Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

ii

Taiwo retreats to the den after dinner, three shallow steps down from the dining room table. She sits on the love seat’s strange orange plaid wool with a copy of Ghana Ovation . Behind her Fola, at the table with Benson, is discussing the tradition of fantasy coffins; she hears them there, faintly, conferring in whispers like grown-ups evading the hearing of children. They felt like that, children , she thinks, during dinner, as watchful and rule-bound as Catholic school pupils — and wonders why all of them do this, still now, even now, the African Filial Piety act? Lowered eyes, lowered voices, feigned shyness, bent shoulders, the curse of their culture, exaltation of deference, that beaten-in impulse to show oneself obedient and worthy of praise for one’s reverence of Order (never mind that the Order is crumbling, corrupted, departed, dysfunctional; respect must be shown it). She loathes them for doing it, herself and her siblings, the house staff, her African classmates. Quite simply, she isn’t convinced that “respect” is the basis, not for them the respectful nor for them the respected. She suspects that it’s laziness, a defaulting to the familiar, or cowardice in the former and power in the latter. Most African parents, she’d guess, grew up powerless, with no one on whom to impose their own will, and so bully their children, through beatings and screaming, to lighten the load of postcolonial angst…

or assorted observations along the same lines, when she flips to a page and is yanked back from thought. By the name first. The caption, fine print amid faces (weddings, polo matches, funerals, glossy chaos of society photos), “Femi and Niké Savage at…,” and then by the photograph:

the shoes

and suit

and shirt

and neck

and smile

and nose

and eyes.

Those eyes.

Black, thick-lidded eyes gazing back at her, red-rimmed, the wild sort of gaze of a man on a drug, matching smile (hard, unfocused), the wife there beside him gone ashen with age, the new wig a blond bob.

She hurls the magazine across the room, gut reaction. It lands with the splatter of pages on wood. Fola and Benson look up from the table. “Darling?” says Fola, but Taiwo can’t speak. “What is it? What happened?”

“A bug,” breathes out Taiwo. She points to the magazine splayed on the floor. “I was k-killing a bug.”

“Ah, yes. Welcome to Ghana.” Benson doesn’t notice her tremulous voice. “That reminds me. Are you all on antimalarial medication? The mosquitoes can be killer. I’ve got Aralen in the car.” Taiwo shakes her head. “I’ll go grab it. No worries. I might just have enough to get you started for now.” He glances at Fola as he stands from the table.

Fola nods, distracted. “Great, thanks,” as he goes.

iii

Fola stands also and stares at her daughter, aware of a heartbeat too fast and too loud, throbbing ache, lower right, where she has the small scar from the day she went tumbling down the stairs with the girl. Almost hard to believe she was just twenty-eight, half a lifetime away, with three children (first girl: a complete mystery to her mother next to Olu and Kehinde, a new thing entirely, more perilous somehow). Already at one she was beautiful, Taiwo. They both were. Wherever they went, they were stopped. Strangers always thought they were both baby girls and would gush in high voices, “How bea uuu tiful.” They were. But it made Fola nervous. To handle such children. Too precious, too perfect, the girl in particular, like a very expensive gift made of breakable material that one should just look at and try not to touch. Kehinde was easy, like Olu, even easier, but Taiwo would cry whenever Fola put her down and would wail without pause until Fola returned — only Fola, never Kweku — to pick her back up. It was this that confused her: how much Fola liked this, the thrill she’d receive when she picked up the girl, and she’d immediately stop crying to smile at her mother, to cling to her, burying her face in her neck. The neediness touched her, overwhelmed her, unhinged her; she worried about favoring or spoiling the child, or confusing her, leading her to believe that the world was less patently apathetic than it actually was.

On the occasion of note she was washing the babies in the bathtub upstairs when the front doorbell rang. It was Olu, then five, driven home by a teacher who lived down the street and now honked, pulling off. The door was at the bottom of those two narrow staircases, too long a trip down with the twins unattended. She picked them up, dripping suds, one in each arm, and went rushing down the stairs to get Olu. And slipped. She can remember the feeling still now, that pure panic that flooded her lungs as her slipper flew out and her back hit the stairs and she tumbled down clinging to babies’ wet skin slick with sweet-smelling suds. When she came to a stop she was holding Kehinde only, having somehow nicked her ribcage on the stair edge, and bleeding. Taiwo had landed, by some act of mercy, at the bottom of the staircase completely unharmed. She was sitting there staring as Fola rose, bleeding, her arms around Kehinde. Not crying, just staring. But the look in the eyes was more piercing than screaming. The eyes seemed to say you let go, you let me go . Those eyes — which she’d found so unnerving, in the beginning, having only ever seen them in a painting, unblinking — now stared at her, heartbroken, heartbreaking, accusing: a dead woman’s eyes on a baby girl’s face.

Olu pressed the doorbell, and Taiwo started crying. At his sister’s distress Kehinde promptly started wailing. Fola started screaming in her head; crying silently, she opened the door to stunned Olu. “Hold your brother.” Olu took Kehinde, and Fola grabbed Taiwo, ushering them all up the stairs and away from the cold. But the girl kept on crying, a very tired cry, untiringly, for hours, until evening when her father came home.

Fola looks at Taiwo and can feel the girl’s heaving, her wide eyes unyielding, dry, heartbroken, seething. This is the thing that has come in between them, this rage, Fola knows, since the twins went to Lagos — but neither will tell her what happened with Femi, and Sena, who found them, alleged not to know. There was just the one phone call at sunrise in summer ten months from the day that she left them at Logan: Uncle Sena, last seen on a tarmac in Ghana, now calling from Nigeria at five in the morning. “I knew they were yours from the moment I saw them. Those are Somayina’s grandkids, I said to myself,” Sena blubbered while Fola sat fumbling for a light switch, still sleeping on the couch. “From the beginning. Start again.”

His story was confusing — the more for the static, and how Sena told it, both rushing and halting, conflicted, determined to help, hiding something — but Fola got the gist of it. The first bit she knew:

when her father was murdered his mistress decided his house was now hers and moved in with their son. The two lived together as queen and little prince running a brothel for soldiers through the end of Biafra. In this way young Femi began his career as a dealer of women, small arms, and cocaine, striking out on his own as an underworld wunderkid when Bimbo OD’d at the end of the war. This Fola learned on her last trip to Lagos, in 1975, to beg Femi for help, having heard from a Nigerian in Baltimore by chance that her brother was knee deep in naira. Reunion. They’d never been close. He was four years her junior. He’d come to the house now and then with his mother, this Bimbo, a tall, hard, and wiry woman who in another life may well have modeled, not whored. Her father had never sought to hide them from Fola (“her mother was dead and a man had his needs”), and she knew that the boy who would wait in the kitchen while Bimbo went upstairs was her aburo .