Into Africa
Pasadena author Kwei Quartey takes readers back to his native Ghana in ‘Wife of the Gods’
By Carl Kozlowski 07/17/2009
One of the great adages about writing is “Write what you know,” and Pasadena-based writer Kwei Quartey has definitely taken that to heart. A native of Ghana who grew up in New York City before heading to the San Gabriel Valley in the early 1990s to practice medicine, Quartey has long harbored a passion for writing fiction, and his debut novel “Wife of the Gods” is a mystery set in the land of his birth.
It follows the travails of a detective named Darko Dawson as he tries to unravel the events that led to the murder of a female med student and to clear a falsely accused admirer of the victim — all while handling a series of his own domestic problems. The book is laced with vivid depictions of its exotic locale, as well as twists and quirks rooted firmly in the traditions of that African nation.
Quartey is bringing both of his worlds together at 7 p.m. Monday with an appearance at Vroman’s Bookstore, where he’ll discuss and sign his tome. In an interview with PW, he discussed the extremely long journey that brought him to this point in his life.
“I was an American citizen because my mother is a black American,” explains Quartey, who practices urgent care and chronic wound care at the Health Care Partners branch in Montebello. “My dad was a Ghanaian, so it was easy going back and forth between Ghana and the US. We used to spend summers in New York with our grandmother. I never visited the West Coast as a child. I decided come out west after studying medicine at Howard University because I might like snow for snowboarding, but I was ready to get rid of it otherwise.”
Quartey moved to the Los Angeles area in the early 1990s, living first in Monterey Park, then Alhambra, before spending the past five years in Pasadena. But he never stopped thinking about his homeland, a compulsion that proved especially strong during a trip to Paris at the turn of the century.
“I was surfing French TV in my hotel and came across a fascinating documentary about a rural detective trying to solve a mystery in Ivory Coast, which is just to the west of Ghana,” Quartey recalls. “The detective was trying to use local superstitions to scare people into confessions. I was writing a thriller set in LA, but it wasn’t working, so I thought why not try setting it in Ghana, since I knew it so well and based the mystery on these cultural superstitions.”
He also tied in a subplot based on a “60 Minutes” report about young women forced to serve under local shamans called fetish priests after being accused of breaking cultural taboos. Quartey felt that the plight of these women, who sometimes serve the priests their entire lives, “would be a great addition to whole idea of witchcraft, magical powers.”
During the seven years between the novel’s start in 2000 and its sale in 2007, Quartey recalls that the book went through numerous transformations. He was often rejected and even gave up for a year “because one agent said there are two places on earth that no one wants to read about: Afghanistan and Africa. What a difference a decade makes.”
Indeed, the past decade saw the rise of the wildly popular “The Kite Runner,” set in Afghanistan, and Alexander McCall Smith’s series of African detective novels that inspired an HBO series. Quartey credits his eventual agent, Marly Rusoff, with finally seeing the potential in his work, although he also describes her as being “very strict about me editing it.”
“The murder mystery is not the center of the story,” says Quartey. “A lot of the critics say it’s almost as interesting going into the cultural aspects surrounding it, and how tradition clashes with the modern and makes it more difficult for the protagonist to work because tradition acts as a roadblock in many ways.”
Kwei Quartey appears at 7 p.m. Monday at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Call (626) 449-5320 or visit vromans.com. He’s also appearing at 2 p.m. on July 25 at Book ‘Em Mysteries, 1118 Mission St., South Pasadena. Call (626) 799-9600 or visit bookem.com.
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