A graphic designer begins to lose her ability to see colour. In another writer’s hands, that premise might set up a story about a single gift taken away. Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Synchronicity asks a less comfortable question: what happens when a change in perception threatens the work that keeps someone housed, while also making another way of perceiving possible? Its protagonist, Charlie Mensah, cannot experience the change as a tidy metaphor. She has a child, a profession and a life in Berlin. The world around her demands reliable colour vision before it will make room for her uncertainty.
Otoo’s novella is one place to begin reading her contribution to speculative Black writing in Europe. The other is Ada’s Realm, the novel in which four women called Ada live across centuries and continents while an unnamed being moves through objects around them. A broom, a door knocker, a room and a passport do more than supply playful narrators. They put human lives into contact with histories that refuse to stay in their assigned period. Between these works, Otoo makes time and sensation unstable. The result is neither an escape from the material world nor a promise that the future will be kinder by itself. A different future depends on who gets to describe the present.
Otoo was born and raised in London in a family with Ghanaian roots, and has built much of her writing and activist life in Germany. She told AFREADA that moving between a Ghanaian home and an English school first made her aware of whose stories were absent from the books she read. In Germany she wanted Black women to occupy the centre of stories about ordinary experiences, including relationships and parenting. The decision shaped her early novellas and the much larger architecture of Ada’s Realm. It also gives her speculative elements their force. An impossible event in these books does not float free of a recognisable social life. It changes the angle from which that life can be seen.
A profession made of colour
Synchronicity appeared in German translation in 2014 and in Otoo’s original English in 2015. Its publisher describes Charlie, also called Cee, gradually losing her colours, a change the women before her have experienced. The book is short, but the premise opens several pressures at once. For someone who works as a graphic designer, seeing colour is a practical skill. For a single mother, the ability to keep working is tied to housing, food and care. Charlie cannot simply announce that she is having a transformative experience and wait for the world to accommodate it.
The story’s movement from loss toward another form of perception has attracted more than one critical reading. Joseph kebe-nguema’s study calls the novella Afrofuturist and analyses Charlie’s change through Blackness and disability. The critic describes a woman who feels constrained by an inherited account of what her body should do and cannot safely disclose a change that could cost her livelihood. Stephanie Galasso reads the book’s title as a challenge to the idea that experience always proceeds in a single, obedient chain of cause and effect. The two approaches meet at a practical point: Charlie has to continue living while the meaning of her changed senses is still unsettled.
Consider the difference between the colour of a page and the value of the labour performed on it. A graphic designer’s clients can judge an image as if its colours were fixed properties that a competent worker simply retrieves. Charlie’s experience interrupts that apparent certainty. Perception belongs to a body, and a body can change. The profession that should reward skill becomes a place where the terms of skill are narrowed. The story’s speculative element exposes a demand that often passes as common sense: that the worker’s body remain predictable enough to fit the job without requiring the job to change.
Otoo places this pressure near Christmas. The calendar matters to the emotional scale of the novella. Festive time is supposed to organise reunion, security and anticipation, yet Charlie’s days produce the opposite kinds of questions. What can she tell her family? How can she continue to work? Is she losing an ability, or discovering that a familiar ability was only one part of what she could perceive? Those questions do not resolve merely because a reader recognises the book’s symbolic possibilities. The immediate risk remains material.
The publisher’s edition carries colour illustrations by Sita Ngoumou. That collaboration is a particular feature of a story about changing colour perception. The illustrated object can ask its readers to attend to colour even as Charlie’s relationship to it alters. The reader’s visual confidence becomes part of the reading experience. Otoo does not have to give the audience Charlie’s exact senses for the gap to become felt: a printed colour can be obvious to one person and newly uncertain to another.
The novella also brings inheritance into the question of perception. Charlie knows that women before her have lived through a comparable change. Their experience offers knowledge, but it can also create a demand to understand her own life through an explanation already made. When she feels that she is losing something essential, an assurance that others survived may not be enough. Care across generations can require listening to the particular consequences that a new generation faces. In Berlin, Charlie’s paid work makes the crisis different from an abstract family story. The same event can belong to a lineage and still arrive under conditions that need their own answer.
This is why an Afrofuturist reading of Synchronicity need not depend on a spaceship or a technological gadget. The book asks whether the apparently settled categories through which a society measures ability, colour and value are as permanent as they seem. Charlie’s transformation puts pressure on each. It opens a future whose first sign is an inconvenient present, one in which old expertise no longer guarantees survival and a different sense of possibility has yet to find a name.
Four women, no straight line
In Ada’s Realm, published first in German as Adas Raum in 2021 and in Jon Cho-Polizzi’s English translation in 2023, Otoo enlarges that disturbance of time. The novel follows women called Ada in West Africa in 1459, England in 1848, Germany in 1945 and Berlin in 2019. These are not interchangeable figures wearing a shared name. Their circumstances differ radically. The formal connection asks a reader to notice what carries between eras without flattening the violence particular to any one of them.
Otoo explained to The Berliner that she did not want a linear story in which history moves from a primitive past to an enlightened present and then automatically toward improvement. That progression would make the 2019 Ada a beneficiary of time itself. The novel instead lets earlier forms of violence and dispossession remain active. Its structure asks how a person living now may encounter something whose origins precede her, whether or not she has been taught to recognise it.
The book’s object narrator gives that question an unexpected body. An English excerpt published by EuropeNow begins with the being as a brushwood broom in 1459. It lies among pots and charcoal in a courtyard and observes women going about their work. Its material place is exact. A broom is handled, stored, used and sometimes made into an instrument of punishment. It cannot simply speak from above the scene as a neutral historian. Its perspective comes from a position close to hands, surfaces and household routines.
In the novel’s 1848 passage, a published translation sample presents the being as a brass lion-head door knocker. Its new form controls what it can experience. At the threshold of a house, it registers arrivals, departures and the social difference between people able to approach with confidence and those made to wait. The change from broom to knocker does not grant the being mastery over history. It gives another constrained position from which history can be sensed.
Otoo described the being as existing before birth and after death, and taking the forms of a broom, a door, a room and a passport across the novel. The sequence is a formal device with an ethical effect. Objects seem easier to classify than people, yet here each object has a partial view. The broom knows the yard from the yard. The door knows the house from its edge. A passport belongs to systems that permit one person’s movement and obstruct another’s. Letting these objects speak means asking what official narratives miss when they are written only from the position of those able to claim an overview.
The figure of Ada Lovelace in the English section adds another complication. She is a historical woman associated with computing, but the novel is not a conventional biography of technological progress. Her place among the other Adas prevents a single story of invention from standing in for women’s futures. The West African Ada in 1459, the woman in wartime Germany and the pregnant woman seeking a home in Berlin each confront conditions that no one technical achievement has solved. The book can bring these figures into relation without asking one to represent the others.
Otoo told AFREADA that the locations have personal ties: present-day Ghana through her parents, England through her birth and upbringing, and Germany through the children she raised there. The connection establishes why those places mattered to the writer. It does not reduce the fictional women to disguised versions of her. Their stories are made from research, invention and formal decisions; her geography gives the project a starting point, not a key that unlocks every character.
In a Cambridge conversation, Otoo said that she wanted to show women resisting and asserting their humanity within circumstances of trauma and pain. That intention explains the novel’s refusal to present historical harm as a spectacle with a consoling ending. The women do not become significant because suffering has made them exemplary. Their acts of resistance matter because they occur under different, sharply drawn constraints. An imagined relation between them can enlarge a reader’s sense of history without claiming that the women shared the same choices.
The language of belonging
The English-language writer’s decision to write Adas Raum in German was another change in the conditions of storytelling. Otoo told the Cambridge audience that German literature had long been treated as the domain of a homogeneous group. Writing the novel in German was, for her, an act of resistance. The choice carried risk. She told AFREADA that English was the language in which she felt a deeper emotional history, while German was the language needed for some of the social and political details she wanted to address in Germany.
The translation back into English therefore cannot simply restore an original voice. Otoo has described Jon Cho-Polizzi’s translation as its own work. The English title, Ada’s Realm, changes the German Raum, which can suggest room or space as well as the wider idea of a realm. The movement between languages mirrors the novel’s concern with where a person can belong. A room may be physically available while the terms for inhabiting it are still contested. A realm can sound generous but also imply borders and authority. The title travels, and its possible meanings do not travel in exactly the same arrangement.
That attention to form was present before the novel. Otoo said in a 2023 interview that her novellas already experimented with structure as well as plot. Synchronicity works through a calendar and a changed sensorium; Ada’s Realm works through recurrence and a travelling, object-bound narrator. Both refuse a simple promise that later time equals better knowledge. In one, Charlie may know less about the colours she once used confidently while learning something about an inherited form of perception. In the other, an Ada living in 2019 may confront a past whose effects remain immediate even when its events are centuries away.
These forms have a political edge because they interfere with the idea that the present can judge the past from a secure distance. The door knocker cannot see everything happening in the house; the reader cannot see every Ada as a case already closed. Charlie cannot prove her ability by appealing to a stable definition of vision. Otoo’s writing puts the reader in contact with lives that exceed the categories offered to them. The speculative element creates that contact without turning a woman into a symbol that can be understood at a glance.
Otoo has also worked as an editor. In a first-person interview with The African Courier, she described her role in the Witnessed book series and her interest in making space for other writers and artists. This work sits beside her fiction rather than serving as a footnote to it. Who appears in print, who gets translated and whose experience can be a narrative centre are practical questions about publishing. Her fictional worlds give those questions sensory and temporal form.
The 2016 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her German short story brought Otoo wider recognition, but the two books here show more than an ascent through literary institutions. Synchronicity has a character whose work may become impossible when her senses change. Ada’s Realm has women whose rooms, countries and bodies are shaped by histories that do not move neatly behind them. Their speculative structures make those pressures visible without pretending they can be solved by a single revelation. Otoo’s future is neither a faraway destination nor an empty page. It begins when a supposedly ordinary measure of ability, belonging or historical progress can no longer explain the person standing before it.