Meet the Author #7
Musa Okwonga
In this event, Maha El Hissy spoke with author, poet, and musician Musa Okwonga to discuss his 2021 book In the End, It Was All About Love, published in German translation in 2022. A central topic of their conversation revolved around the question of how personal experience and universal themes like love, loss, identity, and societal injustice are translated into literature.
Readers of Okwonga’s largely autobiographical work follow the protagonist on a journey through Berlin, encountering numerous social, cultural, and political questions along the way. The narrative also includes a trip to the North of Uganda, where the protagonist visits his father’s grave. Okwonga describes his conscious choice to resist providing certain specific place names or temporal anchors in order to direct focus to more universal experiences. His goal was to create a feeling of both disorientation and openness, inviting readers to interpret the story from their own personal perspectives.
Musa Okwonga’s reflections centered the question of how love, in all its many facets, can also function as a force for resistance against alienation and exclusion. This idea—employing love as a counterweight to hardship and hatred—provides a narrative thread throughout his work, underscoring the power of interpersonal connections. At the same time, he makes an argument for literature’s ability to create spaces for rethinking belonging, transformation, and the role of places like Berlin as settings for such work.
A particularly memorable moment in the reading came during an excerpt from the chapter How to Eat Cake in Berlin, bringing everyday activities like eating cake into conversation with moving reflections on memory and loss. Okwonga explained how his protagonist establishes a ritual for himself through this simple act. Such rituals appear again and again throughout the work, providing opportunities to seek stability in an otherwise chaotic world.
In his discussion with El Hissy, Okwonga also acknowledged many of his literary influences—a constellation of artists and writers including Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Sylvia Plath, and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Mos Def. He emphasized how each of these artists has, in their own way, contributed to his development as a writer, whether through subject matter, style, or approaches to social questions.
Okwonga also described how his relationship to the city of Berlin has changed since the publication of his book, examining the impacts of gentrification and the surging cost of living on different parts of the city he calls home, as well as pointing to increasing incidents of racism. The slogan 'Berlin is leaving us, we aren’t leaving Berlin' encapsulated Okwonga’s feelings about the city’s transformation, providing reference for a discussion of urban development and social injustice.
Musa Okwonga’s reflections centered the question of how love, in all its many facets, can also function as a force for resistance against alienation and exclusion. This idea—employing love as a counterweight to hardship and hatred—provides a narrative thread throughout his work, underscoring the power of interpersonal connections. At the same time, he makes an argument for literature’s ability to create spaces for rethinking belonging, transformation, and the role of places like Berlin as settings for such work.
A particularly memorable moment in the reading came during an excerpt from the chapter How to Eat Cake in Berlin, bringing everyday activities like eating cake into conversation with moving reflections on memory and loss. Okwonga explained how his protagonist establishes a ritual for himself through this simple act. Such rituals appear again and again throughout the work, providing opportunities to seek stability in an otherwise chaotic world.
In his discussion with El Hissy, Okwonga also acknowledged many of his literary influences—a constellation of artists and writers including Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Sylvia Plath, and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Mos Def. He emphasized how each of these artists has, in their own way, contributed to his development as a writer, whether through subject matter, style, or approaches to social questions.
Okwonga also described how his relationship to the city of Berlin has changed since the publication of his book, examining the impacts of gentrification and the surging cost of living on different parts of the city he calls home, as well as pointing to increasing incidents of racism. The slogan 'Berlin is leaving us, we aren’t leaving Berlin' encapsulated Okwonga’s feelings about the city’s transformation, providing reference for a discussion of urban development and social injustice.