Lesley Lokko Prepares for Venice

Lokko arrived in the UK, in 1981, as a 17-year​-​​ ​old teenager and her world as she knew it changed. ‘I arrived in the UK and was suddenly told I was “Black”, not Ghanaian,” she said. ‘It didn’t make sense to me.’ When Lokko tells this part of her story, she speaks with a very fierce facial expression: ‘It wasn’t how I would have described myself. In Ghana, no one is simply Black because everyone is Black. Suddenly, I had a new identity that was not of my own making.’

Lokko spent the next 40 years of her life trying to understand what it meant to be Black, both as an academic and a novelist. According to her, ‘What bothered me most was the sense that being Black simply meant not being white. That’s not deep or rich enough to satisfy anyone.’

Her academic path was long and varied. After leaving Ghana, Lokko took her A-levels at Malvern St. James, an English boarding school. She later gained admission to study Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University but left the university shortly afterwards for a degree in Sociology in Los Angeles. Twenty-nine, and unhappy with the identity politics she encountered in the US, she returned to the UK. ‘In America,’ she told me, ‘it was actually worse, because the Americans were much more ignorant about identity than in England.’ In contrast to the popular view of America as the land of opportunity, Lokko found America ruthless in terms of class and race. The American system’s brutality, according to Lokko in a 2008 interview with the UK’s Independent, is a ‘vicious social Darwinism’. America, she added, ‘was made by immigrants but their attitudes towards contemporary immigrants shocked me.’

One day, while working as an office manager in Los Angeles, Lokko had a conversation with her manager that changed the direction of her life. He had asked her to help him choose some countertops for a venture he was starting and showed her a sketch. Since her mother had been an art teacher, Lokko knew how to draw a perspective and she made one for him. After reviewing her drawing, he said, ‘You ought to be an architect.’ I asked her, ‘So the discussion that made you decide to become an architect was totally unplanned?’ And she replied, ‘Totally unplanned.’

Following the discussion with manager, Lokko enrolled at University College, London’s Bartlett School of Architecture, where she completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. By the time she graduated, she found that, contrary to her initial belief, there was still so much more to be discovered. Recalling that moment, she explained:

Although Lokko found architecture frustrating, she also excelled at it, gaining a doctorate in the field in 2007. But at the same time, Lokko began looking for creative outlets beyond architecture; during the search, she came across a Time Out article on how to write a blockbuster, and in 2004, she published her first novel, Sundowners. Since then, Lokko has published twelve novels and is set to deliver another one after curating La Biennale di Venezia later this year, beginning from May 20th.

Though Lokko regards her novels as commercial works produced for money, the roots of her writing are not trivial. She had, after all, been a lifelong reader and had drunk from the gourds of renowned literary influences such as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer and David Malouf. As such, her works, which began on a commercial note, went on to tackle much serious topics like race, immigration and the identity politics of America and Europe.