Kwame Alexander On The Book About Slavery He Was ‘Called To Write’

Kwame Alexander has written dozens of books—ones about basketball, ones about soccer, ones about animals, ones about Black Americans, ones about love. But his 36^th, The Door of No Return, which comes out Tuesday, was different.

“I felt like this was the first book that I didn’t set out to write—I was called to write it. This is the one I was sort of born to write,” says the acclaimed poet, who won the 2015 Newbery Medal for the book-in-verse The Crossover.

He felt the call while on one of his 11 trips since 2012 to Ghana, where he has helped build a library and supported other literacy and school improvement projects through the Literacy Empowerment Action Project he co-founded with fellow author Tracy Chiles McGhee. While speaking with residents of a village in the Eastern region of Ghana, he searched for a connection he could make with them.

“I went to the place everyone goes when they think of the history of Black people in the United States. I said, ‘What do you know about slavery?’” he remembers. “And they were like, sort of matter of factly, ‘That’s when all the bad people got taken away.’”

The men quickly turned the conversation to music, asking Alexander if he’d caught the latest Kanye West album. “They wanted to have what I viewed as a mundane conversation, and I wanted to talk about something serious. But in their eyes, slavery isn’t the thing that defines us. And I thought perhaps it shouldn’t be the think we automatically go to when we think of Black history,” he says. “I wanted to explore this notion that 1619 isn’t our beginning; it’s our middle. I couldn’t articulate that idea then, but I knew I wanted to write about that.”

In crafting the storyline for Return, Alexander came to envision a young boy growing up in Ghana “just going about his life—swimming, crushing, trying not to do homework—all the things kids do.”

The boy, Kofi, leads a happy life in 1860 Ghana. He hangs out with his best friend and dreams of showing up his bigger, stronger cousin. He anticipates his upcoming born day party, when he’ll become a man of the village.

But two earth-shattering events soon obliterate Kofi’s day-to-day concerns and change his life forever. He goes from worrying about whether he should hold his crush’s hand to fighting for his survival.

Alexander knew what was coming down the pike for Kofi, and it made the book difficult to write at times. “It was daunting and stressful to write it. I was in London, so I would go walk around, enjoy Regent’s Park and the rose garden, because I’d know what was coming next,” he remembers.

Soon, Alexander will be revisiting those emotions again. Return is the first in a trilogy, and it’s not hard to imagine where book two will pick up once you’ve finished book one. At 400 pages, the novel-in-verse is a fast read but not an easy one. It’s also difficult to describe the storyline without giving too much away. What’s clear is that Alexander did his research and doesn’t flinch from the truth. His focus on it respects the intelligence of the young adult audience, at a time when book bans do the opposite.

“This is a true story. I am not making stuff up. I’m reenacting and reimagining things that happened to mothers, mothers who lived in Ghana and Sierra Leone,” Alexander says. “I’m conjuring my ancestors’ memory, and it’s hard, it’s tough.”

The verse of the novel showcases Alexander’s incredible gift as a poet. He chooses each word intentionally—you don’t get a lot of them in a novel-in-verse that’s 400 pages—and he loves the white space that comes on each page; he considers it as much a part of the story as the words.

The mere appearance of the verses tell a story. For instance, when children chant the name of Kofi’s cousin in a growing crescendo, the font size grows bigger. When the village council hands down a controversial decision, the font on the page increases from small to large, reflecting the crowd’s more and more frenzied reaction.

“I have a friend who says the spiritual journey the reader takes with the words that are on the page is as important as the words that aren’t there. I love that. I love figurative language, metaphor, simile,” he says.

The marketing materials for Return compare the book to Alex Haley’s game-changing 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It’s a bold comparison to make—but also an accurate one. This book, and its sequels, will be talked about for many years ahead.