Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond’s new novel, “My Parents’ Marriage,” spins endlessly on this hypothetical question: If our parents’ marriage is often a blueprint for how to navigate future relationships, what happens when that marriage, marred by repeated infidelity and estrangement, leaves much to be desired? For Kokui, the novel’s young, Ghanaian protagonist, the result is emotional turbulence, with one knotty circumstance after another spooling out in an otherwise conventional plot. The novel opens just before Christmas in 1972 at Accra’s Ambassador Hotel ballroom, where beautiful young women and monied, military men, many of them married, mingle in a celebratory atmosphere. In attendance because of her father’s wealth and status, Kokui retreats to the veranda to get some air and smoke a cigarette.
There, with anxious thoughts about the future, she meets a young man named Boris. The encounter, brief but memorable, will change the trajectory of Kokui’s life, mainly for the better. But first, there is the demoralizing situation of Kokui’s parents’ marriage, with its ensuing “lakes of sadness.
” From about 1941 to 1974, Mawuli, Kobui’s father, married six times and fathered about 12 children, some with women he never wed. Kokui’s mother, Micheline, is Mawuli’s fourth wife, but, having left him for obvious reasons, she resides across the border in Togo, her home country. In a patriarchal society where women suffer many disadvantages, Micheline refuses to .