Part Three: Your Passport, opens with a tribute to the narrator's well-travelled father, and has him visiting northern Uganda and his father's home village and his grave.

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

The narrator has left the UK, repelled by the anti-immigration feelings linked to the Brexit vote, for Berlin.

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:

In the End, It Was All About Love (with Musa Okwonga) In the End, It Was All About Love (with Musa Okwonga)

Dae-o then hears the news that he’s been exposed online. He’s been made out to be a piece of trash. When Ae-jeong gets into work, she sees her bank book is missing and wonders where Mr Wang is. Dae-o wants the video put down of Ae-jeong at his book concert as he’s worried about her and his daughter. He tells his agent that the rumours are true — he wrote the story without considering Ae-jeong’s feelings. Taking full responsibility Both books are at their hearts journeys to find homes, to find some sort of emotional and psychological settling. In this one, he seeks an easier unburdened place to call home, a restart: 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...." There is a specific time and date you have been fearing for much of your adult life. When that moment passes, you will be precisely one second older than your father was when he died, and you will have precisely no idea what to do next. 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 is a powerful novel by Musa Okwonga by poet, journalist, musician and author Musa Okwonga, and published by Rough Trade books. what are you? What have you achieved? You are a writer, making work that is far below his potential. 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. (SIGNED COPIES) IN THE END, IT WAS ALL ABOUT LOVE. (SIGNED COPIES)

And finally you are free; in the end, it was all about love ….your vehicle circles round the yard, draws out of the field and indicates to its right, and then begins the slow descent towards Kampala. In the years since, people would often ask you about Uganda, what it was like, and you would never really know what to say. If you had, you would have told them it was the place which taught you the extremes of joy and pain. And now, for better or worse, you are coming home.Instead, they can build loving relationships with other people and beings who are capable of fulfilling all their needs. Relationships, science shows us, are underpinned by the same biological and psychological mechanisms and are as beneficial to health and wellbeing as romantic love. Any hierarchy of importance is a cultural construct. We can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much Ha-nee reads the book “Love is Nonexistent” and ponders over the claims that it is fake and the implied truth that Dae-o abandoned Ae-jeong and her child. She speaks to her mother and tells her that everyone online is saying the novel is fake and that she knows the woman is based on her. Of course, Ms Song is the orchestrator of all of this. This is one last throw of the dice to stop Ae-jeong and Dae-o from concluding their relationship but it’s obvious it isn’t going to work. Episode 16 is going through the motions. It’s true Part One: Righteous Migrants - the poem concerns the lingering effect of the winds that blew the slave ships, and the narrative tells of the narrator's time in 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.

In The End, It Was All About Love - The Good Literary Agency In The End, It Was All About Love - The Good Literary Agency

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): At the other end of the spectrum are the polyamorists. A group who experience romantic and sexual love with more than one partner. Again, the all-pervasive narrative of romantic love has led us to depict those who practise polyamory in a less than favourable light. They are characterised as being promiscuous, immoral, untrustworthy and dissatisfied. 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. Ha-nee seems content on keeping up to date with the news — she’d rather know what everyone else is saying than not know. She tells her grandmother that the kids have not bullied her over it and actually, they’ve been nice. Ha-nee continues and states that she can tell Dae-o is not a bad man.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. There are several stylistic choices that make this book stand out of a crowd. It isn’t a novel, though it does pursue a single character’s development to trace, in some measure, an arc of coming-to-terms. Its episodic structure, offering vignettes of the narrator’s experiences that sometimes build on and refer to each other but are never corralled into a linear narrative, both make for an initially choppy reading experience, and emulate the brief-encounter mode of living that seems to be so characteristic of the narrator’s life in Berlin. Sometimes this left me longing for the connective tissue between the episodes; sometimes it seemed this was perhaps precisely what the narrator was longing for – each episode somehow as lonely an island as he. Ha-nee and Dae-o meet. They both ask each other how they are feeling. Ha-nee asks Dae-o to take care of her mother first. This is the scene that confirms that she trusts Dae-o. Dae-o admits that he hated Ae-jeong for a very long time over misunderstandings. Ha-nee says she’s always been happy due to her mother and grandma but that it’s time for Dae-o and her mother to be happy. The level of maturity from this kid is incredible. If this was my child, I’d offer them half of my salary just to maintain this outstanding behavior. Sacrificing the film 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.