Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi:
1. Talk about Japin's use of imagery—for example, the portrait of the princes, the wounded monkey, and the butterflies in the mine. What do the images signify, and how do they deepen the story's impact?
2. The Dutch title of this work is "The Black Man with the White Heart." Which title do you prefer, English or Dutch? Why might the English publishers have changed the title?
3. How did the 19th-century Dutch manage to get around the prohibition against slavery?
4. How are the two young cousins different from one another? Why did they choose different paths for living in Dutch society—Kwasi wishing to assimilate, to blend in; Kwami to stand out and maintain his African identify. Talk about the consequences of those two choices—how did Kwasi's assimilation and Kwami's separatism end up shaping their lives?
5. Were you surprised at the physical acts of violence that the two young princes met while attending the school in Delft? Are there any parallels to racism in the 21st Century? To what degree does racism still exist today?
6. To what degree is Kwasi, in particular, aware of racism and the barrier against his black skin color?
7. What was behind Kwasi's speech to the students' club in which he repudiates his African origins?
8. Princess Sophie and Kwasi were both outsiders living in royal circles—they didn't belong. What would it feel like to never "belong" somewhere. How would that sense of dislocation shape your identity?
9. How does older Kwasi make fun of the portrait he and Kwami had painted with the major general? What was the message the portrait was intended to convey?
10. What do both Kwasi and Kwami come to understand about their treatment by their Dutch hosts?
11. Years later, Kwame recalls Holland and thinks that "a vast panorama is necessarily finite." When he thinks of the jungles of Africa, however, he writes, "an obstructed view suggests infinity."
12. Kwasi opens the book with this statement:
The first ten years of my life I was not black. I was in many ways different from those around me, but not darker. That much I know. Then came the day when I became aware that my colour had deepened. Later, once I was black, I paled again.
How does this passage reflect the narrative arc of the book? What does Kwasi mean when he says that he "was not black" as a child and that later he "paled again"?
13. How does Kwasi come to discover and define his identity, his soul?
14. Talk about the government mandate regarding "noblesse de peau," which Kwasi finally reads. Were you shocked by its blatancy? Was Kwasi? Or had he come by then to understand the barrier of skin color?
15. Japin frames The Two Hearts, beginning and end, with an older Kwasi reflecting on his life. Why would the author have framed his novel using the voice of an older man?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page