Musa Okwonga - In The End, It Was All About Love

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Okwonga was best known to me as a (lyrical) writer on football, notably A Cultured Left Foot: The Eleven Elements Of Footballing Greatness, and he uses football to illustrate the challenges of Berlin's winters, casual racial stereotyping and the offsetting camaradarie of his companions in a piece called 'Running Through the Snow with Unicorns', the Unicorns the name of the local team for which he plays: what are you? What have you achieved? You are a writer, making work that is far below his potential. Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”. Maybe it’s time to admit that for a significant number of people romantic love is no longer the ultimate goal, that Valentine’s Day is a commercial invention that has run its course and that we need to embrace all the opportunities for love in our lives to fully experience what it is to be human. It’s time for an inclusive celebration of love rather than an exclusive one. Time for a rebrand.

In The End, It Was All About Love | Musa Okwonga | London

Human love is a special thing, unique in its longevity and the sheer number of beings we are capable of loving. We can love our family, our friends, our lovers. We can also love across the species boundary and the spiritual divide. And as AI romps ahead it may be that one day we can find love with an avatar or robot. The sense of being a stranger has its roots in childhood, in the aftermath of the vast blast radius of grief (I think here of Elizabeth Bishop): Ae-jeong then finds out that Dae-o was leaving without telling her and she’s heartbroken. Dae-o explains that he wants to tell the world their real story but that it will take time. He doesn’t want everyone pitying Ha-nee and Ae-jeong. She tells Dae-o that he can write the real love story without leaving them. Dae-o is worried about people talking and not leaving them alone — he wants to write in solitude. While she fulfills her dream, he will become a new writer. Ae-jeong shares the news with her mother and cries, explaining how heartbroken she is. This really is the last roll of the dice to keep these two apart in the finale — the K-drama series could not help itself. The ending of the finale Coming up to the age at which his father died, the narrator is having something of a mid-life crisis, his career rewarding intellectually but not financially, failing to find love, and increasingly finding Berlin is not the refuge from racism he has hoped. The story is also told in the second person, a bugbear I know for many readers, but very effective here. As Okwonga has explained he uses the device to make his story, at least initially, universal:The moment that haunts the early part of the book is the one he knows is coming steadily closer, when he passes his father’s age at his death: Perhaps when ones survival, social standing and acceptance is predicated on coupling up, the obsession with romantic love is understandable. And it will always have a place in the spectrum of love. But we can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much.

In the End, It Was All About Love by Musa Okwonga | Goodreads

The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behaviour and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences. Which all rather ties up with the author's own biography. Asked in an interview if the novel was auto-fiction, Okwonga laughed and replied "I’d say it’s more like a ‘tall tale’ – can we call it that? Obviously there’s parts of this book that haven’t happened, and characters that don’t exist in real life...."The book is divided into small vignette style pieces, all focusing on a different section of the author’s life in Berlin and his past actions in London and Uganda. These range from the importance of therapy, racism, the different types of cakes one finds in Berlin to the minimalist architecture. At times it’s gently humorous, sometimes it poignant. Musa Okwonga is also a poet and there are some poets which also express the author’s feelings about Berlin. The narrator has left the UK, repelled by the anti-immigration feelings linked to the Brexit vote, for Berlin. Many people will call it that, even those who should know better. It is not a bubble. A bubble is a carefully-sealed world whose occupants are oblivious to everything that happens beyonf: it. Berlin is something different. It is a refuge, an enclave, a safe haven. If Berlin were your bubble then that would mean you were incurious about whatever happened in other parts of the world. But you are acutely aware of those happenings, and that is why you are here. There is a very good chance that you are here because you fled the true bubbles of our societies—the small suburbs and villages where you were raised. where your difference was at best tolerated. There is a very good chance that those places, those bubbles, will resent how you see them now. that they will interpret your distance as elitism and snobbery as opposed to an essential act of self-protection. Those places, those bubbles, will not stop to think about what they did to you, that you were so traumatised that you had to flee at the earliest opportunity.