In The Other Crucifix, Benjamin Kwakye explores the relationship between cultural memory and belongingness by focusing on the tensions that shape African identity in America. At the centre of the novel is a young Ghanaian man from a poor family who migrates to America for education and economic amelioration. His migration, although voluntary, places the protagonist-narrator, Jojo Badu, in a ‘middle passage’, a life-negating environment in which his cultural rootedness is ruptured, and which he must survive by holding on to memories that will eventually replace his original home. In this sense, ‘home’ and identity are defined by cultural memory, which, in the narrative, takes the form of remnant consciousness: ‘the ontological, physical, and spiritual manifestations of reclaiming an African cultural heritage’ (McKoy ‘This Unity of Spilt Blood’: 195). Remnant consciousness embodies the migratory subject's hunger for a remembered home that is located in a desire for cultural wholeness. Home as it was in Ghana may not exist for Jojo in America; instead, home is replaced by cultural memory which helps to re-situate the migratory subject, but is also necessarily affected by the tensions between competing identities in the origin and the destination. For the migratory subject, remnant consciousness can provide the means to reconcile these competing and seemingly irreconcilable identities. In the case of Jojo, remnant consciousness is what he resorts to in his attempt to resolve the tension between the anxiety of losing his original identity and his desire to create a new one. Nevertheless, as Jojo begins to put down new roots and to define himself according to the truth of his marginality, America also becomes a space for his identity-in-transition, an identity that becomes a matter of choice rather than tradition.

The Other Crucifix does not tell the story of the successful New World man but focuses on the loneliness and the sense of cultural and linguistic displacement that cripple an immigrant's attempts to fulfil the American dream. Disease, breakage and chasm characterize Jojo's immigrant experience.