Book Review: Kwame Come Home

Kwame Come Home: The Grief by Peter Okonkwo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kwame Come Home reveals, through prose and narrative, actual horrors conveyed via a fictional situation. Vanessa is the mother of a son, Kwame. Kwame is missing. Vanessa is in perpetual agony, not knowing why he’s gone, where he’s gone, if he will ever come back, or even if he’s dead or alive.

Vanessa’s agony is the focus of much of this book. Her obsessive heartbreak has overshadowed all other aspects of her life, turning her into a wailing woman no longer connected to her friends and neighbors. The author manages to achieve a balance between the horrific situation and the beauty of lamentation prose.

In time, we readers find out what’s happened to Kwame, though his mother continues to wail, unaware. His fate is desperate enough that our hearts hurt for him, as well as his poor mother.

The collection achieves a knife-edge clarity by contrasting the mother’s agonizing wait with Kwame’s first-hand record of a human being stripped of agency and reduced to a commodity in transit.

The story that unfolds exposes the profound human cost of contemporary human trafficking. Fraudulent recruitment and systemic extortion is a very real problem in Africa. Author Peter Okonkwo is Nigerian, and no doubt is deeply affected by the plight of Nigerians who have become victims of this terrible practice.

I highly recommend this collection to anyone who appreciates writing that doesn’t pull its punches. If you honor honesty, the human condition, and the bonds between a parent and a child, you will no doubt feel a fire in your heart somewhere between the first pages and the last.

The sequel to Kwame Come Home should publish in the Fall of 2026. I look forward to reading it.