Sankofa Structure

There are so many ways to structure a story. Freitag graph. Save the Cat. The Hero’s Journey. Inverted pyramid. Rashomon structure. Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories. To name just a few. 

Recently, author Theresa Okokon added a new one (or, if she did not invent it, she introduced my students and me to it recently): Sankofa structure. 

As Theresa describes it in her recent memoir Who I Always Was, the Sankofa is both a word in the Twi language from Ghana meaning “go back and fetch it.” It’s also an Andrinka symbol of a bird. 

“The feet and heart of the bird face forward, while the bird’s head is turned back, reaching its beak for an egg resting on its back,” Theresa writes. The Sankofa openheartedly—yet blindly—moves forward while carrying its origins in the same place from which it will tell its story.”

You can see that confident, heart-forward approach throughout Theresa’s book, a memoir-in-essays. While she uses different structures for each essay in the book—some are chronological, some episodic, some braided—the arrangement of the essays in the book is stealthier. She reveals the complex truth about the book’s central event—the death of Theresa’s father when she was a little girl—while simultaneously showing the reader how the protagonist navigated life through her fatherlessness. The past (her loss) is present in every essay, even the ones where her father or her grief are not mentioned. 

In a recent visit to my class, Theresa described her book as, “a past version of me is demonstrating something that a current version of me, or a later version of me, is also demonstrating. I’m sort of swinging back and forth.”

She both moves back and forth between past and present, but also between her book’s three themes: Her father’s death; growing up as a Black girl in the mostly white suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and, “what my editor called romantic displacement. I just called it daddy issues.” 

And so, the book swings even as it moves propulsively forward. Her father’s absence is felt in the very first essay, even before she reveals his untimely, mysterious death. She foreshadows her romantic struggles in essays dealing with her coming of age. The growing-up themes extend their tendrils into the essays that confront her dad’s death head-on in the center (heart) of the book, and at the end. 

“What I wanted was … between vignettes, there’d be this connective tissue, allowing those three central themes to eventually all be about the same thing, which is belonging. What is my identity? Where do I belong? Can I find a way to belong within myself?”

To create her Sankofa structure, Theresa had to resist temptations to reveal things immediately, or order the story chronologically. And, she had to stop trying to resolve the questions surrounding her father’s death.

It’s so often the case anytime we write—we think we’ve let go of our pre-conceived notions about stories. Then we have to do it again. And again.

“There are just some things I’ll just never know, maybe the point is not for me to know everything,” Theresa said. “The point is that I have this family who loves each other deeply, and the point is our joy, not understanding the things that we can’t understand.

“The best advice that I can give is to let go of the belief that story means ending with a resolution. If we stop believing that, we can allow the lack of resolution to be the place where we, as humans, find resolve.”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers