Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Faces Kweku Sai knew.

To him, who could name grief by each one of her faces, the logic was familiar from a warmer third world, where the boy who tails his mother freshly bloodied from labor (fruitless labor) to the edge of an ocean at dawn — who sees her place the little corpse like a less lucky Moses all wrapped up in palm frond, in froth, then walk away, but who never hears her mention it, ever, not once — learns that “loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind.

Even then, at twenty-four, a new father and still a child, a newly motherless child, Kweku knew that.

• • •

Now he stares at the glittering, arrested by beauty, and knows what he knew all those winters ago: that when faced with a thing that is fragile and perfect in a world that is ugly and crushing and cruel the correct course of action is: Give it no name. Pretend that it doesn’t exist.

But it doesn’t work.

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal — logical-admirable refusal — to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality of beauty, much less of beauty in fragility in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places! in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die.

He sees this so clearly he closes his eyes. His head begins throbbing. He opens his eyes. He tries but can’t move. He is glued there, overwhelmed.

The last time he felt this was with Sadie.

Winter again, 1989.

The delivery ward at the Brigham.

Fola propped up in the hospital bed, still bloody from labor and clutching his arm.

The twins, nine years old, fast asleep in the lounge in those ugly blue chairs with the yellow foam stuffing, arranged as they always were, locked into place like some funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle: Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder and Kehinde’s cheek on Taiwo’s head, a girl and a boy with the same amber eyes throwing sparks from their otherwise gentle young faces.

Olu eating apple slices, already so healthy at fourteen years old, reading Things Fall Apart, the single visible sign of his mounting distress the rote up-and-down bounce of his femur.

And the newborn, yet unnamed, fighting for life in its incubator. Losing.

Baby Sai.

• • •

In the rancid delivery room.

“What’s wrong with Idowu? Where are they taking her?”

She clutched his bare arm. He was still in his scrubs, nothing else, arms uncovered. He’d been stitching when she went into labor (too soon). A friend at the Brigham had had him paged over the intercom, and he’d run through the snow from Beth Israel here with the swirling flakes clouding his vision as he ran, and the words, two words, clouding his thinking. Too soon .

“It was too soon.”

“NO.”

Not a human sound. Animal. A growl rumbling forth from the just-emptied belly. A battle cry. But who was the enemy? Him. The obstetrician. The timing. The belly itself. “Folasadé,” he murmured.

“Kweku, no,” Fola growled, her teeth clenched, her nails piercing his goose-pimpled skin. Drawing blood. “Kweku, no.” Now she started to cry.

“Please,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”

She shook her head, crying, still piercing his arm (and other pierce-able parts of him neither perceived). “Kweku, no.” As if changing his name in her mind now from Kweku, just Kweku, to Kweku-No.

He laid his lips gently on the crown of her head. Her crowning glory, Fola’s hair, reduced by half by fresh sweat. A cloud of tiny spirals, each one clinging to the next in solidarity and smelling of Indian Hemp. “We have three healthy children,” he said to her softly. “We are blessed.”

“Kweku-No, Kweku-No, Kweku- No .”

The last one was shrill, nearing rage, accusation. He had never seen Fola unraveled like this. Her two other pregnancies had gone perfectly, medically speaking, the deliveries like clockwork, instructional-video smooth: the first one in Baltimore when they were still children, the second here in Boston, a C-section, the twins. And now this, ten years later, a complete accident, the third (though they were all complete accidents in a way). She was different with this one almost right from the start. She insisted upon knowing the gender at once. Then insisted he not tell anyone, not even the kids, not (a) that she was expecting and then (b) what it was. Both became obvious that evening in summer she returned with four gallons of pastel pink paint. She chose the name without him, for “the child who follows twins.” This didn’t so much surprise him. She’d become kind of precious about her Yoruba heritage after becoming iya-ibeji , a mother to twins. He didn’t like the name, the way Idowu sounded, and less what it meant, something about conflict and pain. But he was relieved that her choice wasn’t something more dramatic, like Yemanja , the way she’d been acting. Building shrines.

And now this. Ten weeks early. There was nothing to be done.

“You have to do something .”

He looked at the nurse.

A drinker, he’d guess, from the paunch and rosacea. Irish, from the trace of a South Boston a . But no trace of bigotry, which often went with this, and gentle eyes, grayish-blue, glistening. The woman managed to frown and to smile simultaneously. Sympathetically. While Fola drew blood from his arm. “Where did they take her?” he asked, though he knew.

The nurse frowned-and-smiled. “To the N.I.C.U.”

• • •

He went to the waiting room.

Olu looked up.

He sat by his son, put a hand on his knee. Olu abandoned Achebe and looked at his knee as if only now aware it was bouncing.

“Watch your brother and sister. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To check on the baby.”

“Can I come with you?”

Kweku looked at the twins.

A funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle. They slept like his mother. Olu looked at them, too. Then pleadingly at Kweku.

“Come on then.”

• • •

They walked down the hospital hallway in silence. His cameraman walked backward in front of them. In this scene: a Well-Respected Doctor goes striding down the hallway to save his unsavable daughter. A Western. He wished he had a weapon. Little six-shooter, silver. Two. Something with more shine than a Hopkins M.D. And a clearer opponent. Or an opponent less formidable than the basics of medical science. The odds.

Presently, Olu. “What is it?”

End scene.

“Nothing.” Kweku chuckled. “Just tired, that’s all.” He patted his son’s head. Or his son’s browbone more accurately, his son’s head having moved from where he remembered its being. He looked at Olu closely now, surprised by the height (and by other things he’d seen but never noticed before: the wide latissimus dorsi, the angular jawline, the Yoruba nose, Fola’s nose, broad and straight, the taut skin the same shade as his own and so smooth, baby’s bum, even now in adolescence). He wasn’t pretty like Kehinde — who looked like a girl: an impossible, impossibly beautiful girl — but had become in the course of one weekend, it seemed, a really very handsome young man. He squeezed Olu’s shoulder, reassuring him. “I’m fine.”