The substance of style: Reading Lesley Lokko

Abstract

It was upon meeting Lesley Lokko, an architect and academic by training (and who simultaneously lives between Johannesburg, London, Accra and Edinburgh), that I first became interested in her writing-the author of a modest nine bestsellers of chick-lit, written between 2004 and 2014, and translated into fifteen languages. It is the substance of her style, embodied in her person and livelihood, and which carry over into her fictional characters of African women set in postcolonial pan-African settings, that I want to explore in this article. I 'read' Lokko the author in conjunction with a few select characters from her debut novel Sundowners (2004) to suggest that she draws upon her own biography-'a person who has fallen between the cultural cracks' as one critic puts it (Kean, 2008: n.p.)-to create the global African female protagonist. Her characters are black and white, and comfortable in a range of exotic locations within a fast-paced contemporary global world of 'sex, shopping, and glamour'-attributes that sell chick-lit to female audiences according to Lokko (2015). 1 She clearly gets it right, but I would argue that it is her focus on identity, race and diaspora (themes written about in her academic work and that loop back in her fiction) that makes her novels a success and their distribution global; as well, her online presence and highly stylised website only add to the allure of Lokko, the person and the writer, and make for a compelling read. Prelude Africa has taken you in and has broken you away from what you were before. This is why you will keep wanting to get away but will always have to return. Then of course, there is the sky. There is no sky as big as this one anywhere else in the world.