Free
Postponed
Out of stock
Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT April 1, 2020
The Center for Fiction
This event has been postponed. We will update this page when a new date is set. If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].
Polymath, writer, art historian, and filmmaker Nana Oforiatta Ayim, visiting NYC as a MoMA Curatorial Leadership Fellow, talks about her stunning debut novel, in which a Ghanaian girl struggles to understand the lasting effects of the colonial past on herself, her parents, and her country.
Presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA).
This event is part of our Crossing Genre series: Chord progression becomes the first chapter. An abstract painting transforms into a ballet. The most innovative stories have unexpected origins. In this fascinating interdisciplinary series, musical composers, writers, and visual artists reveal the inspirations behind their work.
Featuring
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Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Photo by Naafia Naah
Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Photo by Naafia Naah
Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a writer, art historian, and filmmaker whose work has appeared at the New Museum, the Tate Modern, and elsewhere. As the founder of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge, she pioneered a pan-African Cultural Encyclopedia. Recently appointed a TORCH Global South Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, she is also the recipient of an Art + Technology Award from LACMA and the inaugural Soros Arts Fellowship. The God Child is her first novel. She lives in Accra.
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Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
http://www.mocada.org/Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
http://www.mocada.org/The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) uses the visual and performing arts as a point of departure for exploring new artistic production across a variety of disciplines. Through exhibitions and programming, MoCADA incites dialogue on pressing social and political issues facing the African Diaspora and fosters a dynamic space for the creation and continuous evolution of culture.
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The God Child
By Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Published by Bloomsbury USA
The God Child is a coming-of-age story about a young girl finding her freedom in the midst of familial, cultural, and political constraints. With a bracing combination of power and vulnerability, Ayim’s debut is about how families, and nations, overcome the limitations of the past through the cycles of generations.
Maya is the only child of an expat Ghanaian couple based in Germany, where as the sole African girl in her school, the pressure is on her to succeed. While her father is taciturn and reserved, her mother―heir to a crumbling dynasty in Ghana―is glamorous and charismatic. Maya is both in awe of and intimidated by her overbearing beauty and her ability to command a room, especially with tales of the family’s former glory that seem so far removed from Maya’s reality. But when Maya’s mother adopts her god child, Kojo, his mission to heal their story begins to bring to Maya the sense of possibility and purpose she has longed for.