Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“They’re always in trouble, these Igbos. Na wow o .”

“Your mother was an Igbo.”

“Half.”

“That’s quite enough.” But when she looked he was laughing, coming to kiss her head, leaving. “I’ll be back before Sunday. I love you.”

“Mo n mo.”

There was no equivalent expression for I love you in Yoruba. “If you love someone, you show them,” her father liked to say. But said it nevertheless in English, to which she’d answer in Yoruba, “I know,” mo n mo .

Out the door.

Just like that.

Stood, set down his coffee cup, kissed her on the forehead once, hand each on her Afro puffs, walked out the door. Gone. Woolly hair and woolen suit and broad and buoyant shoulders bobbing, bobbing, bobbing out of view. The swinging door swung open, shut.

Fourth: fourteen hours later in his bed beneath the blanket, sliding down beneath the kente into darkness, absence, scent and heat, a still and silent ocean. And remaining. In the quiet. Lying ramrod straight, not moving, knowing.

That something had been removed.

That a thing that had been in the world had just left it, as surely and simply as people leave rooms or the dust of dead dandelion lifts into wind, silent, leaving behind it this empty space, openness. Incredible, unbearable, interminable openness appearing now around her, above her, beyond her, a gaping, inside her, a hole, or a mouth: unfamiliar, wet, hollow and hungry. Un-appeasable.

The details came later — such as details ever come, such as one can know the details of a death besides one’s own, how it went, how long or calming, cold or terrifying, lonely — but the thing happened there in the bedroom. The loss. Later, if ever alone, she’ll consider it, the uncanny similarity between that and this moment: alone in the dark in the sweltering heat in a room not her own in a bed far too big. Mirror endings. The last of a life as she’d known it, that midnight in Lagos, never suspecting what had happened (it simply wouldn’t have occurred to her, that evil existed, that death was indifferent), yet knowing somehow. This was the event for her, the loss in the concrete, the hours in which she crossed between knowing and knowledge and onward to “loss” in the abstract, to sadness. Six, seven hours of openness slowly hardening into loneliness.

The details came later — how a truckload of soldiers, Hausas, high on cheap heroin and hatred, had killed them, setting fire to the mansion, piling rocks at the exits — but the details never hardened into pictures in her head. So she never really believed it, not really, couldn’t see it, never settled on a sight that would have made the thing stick, put some meat on the words (roaring fire, burning wood), put a face on the corpses. The words remained bones. They were no one, the “soldiers.” They were shadow-things, not human beings. The “Nwaneris” were what they’d always been: a portrait on the wall, a name. A pallid cast of characters. Not even characters, but categories: civilian, soldier, Hausa, Igbo, villain, victim. Too vague to be true.

And not him.

It was him. He was there without question (though they never could confirm it, his bones turned to ashes, in REM, dreaming, his “Fola!” two bubbles), as rampant anti-Igbo pogroms kicked off the war. But she simply couldn’t see him, not her father as she knew him, as she’d seen him from the table, bobbing, bobbing out of view. It was someone else they’d killed that night, these “soldiers” whom she couldn’t see, this “victim” whom they didn’t know, anonymous as are all victims.

The indifference of it.

This was the problem and would be ever after, the block on which she sometimes feels her whole being stumbled: that he (and so she) became so unspecific. In an instant. That the details didn’t matter in the end. Her life until that moment had seemed so original, a richly spun tale with a bright cast of characters — she: motherless princess of vertical palace, their four-story apartment on Victoria Island; they: passionate, glamorous friends of her father’s, staff; he: widowed king of the castle. Had he died a death germane to this life as she’d known it — in a car crash, for example, in his beloved Deux Chevaux, or from liver cancer, lung, to the end puffing Caos, swilling rum — she could have abided the loss. Would have mourned. Would have found herself an orphan in a four-story apartment, having lost both her parents at thirteen years old, but would have been, thus bereaved, a thing she recognized (tragic) instead of what she became: a part of history (generic).

She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way that they’d nod as if, yes, all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, but of course . Never mind that the Hausas were targeting Igbos, and her father was a Yoruba, and her grandmother Scottish, and the house staff Fulani, some Indian even. Ten dead, one an Igbo, minor details, no matter. She felt it in America when she got to Pennsylvania (having been taken first to Ghana by the kindly Sena Wosornu), that her classmates and professors, white or black, it didn’t matter, somehow believed that it was natural, however tragic, what had happened. That she’d stopped being Folasadé Somayina Savage and had become instead the native of a generic War-Torn Nation. Without specifics. Without the smell of rum or posters of the Beatles or a kente blanket tossed across a king-size bed or portraits. Just some war-torn nation, hopeless and inhuman and as humid as a war-torn nation anywhere, all war-torn nations everywhere. “I’m sorry,” they’d say, nodding yes in agreement, as one says I’m sorry when the elderly die, “that’s too bad” (but not that bad, more “how these things go” in this world), in their eyes not a hint of surprise. Surely, broad-shouldered, woolly-haired fathers of natives of hot war-torn countries got killed all the time?

How had this happened?

It wasn’t Lagos she longed for, the splendor, the sensational, the sense of being wealthy — but the sense of self surrendered to the senselessness of history, the narrowness and naïveté of her former individuality. After that, she simply ceased to bother with the details, with the notion that existence took its form from its specifics. Whether this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death — didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.

• • •

This is what she’s thinking as she sits here, wet, empty, a newly wrecked ship on a shore in the dark: that the details are different but the space is unchanging, unending, the absence as present, absolute. He is gone now, her father, has been gone for so long that his goneness has replaced his existence in full. It didn’t happen over time but in an instant, in his bedroom: he was removed, and she remained, and that was that.

That is that.

One pepper bird, pluckier than its bickering playmates, pecks at the glass at the back of the drapes. “Kookoo, kookoo, kookoo,” it cries, and she is reminded for a moment of what she said as she woke. What was it? She can’t remember. A nightmare. It was nothing. “ Koo -koo,” insists the bulbul, but the A/C cuts in.

“Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.” A death rattle. It dies, and the bedroom falls silent.

Fola waits a minute, then laughs at her waiting. Waiting for what? There is nothing , she thinks. He is gone, she remains, that is that, tat-tat-tat . She changes and goes back to sleep.