Author Q & A

AUTHOR Q & A

More Tell Me

An interview with Authors Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah & Alejandro Varela

from Astra House Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

Author of The Sex Lives of African Women

Q. The North American edition of The Sex Lives of African Women is publishing in March 2022. What can you tell us about how it differs from the U.K. edition? What are you most excited about when you think about the book being published in the U.S.?

A. I feel like the North American edition of my book is an entirely new book. Everyone who loved the U.K. edition should also buy the American edition :) Seriously. My incredible editor Alessandra Bastagli pushed me to weave more of my own story in the book and I am so glad I did. Readers will get insights as to why I chose to interview the women that I spoke to, and learn about what I personally took away from all those conversations. I am also super excited about this book speaking to Africans in the Diaspora, and African-Americans and Afro descendants. I feel like we often hear about the Diaspora wars, and this book shows that we have more in common than what divides us. I consciously claim the global African diaspora in this book. As a pan-Africanist, I recognize that we are divided by the legacies of slavery, colonization and migration, and so this book is also to say that we are all family.

Photo Credit: Nyani Quarmyne

Nana is a feminist activist, writer, and blogger who writes frequently for The Guardian, Open Democracy, and elsewhere. She works with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). She lives in Accra, Ghana.

Q. What are you hoping readers in the U.S. will take from your book? What kind of conversations are you hoping readers here will have when they read your book?

A. I wrote this book because I wanted to continue to create space for African women to talk about sex. A subject that we are often told is “private” and only to be discussed in closed quarters. On the contrary, we know sex is a deeply political issue—it is why some countries try to legislate who we love or choose to have

sexual relationships with. I feel that by having conversations about sex we will also learn to take control over our own bodies and pleasure, and that is a radical act of self-love.

Alejandro Varela (he/him)

Author of The Town of Babylon

Q. You have a background as a public health researcher. In your writing, from the short story “Carlitos in Charge” to “The People Who Report More Stress’’ (from which your forthcoming story collection takes its title), and in this novel, The Town of Babylon, are you following the same interests in your fiction as you did as a researcher?

A. I have always wanted to make complicated ideas accessible to others. I suspect this has something to do with being a second-generation kid who helped his parents communicate in the dominant language, or being a brown kid in a white neighborhood, or being a gay guy among straight people. If I get them to see that I’m safe, intelligent, American, masculine, etc., they will see how insignificant my differences from them are. But this sort of defensive assimilation was doing myself and my communities a disservice. And yet, that desire to synthesize and communicate effectively remained, and it dovetailed nicely with a career in public health.

Public health work focuses on changing health behaviors, often putting the onus on the individual, but I am more interested in the upstream risk factors, the structural changes that would reduce death and illness across the board—heart disease, cancer, overdose, suicide, occupational deaths, AIDS, etc. Fiction allows me to explore these ideas, in a way that science writing, op-eds, and even creative nonfiction doesn’t.

Alejandro’s work has appeared in The Point magazine, Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. He’s a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature, and is based in New York.

Q. In the acknowledgments in The Town of Babylon, you cite the documentary “The Great Leveller (Paul Sen, 1996), the macaques at Wake Forest, the baboons in the Serengeti, the civil servants at Whitehall, and the residents of Roseto, PA.” How did these all influence you?

A. The Great Leveller is a BBC documentary that was seminal in my understanding of how humans influence one another’s health. In brief, hierarchies are deleterious, whether among humans or other primates— baboons and macaques. Animals at the tops of their pyramids are healthier than those at the bottom. The primary mechanism is control: if one feels they have agency over their lives, they are healthier than if they don’t. One flaw of hierarchical societies is that if the best health is at the top of the ladder or pyramid, the overwhelming majority of us are destined for poorer health. There are physical costs to being constantly alert or on guard; there’s a price to feeling less than or isolated, to not having control over your destiny.

Astra House is dedicated to publishing authors across genres and from around the world. They value works that are authentic, ask new questions, present counter-narratives and original thinking, challenge assumptions, and broaden and deepen one’s understanding of the world.