What my Maman taught me.

I have had a number of conversations around how I started writing, what drives me and where I get my inspiration from. And in these moments and conversations I have come to realize there is one consistent thread that leads me back to a love of books. My mother.

We grew up moving from country to country and my mother carried our cultural heritage with us everywhere.

In the 80s, a time when there was no Netflix and VCRs were the thing, she made tapes of all our favourite cartoons from Asterix and Obelix to the Smurfs. She brought them with us when we left Belgium and moved to Nigeria. It was a tiny piece of our norm but also would support our french language skills once we moved to an anglophone world.

My mother isn’t a native English speaker and yet she sat with me day after day to help me learn English and do my homework.

We learnt twice as hard, mastering the British English and then moving again only to have to re-learn English and navigate the difference between a courgette and a zucchini.

I remember being a child and moving to a new home in The Gambia. My mum brought the carpenter in and ask them to build a bookcase from wall to wall.

She filled it with books of fiction, facts, fairy tales and everything you can imagine.

I also remember standing in front of that bookcase not too long after, annoyed that there was nothing new to read because I had gone through them all.

In the Gambia in the 90s there were incredibly few libraries around. We were lucky enough to have access to the one at the American School where the librarian Ms Sanyang encouraged me to read..read.. read..

As a family we would often drive from The Gambia through Senegal to Guinea Bissau. For almost 6 hours we would sit in the back and listen to the radio, stare at the countryside, or read.

By the time I was a teen I had read my fair share of Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters club. However, I had also read biographies of Saints, books about the Vietnam War. I had read about the Hmong and Aborigines and more.

Today I realise I have been reading my whole life, never really finding a genre, just reading broadly like an insatiable vessel and I never noticed it.

My mum gave me that gift.

I have also been reflecting on the fact that I am referred to as brave.

Brave to self – publish, when in fact I knew nothing about the publishing industry.

I do not consider myself brave, quite the opposite.

I am scared of rides at theme park, scared of the forest, scared of cockroaches and all sorts of creepy crawlies. I never watch scary movies and I am truly not fond of heights.

I am generally not the brave kind.

However, I am unafraid of new experiences and I trust in my ability to learn.

My mum taught me that.

She taught me to trust me.

That mistakes were part of the cycle, as long as you learnt from them

She taught me that the world is huge and it is mine to discover.

That, plus a strong sense of empathy that I got from my father are the fundamental building blocks that make me, me.

When I was at university in London I took a language option class in Spanish.

When it was time to get practical experience of the language, most students took a trip to Spain. I took a trip to Cuba.

I still don’t have a why for that decision, more of a “Why not?”

Most of my peers had a number of questions as to how I would manage in Cuba alone. But not my family, they supported me and just started looking at the practicalities of housing immediately.

Regardless of my choices in life or how far I have gone, I know and I trust that all it takes is a phone call and my mum would be right there.

Something about having faith in myself and having faith that my family are there for me, makes me move in this world different.

It makes me bold.

It focuses my sight on solutions and possibilities.

It helps me fail and get back up again.

This week as we celebrated the release of my third book Det Djupa Blå by one of the largest Swedish publishers, I was asked how it felt as a migrant, black woman who just learnt Swedish to be published in such an institution in Swedish!

I remembered my mother, teaching me English with her rolling French accent.

What can I say.  I got it from my mama.