This novel is a fiction that explores intercultural relationships over three generations between Wales and Kenya. The accompanying commentary explores the interplay of reality and fiction, autobiography and imagination, and the ethical considerations of representing racial others as an author from the centre of the white male hegemony. The grey area between the freedom to fictionalise and the potential for what Gayatri Spivak called ‘epistemic violence’ is navigated using the medical anthropologist Michael Taussig’s concept of the Nervous System, and consequently Walter Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image, which is at its root. These influence both form and method. I contend that this may allow a writing proprioceptively sensitive to culture if the author vulnerably interrogates their own biases. The commentary explores to what extent fiction is autobiographical using theory from Zadie Smith, Walter Benjamin, and Binyavanga Wainaina, and through a fictocritcal deep dive into the author’s own biases. In conjunction with this reflexivity are Suzanne Keen’s ideas on strategic empathizing techniques to implicate the reader in the manipulation of form and voice, thus effecting an equivocal, dialectical authenticity throughout the novel, which in turn destabilises essentialist ideas of racial or national purity.