The gap between both countries

I grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham, and I moved to Accra six years ago when I got the HR job, and I want to tell you that neither city has fully decided what to do with me. Britain kept asking where I was really from. Ghana kept noting my accent, my outside references, the small ways I hold a fork wrong for somebody whose grandmother is from Kumasi. I work in HR at a tech company in the Airport Residential Area and I am good at my job, and I write fiction about people who exist in the same gap I do, people for whom belonging is a thing they have to actively construct rather than a thing they inherit. The novel I'm working on follows a Ghanaian-British woman who returns to Accra for what she describes as two years and stays indefinitely, and what changes and what doesn't. It is not autobiographical, which I say partly to manage expectations and partly because the character makes different choices. I've been writing it since 2021 and I've scrapped three opening chapters and the current version begins on Labadi Beach, which is where I go when I need to think in a way that requires the ocean.