Otoo

Sharon Dodua Otoo

Sharon Dodua Otoo is a British-German writer. She was born in Ilford, East London in 1972 and grew up there. Her parents were originally from Accra, Ghana. She graduated with a BA in German from Royal Holloway, University of London in 1997. After this she settled in Germany, and she has lived in Berlin since 2006. She has four children.

As a political activist, she has worked with many organisations, including the Initiative for Black People in Germany (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, ISD-Bund), co-founded by the Afro-German poet May Ayim.

Her first two publications were written in English. They were later translated into German by Mirjam Nuenning:

the things i am thinking while smiling politely (novella, 2012)

German translation: die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle…

Synchronicity (novella, 2015)

Since then, Otoo has written and published her works in German:

‘Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin’ (short story, 2016, winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann prize)

and

Adas Raum (2021); Ada’s Room (2023, US title); Ada’s Realm (2023; UK title)

Otoo’s first novel explores the idea of metempsychosis, i.e. reincarnation, the transmigration of the soul after death. The novel follows the spirit of Ada through four different earthly incarnations, each one is known as a ‘loop’ (Schleife). The action of the novel begins in a village in West Africa in 1459, just as the Portuguese colonists are landing. From there, the narrative jumps to London in 1848, where Ada has become the mathematician and computer pioneer Ada Lovelace (married name: Ada King). In her third life, she is a Polish woman, Ada Marianska, who suffers forced prostitution in a concentration camp cell in 1945. She is held prisoner in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which was the production site for the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets that launched the space race.

In her fourth incarnation, Ada becomes Augusta Adanne (Ada) Lamptey, a young woman who has come to Berlin from Ghana to study computer science. This section of the book plays out against the background of the UK General Election of December 2019, which was a landslide victory for the Conservative Party. The election result led to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union shortly afterwards on 31 January 2020. However, Ada Lamptey is pregnant, and so her main concern is not Brexit, but her own situation - she has to find a room in Berlin before she gives birth. As she searches for a room, she encounters much racist discrimination. Gradually, aspects of her history are revealed.

When each of Ada’s lives comes to an end, she returns to Asamando, the land of the spirits in the Akan religion. Asamando is a kind of limbo where spirits await their rebirth in the next ‘loop’.

On her journey through space and time, Ada is accompanied by a nameless first-person narrator who adopts the form of various everyday objects: a broom, a door-knocker, a room, and a British passport.

Ada’s four lives are all affected in different ways by acts of violence committed by white men, as well by the violence of European colonialism and imperialism. These recurring incidents remind us of how Portugal, Britain and Germany all engaged in the colonial exploitation of West Africa. This is symbolised by a stolen West African fertility bracelet which plays a significant role in all four of Ada’s incarnations. The stolen bracelet - which ends up in Berlin - bears witness to European crimes against African people over many centuries.

The novel adjusts history slightly to serve its own purposes. For example, we read that Ada Lovelace dies from a bullet wound in 1848. In contrast, the historical Ada Lovelace died of uterine cancer in 1852.

Another feature of the novel is its multilingualism. While written mainly in German, it contains key words and sentences in many other languages, including English, Portuguese, Polish, Twi, Ga and Igbo. Áine McMurtry argues that Otoo’s critical multilingualism is ‘a quasi-material method that makes visible lives which have all-too-often been sidelined in the historical record.’ (See reading list below, p. 106).

Although the novel portrays many instances of horrific violence, it remains optimistic about the possibility of a better world in the twenty-first century.

In January 2024 there was a special issue of the journal German Life and Letters dedicated to Otoo’s work entitled ‘Sharon Dodua Otoo – Literature, Politics, Possibility’, edited by Sarah Colvin and Tara Talwar Windsor (see reading list below).

English Translations

(US) Sharon Dodua Otoo, Ada’s Room, trans. by Jon Cho-Polizzi (New York: Riverhead Books, 2023)

(UK) Sharon Dodua Otoo, Ada’s Realm, trans. by Jon Cho-Polizzi (London: MacLehose Press, 2023)