‘The Prophet of Zongo Street’: Coming to America
By ELIZABETH SCHMIDT

New York Times
Aug 12 2005

Published: August 14, 2005

Six of the 10 stories in Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s moving, subtle and
ingeniously constructed first book are set in Ghana, and the rest
in and around New York. The locations alternate, permitting readers
to travel back and forth along one of the many routes that made up
the African diaspora, one that Ali, who has had homes on both sides
of the Atlantic, knows well. Raised in Ghana, he came to the United
States in 1988 at 16 to study at Interlochen and then Bennington and
now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Dan James

THE PROPHET OF ZONGO STREET
Stories.
By Mohammed Naseehu Ali.
212 pp. Amistad/ HarperCollins Publishers. $22.95.

First Chapter: ‘The Prophet of Zongo Street’ (August 14, 2005)

Forum: Book News and Reviews

“The Prophet of Zongo Street” deftly blends African folklore, dreams,
the wisdom of elders and the pranks of children, and pitch-perfect,
often wry dialogue. Ranging from Zongo Street, the noisy fictional
Muslim neighborhood where all the African stories take place, to the
climate-controlled “lily-white enclave of Southampton” to the hip,
trust-fund-backed art scene in Lower Manhattan, the collection is held
together by Ali’s abiding concern with the power of the human voice:
how people make themselves understood, how they sound in different
contexts and how, above all, Ghanaian immigrants struggle to converse
once they leave Zongo Street.

“The Story of Day and Night” begins with the “30 of us kids,” who
lure their oldest and most respected grandmother, Uwargida, out of
her quarters to her storytelling spot in the central courtyard. In
our first glimpse of life in Ghana, children convey their respect
for Uwargida by listening, and her mythological tales captivate the
members of her extended family and bind them together.

The title story is narrated by a nameless, thoughtful 14-year-old
boy whose older friend gives him a book about the history of African
religious exploitation and instructs him to “always remember that we
human beings are what we say. . . . Our egos may reside in our minds,
but it is the mouth that makes them known to the rest of the world.”
As the collection unfolds, moving out from the family compound and
westward, Ali shifts from the “we” of all the kids in concert to the
increasingly self-conscious “I” of the adolescent boy who questions
the religious underpinnings of his community.

In “Live-In,” Ali takes us from bustling Zongo Street, where for better
or worse everyone knows everyone else’s business, out into the chill
of a “fully air-conditioned supermarket” in Southampton, where Shatu,
a Ghanaian live-in maid, has just realized she’s lost the $200 her
employer has given her to buy groceries. Shatu’s voice, severed from
its communal origins, loses the power to communicate; she “blurts”
the first words of the story — “The money … I can’t find it” —
to a group of “impeccably dressed women,” who “pat Shatu on the back,
offering halfhearted consolations, as if it were required of them,
and then go back to their own carts.” Her “childish and agonized tone”
couldn’t be farther from Uwargida’s in “The Story of Day and Night,”
which is “soft, yet commanding,” and keeps her family rapt. Shatu’s
employer, Marge, wants Shatu to be fired for stealing, but Marge
is 78 and senile, and her nephew and legal custodian likes Shatu’s
“sweet Caribbean accent” (mistaking her pronunciation of “Ghana”
as “Guy-anna”) and begins calling her at all hours of the night on
the private line he has had installed in her room. But Shatu has
no green card and needs the job to support her mother and three
children in Ghana. So she stays in the big, empty house with Marge
and thinks of her own grandmother back in Africa, an Uwargida-like
figure who “had become the repository of the community’s age-old
wisdom and knowledge. … In the evenings she was surrounded by
her many grandchildren, who begged her to tell them Mallam Gizo,
or Mr. Spider tales.”

Many of the Ghanaian characters here are unnamed, but they resemble
one another. This ambiguity provides a sense that no matter how cut
off and lonely they are, no matter how impossible it is to communicate
with their American bosses and school friends and lovers, their lives
elsewhere are intertwined. The reader is never sure, but Shatu’s
grandmother could be Uwargida. The young narrator holding fast to his
religious tract in “The Prophet of Zongo Street” could also be the boy
who contracts malaria in “Ward G-4.” And he could be the young man
who later comes to America, goes to college, becomes, in one story,
a painter and, in another, a Web-site designer by day and musician by
night and finds himself at 3 a.m. in a cab whose driver is hellbent
on proving that Armenians are the true source of world culture.

Alarmingly (and, it turns out, playfully) titled “The True Aryan,”
this last story turns the tables. The Ghanaian musician is full
of his own concerns and ambitions (“looking at the city’s skyline
always filled me with a sense of success and self-importance”)
and, desperate to get back to Park Slope, refuses to engage with
his driver’s barrage of clumsy mini-lectures presenting the case
for Armenians and relating to the plight of blacks. But Sarkis, the
driver, catches his passenger off guard by declining to take money
for the fare and saying: “In Armenia, the way we greet each other,
we say, Savat tanem. So I am telling you, Savat tanem! … You know
what that means, Savat tanem? … It means ‘I’ll take your pain.’
” It’s a gesture that breaks down the musician’s Western narcissism:
“With one foot already on the street, I knew there was only one
thing left for me to tell Sarkis. I looked into his eyes, and with a
sudden deep respect said to the man, ‘I’ll take your pain, too.’ ” The
cabdriver jolts the musician back into listening, as he had as a child
on Zongo Street, showing how even in the most unlikely and inhospitable
circumstances a sense of connectedness between people can be restored.

Elizabeth Schmidt teaches English at Barnard and is a contributing
editor for the literary magazine Open City.