The Count's False Banquet
Benjamin Kwakye concludes his trilogy on the modern African migrant’s experience in America with another dazzling medley of language, plot and outreach to our common humanity. In this final instalment, Count Tutu leaves his native Ghana for the United States seeking the feast of the famed American Dream. His anticipated banquet of dreams sours, however, when he is at once welcomed and rejected, torn by external and internal conflicts, soothed by the promise of romance (both literal and figurative), and inflicted with other deep emotional wounds with far reaching consequences. With the spacious array of the immigrant experience for a canvass, The Count’s False Banquet paints an impressive portrait of the pain of self-imposed banishment from home, the contradictory inescapable boundlessness and restrictions of longing, hope and desire, and the expansiveness of human will.