JOSEPH of Africa and America

Joseph Senu tells his grandson Caleb the story of his eighty-three years between innings of English Premier League soccer in JOSEPH of Africa and America. The chapters set in Ghana are what move the book. Pram is the cocoa-farming town where his mother drops him off without explanation. It has the texture of lived memory: kerosene lamps, harmattan dust thick enough to choke on. A cocoa clerk tweaks his scales and runs the town.

He describes memories—the Presbyterian church his grandfather founded, the chieftaincy customs requiring an unblemished body, the funeral in Pram’s market square, indigenous bands, and Muslim delegations standing beside the church choir.

America is where the book loosens its grip. Joseph’s arrival brings lost luggage, a $400 payout from British Airways, an orientation full of students from Cyprus and Brazil. Then a long professional chronicle takes over: Couche & Co., America Bank, a teaching post outside Atlanta.

Abrokwa records salaries and job titles. He notes the interview outfit (a $600 navy suit, a burgundy tie) with the precision of a man who kept receipts. A landlady turns him away at the door with a slur and nothing else. A store manager in Marina del Rey looks him up and down and says nothing at all. Both moments feel so real because Abrokwa doesn’t dress them up.

A chronic illness costs him his eyesight for stretches. A wallet gets stolen. A friend borrows money for ten IBM computers and skips the debt. The hardships keep coming. Joseph absorbs each one the same way. The reader gets no room to sit inside the damage.

Whole years pass in summary: a friend’s divorce, a stroke, a niece who becomes a nurse. These are reported, not dramatized.

The Caleb frame is the book’s genre experiment: half memoir, half oral history staged as dialogue. Soccer scores run through it like a clock. When it works, it earns its sentimentality. Caleb asks why his grandfather quit playing after a concussion. Joseph translates Ghanaian obligation into terms a Boston kid can comprehend.

As far as the prose, the sentences pile clause on clause and the dialogue tags do double duty as summary. A wedding, a funeral, a job offer get the same flat treatment as a paragraph about grocery-store yams.

Abrokwa has a remarkable life to draw from. From cocoa farms to American banking floors and a fake birthday to a real fortune. The telling settles for recitation over shape. Joseph of Africa and America earns its keep in Ghana but runs thin once it crosses the ocean.