Peace Adzo Medie
Ghanaian academic and writer
Peace Adzo Medie is a Liberian-born Ghanaian academic and writer of both fiction and nonfiction.
Quotes
edit- Respect is important and something that is very much needed in society, but has been constructed by some to mean submission and self-denial, especially in regard to young women.
- Stories allow us to peek into the lives of others, and they also allow us to see ourselves.
- I use fiction to teach in my social science courses and I am always keen to explore the issues that I work on in my research.
His Only Wife (2020)
edit- It takes strength to walk away from someone you love.
- Please, put love aside and be practical. Love will not put food on the table; it won’t hold you at night.
- A person who talks so freely about her own life will talk just as freely about yours.
- If there was one thing I agreed with my mother on, it was that one could never be sure about a person’s intentions, no matter how kind that person seemed.
- Not everyone who smiles with you wishes you well.
- I have to fight for what I want, for what's mine.
- I knew that even though we were surrounded by a large family, we had nobody.
- How can I be a good wife with no husband by my side?
- Marriage shouldn’t be a never-ending competition where you spend your life fighting to be seen and chosen.
- I said to love with your head but I’m also the first person to tell you that it is hard to live like that. It is brutal and it eats at you every day and leaves you empty.
- I’ve been impacted by many books, but one that has profoundly impacted me as a writer is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. After reading it as a teenager, I began to think seriously about how I could use words to create images and to effectively show the reader what I was thinking. Before then, my focus had been on producing fiction to entertain myself.
- I’m very interested in presenting the truth of people who are not centered in mainstream narratives. But I’m also fascinated by how we construct our version of truth, by how two people can have the same experience and not only describe it differently but also believe that their version is the only truth. The novel I’m currently working on excavates this phenomenon.
- In the social sciences, we know. . . that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them.
- Before I begin writing a book, I spend months—and sometimes years—thinking about characters and plot. In fact, I like to think that a lot of my writing happens in my head and I spend a great deal of time with characters and their stories in my thoughts, before I write anything down. But because I also work on multiple research projects, on which I also publish—so far, a book and several academic journal articles—I tend to switch back and forth between thinking about fiction and nonfiction. Therefore, there are long periods when I don’t focus on fiction.
- However, when I’m able to think and write about fiction, I very much enjoy it. I began writing fiction for myself when I was about 10 years old, because I ran out of books to read. I discovered that I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed reading. Therefore, I think the pleasure I get out of writing fiction is what enables me to maintain my momentum and interest—and is the reason I’ve been writing for almost 30 years, even though most of what I’ve written has not been read by anyone.
- Stories serve so many purposes. We need them because they document our truths, they magnify our dreams, they teach, they entertain, they inspire.
- My identify plays a huge role in my writing. I’m Black, Ghanaian, and a woman, and one of the reasons I wrote His Only Wife was that I was hungry for stories of Black women just living their lives and doing regular things. In the social sciences, we know—although some continue to resist this truth—that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them.
- An important role that writers can play is in documenting resistance movements. This can ensure visibility, facilitate recognition, and bring marginalized voices to the center.
- The transition probably happened when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. Around that time, I started sending out short stories. Short stories were more manageable because, in some ways, submitting them was similar to submitting academic research articles. So I think it was easy for me to do. But I remember going online, because I didn't know much about publishing or people in publishing - I only knew one person who was a writer before I published my book. I went on Google and searched, ‘how do you publish a book?’ and the steps just seemed so overwhelming.
- You need connections, you need to have a certain kind of training, you need an agent, and if you send your work to an agent, it ends up in a slush pile. It was all too much. So I never sent out a book manuscript - my plan was that I would look into publishing my books when I retired from academia. I just figured that I would keep writing, then when I was 65 or 70, I would try to get published. That was the plan.
- So my books never end up being the books that I planned. His Only Wife was a very different story when I started writing it. I was returning to Ghana and His Only Wife started off with a main character who in some ways shared some similarities with my own life - someone living in the US and coming back to Ghana after graduate school. I'm sure you can see that Afi in His Only Wife is not that person, so that shows you how much my writing changes once I begin writing.
- But when I'm thinking about starting a book, I want in those first few pages for the reader to get a good sense of who the main characters are, but also a good sense of the tension or conflict that is going to propel the book forward. So in those first few pages or the first chapter, by the time you get to the end of that chapter, you have a good sense of the characters, and you have a good sense of what is driving them, and what is driving the story. That's what I aim for.
- Tell the story you want to tell. It's a very simple message but it's really affected my writing in a positive way. I hadn't read any book on Ghana like His Only Wife so I couldn't look at anyone's trajectory of success and say ‘this person wrote a book like this so if I write it, I will have a similar response’. I just knew that this was the story I wanted to tell. You have to believe in the story and trust the book will find its readers and readers will find the book.
