Worlds Apart follows Sarah Lutterodt from her sheltered post-war childhood on a farm in southern England, through her life-changing years teaching university in Ghana, to her immersion in the rough and tumble of the American business world. With her husband, a Ghanaian mathematician, she struggles to find a place for her biracial family in an America that isnât always welcoming. In retirement, Lutterodt lives between two worlds: a newly experienced Ghana and an America for whom Africa too often remains the âdark continent.â
The teachings of Franciscan Friar, Richard Rohr, helped to liberate her from the strict orthodoxy of her childhood religion and approach differences - whether of race, culture, or economic circumstance - with the 'beginners mind' of Buddhist teaching.
Worlds Apart follows Sarah Lutterodt from her sheltered post-war childhood on a farm in southern England, through her life-changing years teaching university in Ghana, to her immersion in the rough and tumble of the American business world. With her husband, a Ghanaian mathematician, she struggles to find a place for her biracial family in an America that isnât always welcoming. In retirement, Lutterodt lives between two worlds: a newly experienced Ghana and an America for whom Africa too often remains the âdark continent.â
The teachings of Franciscan Friar, Richard Rohr, helped to liberate her from the strict orthodoxy of her childhood religion and approach differences - whether of race, culture, or economic circumstance - with the 'beginners mind' of Buddhist teaching.
If there is a continuous thread to my life, it runs deep below the surface in places I have found hard to reach. I have lived in many different places. There have been many discontinuities. I have pausedâsometimesâto wonder about the common humanity that underlies lives very different from my own. As I grow older, I have paused more often. Sometimes I have sought a deeper connection. Sometimes I have turned away because of fear or ignorance or hubris. I have too often been a prisoner of my own blindness.
Each of us sees the world through the lens of our own culture, education, and belief systems. Each of us lives within a bubble, big or small, be it the life of an African villager whose horizons are limited to a dayâs walk away from home or the life of an East Coast liberal who has traveled the world yet filters all their experiences through the lens of a seldom-examined American exceptionalism.
I count myself fortunate to have touched different worlds. But each of them, in its own way, has been bounded by its own proclivities and prejudicesâsome privileged, others much less so. Many times, I have been on the inside, unaware of my own entrapment until I broke out or looked back. More often I have lived on the edge looking in: observing, judging, valuing. Never quite belonging. Once, I jumped right in and had to fight to survive. Over time, my lens has broadened, I hope, but it is still a lens forged in the particular circumstances of my birth and education.
I am a pragmatist. I donât have the eye or ear of a novelist. My skill has been to adapt, to cope, to find a way through each day and each circumstance, not to uncover deep meaning as I went. Nor to really acknowledge why my accent has always set me apart in the U.S. or to accept the incomprehension my marriage to a Ghanaian seems to provoke.
In this memoir I set out initially to tell stories of my encounters with different worlds, my relationship to each, and my struggles along the way. But as I look back, the search for meaning, for a unifying thread, becomes imperative. I need to see the quilt that emerges when all the pieces are stitched together, when boundaries become places of connection rather than division. The picture is emerging slowly.
My story starts with the sheltered world of my childhood. I grew up on a farm in Surrey, England. Social class and religion defined the world in which we lived. Racial divisions didnât exist; we were simply unaware of different races. People of different skin color, as seen in the pages of picture books or represented by âGolliwogâ dolls, might as well have been gnomes or elves.
My parents, our nanny, my three siblings, and I lived in an ancient Tudor farmhouse. The farmworkers lived in cottages across the road from us. The boundaries seemed immutable. From the age of seven I attended a convent boarding school. There, our sense of apartnessânot to say superiorityâwas reinforced by the versions of history and geography we learned in the classroom. We had brief glimpses of other worlds. But these glimpses did little to affect my sense of who I was or where I belonged. My early identity has marked me indelibly, even though I have traveled far.
My story endsâor nearly soâin Ghana. An image is woven into the patchwork of my life. Weâre sitting in the air-conditioned living room of our house in Accra. The curtains are drawn. CNN is blasting news into the room, thanks to the satellite dish on our roof. The news connects us to the U.S., where we moved when we left Ghana in 1980. Adongo lives with his family in the staff quarters behind our house. The wall that separates our lives from theirs is not dissimilar from the one that separated my family growing up from the workers on my fatherâs farm all those years ago. Now, viewed through a wiser lens, I like to think that the boundaries are less rigid, more porousâplaces where lives are joined with empathy and understanding. They are boundaries, nonetheless.
No one has the capacity to live in an unboundaried world. The scale is too vast, our need for security too great. But we can live with more awareness of our blinders and with compassion for those in other worlds. We can stretch the fissures in our own containers to learn what lies outside and rejoice at what we find. We can persevere in the search for connection. Maybe it is in the search itself that the pattern underlying the disparate details of my life is to be found.
I began reading Worlds Apart with a set of expectations that I would throw out the window in less than twenty pages. Though born in World War II Britain, Dr. Sarah Lutterodt has a gift for writing simply, beautifully, and in such a way that she is universally understood. Her memoirs cover her entire life from birth to the present day as a female academic, first in Ghana, then in her home of England, and eventually to the United States with her Ghanaian husband. Lutterodt recounts the events of her life as she experienced them at the moment, but also with the reflection and wisdom of a twenty-first-century woman who confronts her privilege and prejudice even as she describes a time before phrases like âwhite privilegeâ and âpost-colonialâ were part of the general lexicon.
Â
It was certainly a privilege to read the memoirs of Dr. Lutterodt. Itâs clear to see she writes with her audience in mind and gives readers a bright, clear window into her journey as a mother, wife, and professor. As I read, I was fascinated to find that Lutterodtâs journey of gaining racial and cultural awareness in the twentieth century is just as applicable today. I saw many aspects of my adolescence in her search for a broader, more accepting Catholic faith in the wake of Vatican II and the desire to expand her horizons past the bounds of a family who, while loving and supported, didnât quite know what to do with her. The struggle to balance family and career will resonate for all mothers, especially female academics. Most poignant, though, is the realization that the prejudice Lutterodt experienced raising a biracial family still has parallels in the world of today.
Â
Lutterodt doesnât stop at detailing the prejudices she and her family struggled with in the world; she makes clear to the reader that she also struggled with the prejudice within. The level of self-examination that Lutterodt puts onto her pages goes well above and beyond what I would expect from a woman of her age. This is not to say that Worlds Apart is an objective and unflinching examination. Lutterodt, like all of us, is human and isnât exempt from occasionally virtue-signaling or interpreting events in a narrow light.Â
Â
I, personally, loved reading Worlds Apart, but if you view âwokeâ as a four-letter word then this book probably isnât for you. If, however, you are interested in examining the subtle effects of race and class on our world, youâll enjoy Dr. Lutterodtâs book. I give it four out of five stars. While otherwise well-written, there were a few spelling and grammatical errors within its pages, but not nearly enough to detract from the joy of reading it. This book probably wonât change your life, but its value and contribution cannot be denied.