In other rooms, other lives

The running thread here is the hope that human beings will ultimately learn lessons from history and it is this dream that makes this challenging novel a worthy read

In Ada’s Realm, Sharon Dodua Otoo’s first novel written originally in German and translated into English by Jon Cho Polizzi, Ada is not one woman but several and she’s not of one moment in time but several. Characters being born and reborn and experiencing multiple lives is not a novel concept in literary fiction. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life are but two books that used this conceit — in the former, to explore love, identity and gender, and in the latter, the possibility of second chances and changing history.

In Ada’s Realm, Ada doesn’t get to be of many genders or attempt to change the history of the world. When we first meet her, she’s in the middle of giving birth to a child in a village in West Africa and being bullied by a bevy of aunts. Also closing in on the village are Portuguese traders whose entry into this story will unleash the evils of colonialism on the lives of Ada and her people. In the busy first part of the book, we also meet Ada in the form of Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter and computing genius. In Otoo’s fictional retelling of Lovelace’s life, she’s indulging in an affair with Charles Dickens. Genius though she is, she’s looked down upon by all the men in her life. The third version of Ada that Otoo conjures up is that of a prisoner forced into prostitution in a concentration camp during the Second World War. And the fourth life that Ada is given is that of a young Ghanaian woman with a brand new British passport in contemporary Berlin on the eve of Brexit.

And besides the four Adas who crowd the narrative is an omnipresent spirit that possesses various objects during each of their lifetimes and watches over these women. God is introduced as a character as well, initially as a breeze that has “…perfected it, her movements were calm, comforting.” The travelling spirit works as an intermediary between the divine and Ada’s earthly existence but still needs practice to reach that same level of calm and comfort whilst trying to help Ada get the upper hand in her struggle to live and stay alive.

Trauma narratives

As I read the novel and admired its creative inventiveness, it was impossible not to be reminded of that little video snippet of Jamie Lee Curtis where the actress repeats the word “trauma”. Ada’s lives as written by Otoo are trauma narratives and the violence and violations visited upon her various bodies can be exhausting to read. Add the time jumps and shifts in narrative voices and you have a book that demands your undivided attention and concentration. I was not always convinced this antic desire to bring in one Ada or the other in quick succession worked in service of the story Otoo wants to tell — about the timelessness of misogyny and racism and the disposable nature of women in historical accounts.

The novel is at its most compelling when Otoo tells us the story of Ada in 2019 in Berlin, heavily pregnant and living with her half-sister Elle. The travelling spirit in this part of the story has taken the form of Ada’s British passport, which she has by virtue of being born in England where her father had migrated from Ghana. Ada’s mother died in a house fire in England when she was a baby and she was brought up by relatives in Ghana while her father worked abroad.

When we meet Ada she’s searching for an apartment of her own, eager to get away from Elle whose oppressive presence she wants to escape. Elle, the result of a relationship Ada’s father had when he lived for a while in Germany, is herself trying to navigate being born of two cultures and belonging to neither. Ada experiences racism in modern Europe both overtly and subtly as she searches for a home to rent while Elle bristles at the passive racism she experiences from countrymen and women who can’t seem to accept her as one of their own. The scenes in which these two sisters traverse contemporary Berlin are thick with tensions both spoken and unspoken and Otoo’s skill as a storyteller brings them alive on the page.

Born in London to Ghanaian parents, Otoo initially started writing in English. A short story she’d written in German won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016. Ada’s Realm grew out of that initial story, expanding on many of the themes of birth and death and history that keep repeating over and over again. Otoo has spoken in interviews of the final part of Ada’s Realm as being about restitution and the hope that human beings ultimately learn lessons from history. It’s this birth of hope that gives this complex and challenging novel a worthy ending, one that comes as a relief to not just Ada in all the lives she’s led but to the readers as well.