Philip Graham at Persuasion:
My wife Alma Gottlieb is an anthropologist, and for years we had lived in small villages in West Africa, among the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire. In 1993, during our third extended stay, news of my father’s death back in the U.S. arrived in the village, too late for us to return for his funeral. Stunned, I couldn’t decide what to do, how to mourn, until village elders offered to give my American father the ceremonies of a traditional Beng funeral. After days of elaborate ritual, the village’s religious leader, Kokora Kouassi, confided to us that my father now visited him in his dreams—from Wurugbé, the Beng afterlife—with messages of farewell and comfort. The Beng believe the dead exist in an invisible social world beside the living, and Kouassi’s dreams were meant to assure me that my father wasn’t far away at all. Instead, he hovered invisibly beside me.
Soon after, I began to receive, unbidden, the first sketches of ten fictional characters. I understood immediately that they were all ghosts—American ghosts, but existing in an afterlife similar to Wurugbé. And they were all surprises. Among them was a car repairman who discovers in his afterlife the pleasures of Books on Tape; a 1950s entomologist hiding her sexual identity who, as a ghost, continues her research in an ants’ nest; a Civil War-era teenager beset by an ambiguous religious vision; the ghost of a Depression-era reporter who leaves far behind the restrictions of her former newspaper’s women’s craft page; and above all, Jenny, the ghost of a three-year-old child who, through her longing, encounters and absorbs the memories of these diverse ghosts—ghosts whose lives and afterlives encompass overlapping eras of nearly 200 years of American history. Jenny’s embrace of these inadvertent mentors opens within her windows of empathy into the difficult, essential gift of otherness.
For the next 30 years, I wrote and rewrote this novel, while publishing four other books of fiction and nonfiction. Learning the territories of this afterlife that had risen from somewhere deep within me, as well as Jenny’s challenge of balancing a growing crowd of selves within her, became the one steady creative project of my life.
More here.
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