Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.

Because she said, “Thank you, I would, please,” and the same thing again when he asked her to marry him (she always says yes) and is loyal and simple and supple and young. Because her thoughts don’t explode over breakfast. He believes he loves Ama because of the symmetry between them, between his capacity for provision and her prerequisites for joy. Because he finds all symmetry elegant and this symmetry quiet: an elegant kind of quiet, here and there, around the house. He believes he loves Ama — although he once thought he didn’t, thought he cared for and was grateful for but didn’t “really love” her, and in the beginning he didn’t, before he recognized her genius — because he knows something, now, about women. He has come to understand his basic relationship to women, the very crux of it, the need to be finally sufficient. To know he’s enough, once and for all, now and forever.

This is why (he believes) he loves Ama.

• • •

He is wrong.

In fact, it is because as she sleeps at night, with a thin film of sweat above her ripe plum-brown lip and her breath sounding sweetly and loudly beside him, she looks so uncannily like Taiwo. Like Taiwo when she wasn’t yet five years old and when he was a resident, postcall, staggering home, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to stand, too worked up to sit — and so pacing.

He’d pace to and fro about the narrow apartment (the best he could afford on his resident’s pay, the dim, skinnier half of a two-family duplex on Huntington Ave where the ghetto began, beneath the overpass that separates Boston from Brookline, the wealth from the want) in his scrubs, in the dark. Down the hallway, through the kitchen, to the first room, the boys’, with its rickety wooden bunk bed, Kehinde’s drawings on the walls. To the little windowed closet, from which he’d watch some minor drug trade. To the bathroom, where he’d wash his face.

Press a towel to it.

Hold.

But finally to the front room and to Taiwo on the pullout couch, with no bedroom of her own as he so wanted her to have, his first daughter, a complete mystery despite the resemblance to the brother. A girl-child. A new thing. More precious somehow.

With a thin film of sweat above her lip care of the “project heat.”

Which he’d wipe away, thinking it’s the least I can do .

For a girl with no bedroom and conch-shell-pink lips.

Where he’d fall asleep upright, sitting next to her.

• • •

In fact, he loves Ama because, asleep, she looks like Taiwo when his daughter wasn’t five and slept sweating on the couch, and because when she snores she sounds just like his mother, when he wasn’t five and slept sweating on the floor. In that same thatch-roofed hut where his sister would die, on a mat beside his siblings’ by the one wooden bed, where their mother snored sweetly and loudly, dreaming wildly, as her son listened carefully to the places she went (to the operas and jazz riffs and snare drums and war chants, to the fifties as they sounded in faraway lands, beyond the beach), dreaming aloud of on-the-radio-places that he’d never seen and that she’d never see. And this sight and this sound, these two senses — of his daughter, (a), a modern thing entirely and a product of there , North America, snow, cow products, thoughts of the future, of his mother, (b), an ancient thing, a product of here , hut, heat, raffia, West Africa, the perpetual past — wouldn’t otherwise touch but for Ama.

A bridge.

Loyal and simple and supple young Ama who came from Kokrobité still stinking of salt (and of palm oil, Pink Oil, evaporated Carnation) to sleep by his side in suburban Accra. Ama, whose sweat and whose snores when she’s sleeping close miles of sorrow and ocean and sky, whose soft body is a bridge on which he walks between worlds.

The very bridge he’d been looking for, for thirty-one years.

• • •

He thought when he left that he knew how to build one: by returning home triumphant with a degree and a son, laying the American-born baby before the Ghana-bound grandma like a wreath at a shrine, “See, I told you I’d return.” And with a boy-child on top of it, a luckier-Moses. A father and a doctor. As promised. A success. He imagined this moment every day in Pennsylvania, how his cameraman would film it, panning up to her face. Cue strings. Tears in mother’s eyes. Wonder, joy, amazement. The awe of the siblings. The jubilation. Cue drums. Then the dancing and feasting, fish grilled, a goat slaughtered, red sparks from the fire leaping for joy in the sky, a black sky thick with star, the ocean roaring contentedly. The reunion a bridge, her fulfillment the brick.

This is how he planned it.

But this isn’t how it happened.

By the time he returned she was gone.

Heartbreaking winter, 1975.

A one-bedroom hovel.

A wife of one year.

Who was sitting at a table in the “kitchen,” i.e., a corner where a stove and sink were shoved against a wall with a tub. He entered in an overcoat. He hated this particular overcoat. A bulk of dull beige from the Goodwill downtown. She’d insisted that he buy it and now demanded that he wear it. It was the warmest thing he owned, but it made him look poor.

He came into the apartment, looking poor. She looked gorgeous. She always looked gorgeous, even angry, to him. She wore bell-bottom jeans and a wraparound sweater, both care of the Goodwill, a scarf in her hair.

No, not a scarf, he saw, looking more closely. A gold-flecked asooke , the Nigerian cloth. Nigerians were far more artful than Ghanaians with their head wraps. “More flamboyant, more ostentatious,” they Ghanaians liked to chide. But at that moment he saw otherwise: more insistent upon beauty. At all times, in all things, insistent upon flair. Even here, in this hovel, wearing secondhand clothing, at a table by a tub, she insisted on flair. Had found this gold cloth, no doubt expensive, from her father, to sort of wind around her Afro puff, true to her name. “Wealth confers my crown.” Folasadé . She looked gorgeous.

He came into the apartment and froze at the door.

Her hands were folded neatly on the red plastic tablecloth, the kind that you buy for a picnic, then bin. They’d snuck it home, embarrassed, from his orientation barbecue. She thought it cheered things up a bit. Flowers, too. Of course. Everything looked as it always looked. The bed was made. The baby was sleeping. And breathing, he checked quickly.

Because something was wrong.

He stopped at the door knowing something was wrong.

• • •

He didn’t see the letter lying flat on the table. Only Fola as she turned her head, neck taut with fear. She didn’t speak. He didn’t move. His cameraman slipped in the window. In this scene: a Young Man receives Horrible News. He set down his bag now. To free both his hands up. For whatever he might have do with them, given whatever she had to say.

She said, “Your mother is ill, love.” She held up the letter. “Your cousin got our address from the college and wrote.”

These were too many words to make sense of at once. Mother. Ill. Cousin. Address. College. And wrote. Which of his cousins even knew how to write? This mean, specious question somehow washed to shore first. “My cousins are illiterates! They know nothing!” he bellowed, not knowing why he was shouting, or at Fola. “It’s a lie!”

She just watched him, with that expression, with her brows knit together and her mouth folded over, an upside-down smile. Only yesterday he’d noticed that she made this face with Olu, too, whenever he was wailing to communicate complaint. The brows knit together, the head slightly sideways. “ Okunrin mi ,” she’d say. My son. “I know, I know, I know. It hurts.”