The Mirror and the Myth: On Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black

There are certain books you stumble on at just the right time when you’ve grown weary of polite optimism, when you need someone to tell the truth plainly, without trimming the edges. In Every Mirror She’s Black is one of those books. I found myself reading it on a quiet evening in Ghana’s industrial and port city of Tema, the kind that hums with generator noise and restlessness. Maybe that’s why it struck me the way it did. Åkerström’s novel doesn’t come to entertain; it comes to unsettle. It makes you sit still with the discomfort of what it means to be seen and still unseen, to belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

In the grand tradition of migratory narratives, the tales of dislocation and reinvention that form the spine of modern literature, Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black inserts itself with fierce clarity and necessary disruption. This is a novel that interrogates not only the landscapes that migrants navigate, but the very myths of modernity they are sold: the myth of the benevolent West, the meritocracy of whiteness, the cosmopolitanism of inclusion. Set in Sweden, a country often branded as a model of liberal progressivism, Åkerström’s debut novel gives us a different mirror: one cracked, reflecting three Black women whose lives intersect under the illusion of belonging.

What distinguishes Åkerström’s narrative from the familiar tropes of the “immigrant struggle” genre is its multiplicity. Rather than presenting one archetypal migrant, she offers three richly divergent women; Kemi, Brittany, and Muna, each Black, each navigating Sweden’s cultural frost from vastly different vantage points. Their stories unfold separately yet thematically in concert, offering a polyphonic meditation on identity, race, gender, and the violent seduction of assimilation.

Kemi, a high-powered Nigerian-American marketing executive, is recruited to Stockholm by a Swedish company eager to project diversity. Her arrival is framed by a corporate craving for optics rather than transformation. She is intelligent, stylish, politically conscious, and exhausted by microaggressions, by cultural dissonance, by the double burden of being both visible and invisible. Kemi’s story captures what it means to be a symbol rather than a subject, a checkbox rather than a citizen.

Åkerström, herself a Nigerian-Swedish author and photographer, writes Kemi with an insider’s intimacy. The politics of corporate diversity are rendered not just with cynicism, but with emotional granularity. Kemi’s interactions, whether with tone-deaf colleagues, well-meaning liberals, or the exoticizing white men who desire her body but not her complexities, reveal a tension that is all too familiar to African professionals navigating Western spaces. It is not enough to be excellent; one must also be palatable.

The second thread belongs to Brittany, a former model turned socialite, whose Blackness is of a different texture. American and deeply assimilated into the logics of whiteness, Brittany meets Jonny von Lundin, a wealthy Swedish businessman, during a chance encounter on a flight. What begins as romance quickly descends into psychological captivity. As Jonny’s obsession intensifies, Brittany becomes emblematic of how Black women’s bodies can be commodified and controlled even in elite spaces. Her story functions almost like a gothic narrative, a quiet horror of privilege turned prison.

Brittany’s arc is perhaps the most chilling in the novel, not because of overt violence, but because of how violence hides in plain sight. She is pampered but disempowered, adorned but isolated. Jonny, who is also Kemi’s employer, becomes the figure through whom Åkerström anatomizes the Scandinavian liberal: outwardly progressive, inwardly patriarchal, obsessed with order, cleanliness, and control. That Åkerström crafts such a figure without caricature is a testament to her authorial restraint. Jonny is monstrous not because he is a villain in the traditional sense, but because he represents a system that mistakes possession for love and inclusion for control.

The novel’s emotional core, however, lies with Muna, a Somali refugee who has lost everything. Orphaned, stateless, and traumatized, Muna arrives in Sweden at the mercy of the asylum system. Her chapters, sparse and aching, unfold in social housing units, language schools, and endless queues. If Kemi’s and Brittany’s struggles are against glass ceilings, Muna’s is against the floor itself. Her Blackness is not symbolic; it is simply another reason for her erasure.

Through Muna, Åkerström gives voice to the silenced, the ones whose names don’t appear in glossy diversity reports or company HR slides. Muna’s life is marked by bureaucracy, by pity disguised as aid, by the cold efficiency of a system built to contain rather than uplift. Her longing for home, for meaning, for recognition is rendered with devastating simplicity. She does not seek to “succeed” in Sweden; she seeks merely to exist.

By placing these three women in parallel narrative arcs, Åkerström achieves something quite rare: a literary sociology of race and gender. The novel is not content to depict racism as an occasional slight or personal failing; it presents it as a structural, cultural reality embedded even in the most “progressive” societies. Sweden here is not a utopia but a snow-covered maze, clean on the surface, opaque in its corridors, quietly cruel in its demands for conformity.

What elevates In Every Mirror She’s Black beyond its thematic richness is its narrative craftsmanship. Åkerström shifts perspectives with precision, allowing each woman her own distinct voice and cadence. The prose is lucid, often spare, but it carries the weight of silence beautifully. The dialogue, especially in scenes of cultural miscommunication is sharply observed. There are moments when the rhythm lags, particularly in the middle section, but these are minor detours in an otherwise assured debut.

For African readers, particularly women navigating Western professional, domestic, or educational spaces, the novel will feel uncannily familiar. Kemi’s hyper-competence, Brittany’s curated perfection, Muna’s yearning, all resonate with the emotional labor of Black women who are constantly made to prove their humanity in societies that refuse to see it. The novel insists that success does not shield one from violence, that love does not equal liberation, and that safety, for Black women, is always conditional.

Yet In Every Mirror She’s Black is not simply a lament. It is also a call to vision. Åkerström does not offer her characters tidy resolutions. There are no sudden awakenings, no romantic salvations, no triumphant endings. What she offers instead is a kind of clarity; an unflinching mirror in which the reader, regardless of race or nationality, is invited to see the systems we inhabit and the selves we project. It is a novel that resists the seduction of the “uplifting” narrative, and in doing so, it is far more powerful.

This is particularly significant in an African literary context where postcolonial narratives often oscillate between the heroic (the survivor who returns home triumphant) and the tragic (the migrant swallowed by the West). Åkerström offers a third path: that of complexity, refusal, multiplicity. Her characters are neither heroes nor victims. They are flawed, searching, angry, resilient. In them, we recognize not a type, but a truth.

Indeed, the very title of the novel is a provocation. In Every Mirror She’s Black,but what does the mirror see? Who holds it? Who constructed it? What does it mean to see oneself only through the eyes of others? In many ways, the novel is less about the women themselves than about the mirrors they are forced to inhabit: corporate policies, romantic projections, refugee case files. Åkerström urges us to ask: who gets to be whole, and who must always perform?

For all its seriousness, the novel is also deeply readable. Åkerström writes with a photographer’s eye; detail is her medium. She has a gift for gesture: the way a colleague hesitates before pronouncing Kemi’s name, the chill in Jonny’s voice when Brittany contradicts him, the blankness in a social worker’s face when Muna asks a question. These small moments accumulate, revealing how power is exercised not just through laws and policies, but through everyday interactions.

If In Every Mirror She’s Black has a limitation, it is perhaps that it is overly loyal to its own structure. The three storylines, though thematically resonant, rarely intersect in meaningful narrative ways. Readers may yearn for a more interconnected climax, a narrative convergence that never quite arrives. But this, too, may be intentional. The novel is not about solidarity; it is about simultaneity, how Black women can be in the same place, facing the same storm, yet remain ships passing in the dark.

Ultimately, this is a novel about seeing and being seen. In a world where the image of the Black woman is either fetishized, feared, or flattened, Åkerström dares to offer us women who are complicated, contradictory, fully human. She gives us the migrant with ambition, the beauty with no agency, the refugee with an interior life. She gives us the mirror, yes, but she also gives us the woman behind the glass, looking back.

What stays with you after this novel is its honesty. Åkerström offers no resolution, no redemption. Life continues, fractured and unglamorous. But within that, there’s still the quiet defiance of survival. The refusal to disappear.

When I finished reading, I thought of the Ghanaian women I know abroad; nurses, artists, cleaners, consultants, all of them holding themselves together in places that keep asking them to be grateful. I thought of how each one might find a piece of herself in these pages, and how each mirror, however cracked, still reflects a kind of beauty.

Perhaps that’s the gift of this book: it doesn’t tell us how to belong. It simply asks that we keep looking, not at the mirrors that others hold up to us, but at the truth that glints quietly behind the glass.