what he
was doing was using the superstitions and
beliefs in magical powers of the local peo-
ple, trying to trick them into confessing or
stating what they had seen as witnesses. I
was really intrigued, having grown up in
Ghana since I was 18 or so I was aware of
some of these beliefs.
I want to put
Ghana on the
crime fiction
map
- Kwei Quartey MD
I thought – if I could
write that kind of story, and make it a mur-
der mystery, and set it in Ghana.
And that’s when the first idea came for
“The Wife of the Gods.”
tSn: So the girls are indentured because
of things their families did years ago?
Quartey: Sometimes even generations
ago. The idea is to get the protection of the
gods, and to give these children over. So in
that setting mixing it up with these magical
beliefs and why bad things happen to good
people, which is a question that more
Africans ask than, say, Americans ask is,
say, why did this happen to me? Not so
much how?
So that book deals with that aspect.
And the second book, “Children of the
Streets,” is a little bit more of an urban mod-
ern 21st century story that deals maybe a lit-
tle less with tradition but certainly there is
one aspect that is covered, and that is
proverbs. Anybody who reads this book
sees that proverbs become an important part
of the story. African proverbs specifically.
tSn: And then you have another book
coming out next year.
Quartey: I’m hoping it will be next year,
if I can persuade Random House to work
that fast on it. I’m working on a novel
that I’m tentatively calling “Men of the
Rig,” and this deals with the brave new
world of oil exploration which is under-
way in Ghana, which is producing oil
since December, 2010, and of course the
issue is, is this really going to create a
new Ghana, or is it going to be much the
same story as gold exploration, which
does not enrich the lives of even the
people in those gold-mining towns, so
in other words, do it like Norway, which
knows how to handle its oil production,
or do like Nigeria, which is a mess, basical-
ly.
tSn: Who are your inspirations?
Quartey: I think the first inspiration is
certainly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation,
Sherlock Holmes, because he’s really the
prototype, along with Allen Poe’s creations
as well, of testing, looking for small things
that give something away. His character
actually is based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s
character the Professor, Dr. Joseph Bell,
who could always tell a lot about a person
by observing what he wears or how he
walks or what mud was on his shoes or
something like that. So testing, or observa-
tion, is a central point in my books. My hero
Darko Dawson, has in that regard, an abili-
ty called synesthesia in which he is able to
perceive certain senses by another sense.
For example when he hears a voice he can
actually feel it – either wet, or dry and
prickly – and this gives him the ability
sometimes to catch people out in a lie.
He also is keen observer of people and
their behavior. So Sherlock Homes comes
through in that way. And I think even sub-
liminally Sherlock Holmes comes through
because, as many people know, he had an
addiction to cocaine, and Darko Dawson’s
addiction is marijuana.
tSn: So are you a doctor now?
Quartey:: I’m an internist but through
years of training I’ve moved my interest to
chronic wound care, so I’m a specialist in
chronic wound care and I do emergency
medicine as well.
One of the things I definitely want to do it
put Ghana on the crime fiction map. So if
we’re familiar with our heroes, some of
whom are associated with specific cities –
Phillip Marlowe in Los Angeles, who is the
creation of Raymond Chandler, the classic
noir writer, and then we have the more mod-
ern day ones – Harry Bosch from Michael
Connolly’s great creation is also in Los
Angeles.
I feel that I was Akkra, and generally
Ghana, to enter into that panoply of detec-
tive cities – that’s the first thing. We do have
some examples from South Africa, specifi-
cally Botswana and the Republic of SA. Of
course I’m referring to the Number One
Ladies Detective Agency, which is a differ-
ent kind of mystery by the way – it’s soft.
And then we have Michael Stanley’s cre-
ation, Detective Kubu. And then we do have
one writer whose name escapes me but his
character is based in Benin but he goes to
different countries on the west coast – he is
white, so I think there’s a difference there as
well. Because my heritage is not only
American, but it’s also African and
Ghanaian.
Find out more about Quartey’s books on
his website, http://www.kweiquartey.com/
october 19, 2011 The Portland Skanner Page 3