Book Review: Into the Go-Slow by Bridgett M. Davis

Review of Into the Go-Slow by Bridgett M. Davisby Danielle Jackson | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Many times, as a result of the university I attended and the circles in which I was a part while there and after, I have found myself the only American-born black person among a group of foreign born blacks in a social setting. One night in particular is imprinted on my memory: a dinner party full of women from various countries south of the Sahara at a lovely, colorful home in a Maryland suburb. Over cachaça and an opulent meal that included the best couscous I have ever tasted, we complimented each other’s beauty and casually discussed our resumes until the conversation turned to the feelings of tension between Africans and black Americans.
The women put forth what to me felt like a list of grievances: The African Americans do not work as hard as we do at the office. They made fun of the lunch that my family sent me to school with when I was young, ridiculed my name and accent. They allow their neighborhoods to fall into such ruin. They find it so hard to achieve here, but look at us.
I took it upon myself to attempt to dismantle what I call the myth of African American failure. What you see and hear about us in the media is grossly, and often deliberately, misrepresented, I started. African Americans, in fact, built this country, and can be credited with creating many of the uniquely American cultural products enjoyed and imitated the world over (rock & roll, jazz, the Charleston, beatboxing, break dancing, the list continues). Yes, we are flawed. Yet we have been key architects in the democratic and free enterprise systems in which you now move so freely.
After many hours of deliberation, we ended the evening as friends, and I do believe that any time there is open communication, barriers are broken down and humanity as a whole benefits. However, as an African American woman who has intentionally built a life around trying to learn about and understand other people of color and developing a consciousness about our common interests and shared obstacles, the idea that those brilliant, accomplished African women expressed such strong befuddlement, frustration, and ignorance, even, about the black experience in America troubled me.  
It also begs the question: What kinds of pointed questions could I ask about the underclass in Kenya, or Ghana, without tempering all of my American bias? Whenever a narrative is framed through the lens of an outsider, the gaze can be much more unforgiving. Assuring a multiplicity of perspectives is critical, then, when attempting to tell a full story, since whomever controls the narrative has the upper hand.
A student and unequivocal fan of African fiction, I have been edified and uplifted by greats like Bessie Head, Ben Okri, and Chinua Achebe. I found a familiar aesthetic and felt surges of pride in what these writers communicated to me through their work: an intense focus on narrative structure, a shrewd, keen political consciousness, the idea of trans-diasporic collaboration as corrective to white supremacy. So it was always with sincere anticipation that I opened Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche’s novels. Americanah, her latest, was funny and engaging and new in its structure and portrayal of cosmopolitan Africans achieving in the west and, ultimately, rejecting it.
At the same time, for me,  Americanah  is yet another example of a disturbing trend in the discourse—both popular and intellectual—in which African Americans are portrayed as willfully ignorant about the world and hostile to knowledge. I read Bridgett Davis’ excellent second novel, Into the Go-Slow (The Feminist Press)  as a necessary addition to the ongoing conversation among blacks around the world and as a corrective to the increasingly flat, unnuanced portrayal of blacks in contemporary fiction like Americanah.
Into the Go-Slow tells the story of Angela Mackensie, a bright twenty-one year old African American woman from Detroit. She lives with her mother, Nanette, a black striver who, along with her husband Solomon, moved the family from Tennessee to Detroit in the 1950s. By the mid-eighties, when Into the Go-Slow is set, Detroit is a wasteland, diminished by deindustrialization, racial strife, and heroin and crack epidemics. Angela’s family is adrift, stagnant, and depressed: the thwarted promise of the northern metropolis has culminated in a series of tragedies. Solomon, a horse stable employee died suddenly while on the job. The oldest daughter, Ella, is a dedicated and promising jockey who is understandably shaken by her father’s death. She stops horseback riding, and as the family attempts to recover, begins college at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she discovers the ideals of Pan-Africanism and leaps into the movement with characteristic zeal.
Angela’s preteen years are spent watching her older sister’s participation in the movement, at its summit in the seventies, when going back to Africa is considered an important cause. With her obsessive and intense personality, Ella becomes caught up in the trappings of the era—the politicking, parties, and drugs—and develops an addiction that ravages her family and thwarts her professional promise. She eventually gets clean in rehab and travels to Nigeria with her boyfriend Nigel in order to begin anew. Briefly succeeding at this, she creates an exciting life as a journalist at a left-leaning newspaper, but she is killed by a hit and run driver after only a few months. The family knows little about the circumstances of the accident.  
At the time of Ella’s death, Angela is a freshman at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, having followed in her oldest sister’s footsteps. She transfers to Wayne State and moves back home in the wake of the accident. Her middle sister, Denise, has become a successful pharmaceutical sales rep in Atlanta. Angela graduates from college and although it has been three years since Ella’s death, she is stuck memorializing her sister. She works in a Lane Bryant store in a mall, biding her time until she decides what to do next. Nanette, less willing to mourn her tragedies indefinitely, rekindles an old romance and makes a plan to buy a home in Atlanta, where Denise lives, reversing the family’s migration—after a generation, the matriarch has come to terms with the fact that the urban north did not live up to its promise. Angela feels marooned by her mother’s attempts to move on.
Pressured to move her life forward, Angela agrees to her mother’s suggestion to take a portion of her inheritance from her father’s death and go on a post-graduation trip abroad. She decides that Nigeria will be her destination, to her family’s dismay.
Relying on postcards and letters Ella sent home before her death, Angela walks her oldest sister’s exact path through the country. The novel is divided into six sections; the four at its core are named after key places in Angela’s journey, and the metaphorical heart of the story is here, where we witness Angela’s experiences in the country and the accompanying dismantling of her sentimentality. A deromanticizing process begins almost immediately. She lands in the Lagos airport and is thrown off course by the expansiveness of it all. Her senses overwhelmed, she is almost the victim of theft. She takes a taxi to her hotel and experiences the chaos and gridlock of Lagosian traffic, the go-slow, and is unsettled by the impatient pedestrians darting into it without the aid of traffic lights. Her driver calls her akata and asks for her help bringing him to America. The hotel lacks running water and its attendant charges what seems to be an unfair “tourists’ rate.”
Davis quotes the full text of Ella’s exuberant letters from her time in Nigeria, juxtaposing them with Angela’s present-day impressions, and thus illustrating the younger sister’s growing individuality. She finds a couple with whom Ella resided, Chris and Brenda, and at their insistence, lodges with them for some time. Her first time in a Nigerian resident’s home, she is shocked to find the décor contemporary and ostentatiously European. Often, tension between Angela’s idealistic, nostalgic ideal of Africa and the continent’s contemporary globalized reality is displayed through aesthetic observations: interior design, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston playing at a party instead of highlife.
Angela wants to hear all of Chris and Brenda’s memories of Ella. They oblige as best as possible while encouraging her to explore the country. Her hair is braided beautifully by Fulani women. But one night, Chris attempts to sexually assault Angela, so she moves on to another town, Surulere to stay with another acquaintance of Ella. She suffers a bout of painful dysentery and must move on again, still searching for an elusive feeling of home, assurance, or perhaps closure.
To be sure, Angela does experience Nigeria’s beauty and is moved by its barely controlled chaos and the empowering visage of black people running their own affairs. She runs into Ella’s boyfriend Nigel, now a professor at the University of Lagos, who takes her to Fela’s Shrine, the beautiful castles of Kano, and gives her the uncomfortable truth she needs to hear about her late sister. She takes a lover. Mostly though, our protagonist learns that she cannot walk in another woman’s shoes. That she must bravely invest in doing the work of self-creation to “figure out what type of black person she wants to be.”
Author Bridgett Davis has essentially inverted Americanah’s storyline. While Americanah focuses on a Nigerian-born Igbo woman who moves to the United States for university, stays to make a living and observes the paradoxes of American life, Into the Go-Slow allows us to experience the vast country of Nigeria through the eyes of an idealistic black American with an impossibly insatiable hunger for knowledge and who believes that travel to distant lands will enlighten her. I loved that Davis’ portrayal of Angela is full and that the character feels like a flawed, multidimensional human being on the page. Sometimes you want to shake her, other times you want to comfort her. Because of this careful, artful humanity and stunning, sensual depiction of Nigeria and Detroit in the 1980s, the book is a page-turner.
Into the Go-Slow is a classic hero’s tale with traditional themes like the loss of innocence and the quest for one’s bounty amid obstacles. The novel also succeeds at holding up art as a gateway to cross-border connection among blacks, a jumping off point from which we can have painful conversations and learn from each other to move forward as collaborators, in the truest sense of the word, as we have always been.
For all of its politics, Into the Go-Slow is also about grief, healing, and refusing nostalgia, in the way that good novels are always about more than one thing.
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A Memphis native, Danielle Jackson is a writer and media researcher living in Brooklyn, NY.