Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“What’s ha’ name?” she asked him, pen poised over clipboard.

“Folasadé,” Kweku mumbled, too exhausted to think.

“That’s pretty. How do you spell that?”

Without opening his eyes. “F-o-l-a-s-a-d-e.”

• • •

It didn’t even occur to him what the nurse was actually asking until the confusion at the discharge desk. “No Idowu Sai.” A different nurse now, smacking her gum in irritation, slapped the folder on the countertop and pointed. Acrylic nail. Kweku took the folder and looked at the writing. First name: Folasade. Last name: Sai. The nurse, smiling, smug, blew a bubble, let it pop.

“Fola-say-dee Sai. Is that your kid? Fola-say-dee?”

The last time he felt this was with “Say-dee,” this sense of epiphany, this same unsettling sort of discovering that he’s gotten it wrong , that a thing he has looked at countless times and found unremarkable, discountable, is in fact beautiful, has been beautiful all the while. How had he missed it? The just-barely-born infant, the just-barely-breathing neonate, hands clenched in hope, not bizarre-looking, alien, as he’d once thought of newborns (even Olu, Taiwo, Kehinde), but glorious, worth the fight. With the accompanying consternation: sudden cinching in the chest, on the left, where he feels dying and other gathering forces, less: blind-but-now-I-see, choir of angels, hallelujah, more: but-what-does-it-all-amount-to-in-the-end, a sharp, a shrill frustration.

Or what he thinks is frustration.

He once read that frustration is self-pity by another name.

Whatever you call it.

The last time he felt it was with Sadie: frustration/pity, that the world is both too beautiful and more beautiful than he knows, than he’s noticed , that he’s missed it, and that he might be missing more but that he might never know and that it might be too late; that it can be too late, that there is such a thing, a Too Late in the first place, that time will run out, and that it might not even matter in the end what he’s noticed, for how can it matter when it all disappears?

Or a sort of spiral of thoughts in this general direction that comes to a point at that final defense, i.e., how can he be faulted for all that he’s missed when it’s all wrapped in meaninglessness, when everything dies? He is pleading his innocence ( I didn’t know what was beautiful; I would have fought for it all, had I seen, had I known! ), though with whom he is pleading, in the sunroom as in the nursery, remains for the most part unclear. And something else. Something new now. Neither righteousness nor blindness nor blind indignation nor pity.

Acceptance.

Of death.

For he knows, in a strange way, as the spiral comes to rest at when everything dies , that he’s about to.

• • •

He knows — as he stands here in wifebeater and MC Hammer pants, shoulder against sliding door, halfway slid open, sliding deeper into reverie, remembrance and re- other things (regret, remorse, resentment, reassessment) — that he’s dying.

He knows.

But doesn’t notice.

It is knowing, not knowledge. Inconspicuous among his other thoughts. Not even a “thought.” A sound traveling toward him through water, not rushing. A shape forming far off out of negative space. A bubble just beginning its ascent into consciousness, still ten, fifteen minutes from awareness, behind schedule, all the facts being returned to their upright positions, attendants preparing the cabin for arrival. A woman. The voice of a woman. The love of a woman. Love for her and from her, a woman, two women. The mother and lover, where it begins and is ending, as he’s always suspected it must. (More on this in a moment.)

At the moment he is on the threshold, transfixed by the garden.

How in the world has he missed this?

In nearly six years of looking — every morning from this sunroom with its floor-to-ceiling windows and architectural-glass roof, pausing midsip of coffee and Milo (poor man’s mocha) to shift his Graphic , distracted, sucking his teeth at the view, thinking he should have insisted upon the pool and the pebbles, that the “love grass” wants water, that this is the trouble with green, that he hopes his bloody carpenter Mr. Lamptey is happy now — he’s never once seen it.

His garden.

Never could.

He didn’t want a garden. He couldn’t have been clearer. Nothing lush, soft, or verdant; all the lines clean, etc. (In fact, he didn’t want the things that he associates with gardens, like Fola or the English, on his property, in his sight.) He wanted pebbles, white pebbles, a wall-to-wall carpet of white like fresh snow, a rectangular pool. With the sun glinting brilliantly off the white and the water, the heat kept at bay by a concrete overhang. This is what he’d sketched in the Beth Israel cafeteria, sipping cheap lukewarm coffee, stinking of disinfectant and death. A chlorine-blue box on a beach of bleached-white. Sterile, square, elemental.

An orderly view.

And the life that came with it: getting out of bed every morning, coming to sit in his little sunroom with the paper and croissants, sipping fresh expensive coffee served by a butler named Kofi to whom he’d speak in a British accent (somewhat inexplicably), “That will be all.” All his children sleeping comfortably in the Bedroom Wing (now the Guest Bedroom Wing). A cook cooking breakfast in the Dining Wing. And Fola. By far the best part of the view in her Bic-blue bikini swimming the last of her morning laps, Afro bejeweled with droplets, rising dripping from the water like Aphrodite from waves (somewhat improbably; she hated getting her hair wet), and waving.

Stick figures on napkin.

She: smiling, dripping, waving.

He: smiling, sipping coffee, waving back.

• • •

Instead, he’s come to sit here all these mornings with his paper and his breakfast (poor man’s mocha, four fat triangles of toasted cocoa bread), beset on all sides by the floor-to-ceiling windows and the vision of a carpenter- cum -mystic.

That bloody man.

Mr. Lamptey.

The carpenter. Now the gardener. Still an enigma. Who built the house in two years working impeccably and alone, smoking hash on the job, rolling blunts during lunch, singing prayers of contrition for any harm done the wood: who came to work in swami clothing (saffron, barefoot, hip-slung tool belt) looking less like a sage than an elderly stripper with his hammer and chisel and bare chiseled thighs: an ancient soul in a younger man’s body with infant eyes in his old man’s face, some seventy odd years old with his cataracts and six-pack: who sabotaged the sunroom and denied Kweku his view. But who understood the vision : simple one-story compound. The only carpenter in Accra who would build it.

All of the other high-end architect-contractors had their own ideas (same one idea) of how a house should look; namely, as gaudy and gargantuan as financially possible, with no reference to any notion of African architecture whatsoever. Kweku tried to explain this as politely as possible in one overly air-conditioned office after another: (a) that his house as envisioned wouldn’t appear “out of place,” as the contractors suggested (“This isn’t the States”); (b) that Accra had always welcomed brave modernist architecture, just look at the futurist genius of Black Star Square; (c) that a compound around a courtyard was in fact a classically Ghanaian structure, expressly suited to Ghana’s environment, which their show homes were not. Those were storehouses — not “homes”—for the stockpiling of purchases: tacky paintings, velour couches, plastic flowers, pounds of kitsch, Persian rugs, velvet drapes, chandeliers, bearskin throw-rugs, all completely out of context in the tropics. And cheap. No matter how massive they made them, with their three-story foyers and pillars and pools, the homes always looked cheap.