In The End, It Was All About Love by Musa Okwongo

cw: violence, racism, colonialism, war, genocide (and the usual mental health stuff)

The Victoria line has been evacuated for no as yet clear reason this morning (Tuesday 1st August, 2023), so my commute has been drastically delayed. Oh, and it’s back now but I’m committed to an alternative route. Sorry. What a way to open a blog post. Christ. Jesus fuck. Whoopsie fucking shit.

Anyway.

In The End, It Was All About Love is the first larger format publication (i.e. not a pamphlet/chapbook) by Rough Trade Books that I’ve knowingly encountered.

It’s a lovely object, “French flaps”, a few pages – containing poems and introducing each of the three sections of the text – with white text on a black background (the inverse of standard black text on white paper, if that wasn’t clear); the cardboard cover is thick and the design is striking and engaging (tho maybe not necessarily very tied to the textual content but it could be a series design or something I overlooked?); and physically, too, it’s a great size: maybe a little too big for the pockets of the tight corduroy trousers I’m wearing today, especially as I have my dog attached at the waist, but holdable in one hand (so readable while enjoying an oaty flat white) and a pleasing object to see and hold…

A beautiful book and the exact kind of thing I love: creative non-fiction about someone who is really fucking depressed and trying, but kinda (or not?) not getting out of their funk. But also not revelling in it? You know, right? You know?

The unnamed narrator is a British man whose parents emigrated from Uganda to London to avoid political unrest, a civil war which his father, a consultant surgeon, voluntarily returned to fight in and then (unintentionally) die in several decades ago, when the narrator was four.

Now, he is approaching the age his father died at, is living in Berlin, seems to be having a satisfying amount of sex but an unsatisfying amount of intimacy, is a reasonably successful freelance writer and musician, but not so successful that he feels any kind of economic stability…

He’s also plagued by – both very well-founded – fears of oncoming climate catastrophe and fears of the ongoing rise of the global far right; the reality of racist prejudice is experienced in the book, with several verbal and non-verbal encounters documented in the text, and the threat of violence everpresent as a believable escalation…

As a Brit living in Germany who isn’t ignorant, the realities of the intentional and cataclysmic racism of settler colonialism (and thus both slow and fast genocides) is something it’s hard to ever forget.

(((I mean I say it’s hard to forget, but plenty of people choose to forget it and though they’re not really human any more in any way that matters (yes, I am saying that right wing people aren’t really human, and by right wing I do mean lots of people who wouldn’t claim that sobriquet but I know what I mean and I do think that cruelty and denialism and revisionism and any act that knowingly, intentionally and deliberately maintains the current capitalistic society we live in directly causes acts of violence: if you support social and economic policies that maintain poverty and exploitation anywhere in the world, then you are right wing. I’m indirectly talking about the current British Labour party, which is now pro-status quo (and probably also pro Status Quo) and therefore supportive of structures and laws and organisations that benefit from extreme and untrammeled cruelty. So, Starmer, Own it! Embrace it! And call directly for the violence your policies result in! Your project is evil, as is (pretty much) any act that isn’t explicitly (and in actual fact) anti-establishment.) Sorry where was I?)))

Sorreh;

So, yes, in many ways In The End, It Was All About Love is classic psychogeography – Okwongo depicts life in Berlin, in 21st century urban isolation (like all of us are in, right?), and wanders around thinking and feeling. In the final part of the book, he also visits his father’s hometown in Northern Uganda, where the subjects of money and class and choice and opportunity of the rest of the book are drawn into stark comparison with a very different type of poverty to Western European creative precarity…

The narrator travels a little and pursues a lot, seeking honesty and ethics, a sense of dignity and a sense of community, integrity and all of those other things that we are bullied into thinking it is naive and/or foolish to care about …

It’s refreshing to read a narrative like this from a narrator who is older than the age I am when I read it, but I suppose that this is likely to be an ongoing shift, right(?), as the opportunities for stability are removed from those who aren’t born with affluence; there will be more 40yos whose lives are indistinguishable (other than in the body) from lives of people half their age…

Certainly when there’s no real psychological or material gain to be had from taking a shit regular job and acquiescing to dull stability, why would you do it? Why do people still do it?

I work, but, y’know, it’s not what I am. It’s what I do to ensure I have the funds to be able to, I dunno, buy beautiful new paperback books when I want to and make sure I’m able to cover pet insurance and the fanciest of non dietician-led dog food; I don’t have integrity in my life, though, and tho In The End, It Was All About Love dramatises that integrity alone isn’t enough to sustain a life, I imagine it certainly makes speaking to other people easier…

I don’t spend most of my time doing things that make me feel good about myself, and nor do most people; if not most then a damn good chunk, unless we’re again considering those people who don’t understand – or choose to pretend they don’t understand – that the planet is being fucking destroyed and the cunts who are benefiting from this in the short term are stoking – bleakly successfully – disunity between less enfranchised groups so that the majority of us are sucked into in-fighting – no, that isn’t even right, is it?

There are people also trying to build in-roads towards genocide, globally, who want to ease the moment when climate catastrophe creates literally billions of refugees, there are people hoarding food and water and medicine and time who are gearing up the world to be willing to sacrifice to drowning, to starving, to burning, to death billions and billions of people.

As we are encouraged to ease the limits of who we count as human, we all walk hand in hand towards the burnt future sky.

Oh no.

Sorry.

In The End, It Was All About Love is not a hopeless book, far from it! But it is an articulate and a thought-provoking and a wise and a questioning and an intelligent book and those things make me think, make me question, make me feeeeeeeel…

& it makes me ask, as I suppose more and more of us fucking need to, if choosing to not create more evil but just exist in a little bubble of reading great literature and sometimes trying to make it, if doing thus isn’t really, like… isn’t really like acceptable?

I don’t think it is, any more, is it?

We can’t just read, we can’t just think, we can’t just write, we’ve got to fucking act. We’ve got to act. We’ve got to act.

We’ve got to fucking act. Because the other side already fucking are and we’ll all fucking die forever if we don’t do something drastic.

I loved this book. I also fear the future.

Order In The End, It Was All About Love direct from Rough Trade via this link

If you liked this post, check out my book the pleasure of regret