Childish Recollections

Childish Recollections is a poetry collection about memory, migration and the complicated business of belonging.

Childish Recollections is a poetry collection about memory, migration and the complicated business of belonging. Beginning with Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss’s move from Ghana to England in 1977 at the age of two, the collection traces a childhood and early adulthood lived between cultures. Its title turns on the deliberately unstable suffix “ish”: these are recollections that are partial, imaginative and necessarily imperfect, occupying the shifting space between fact and memory.

Growing up Anglo-Ghanaian in a predominantly white Bedfordshire market town, Moss reconstructs childhood through family stories, Twi, food, religion, television, athletics, reggae, breakdancing and the popular culture of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Alongside humour and nostalgia are experiences of racism, cultural dislocation and the pressure to define where one belongs.

A later return to Ghana complicates rather than resolves that search, as Childish Recollections ultimately embraces the hyphen: identity formed through overlapping histories, languages, families and places.