Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

Only now does it dawn on him, here at the window where Fola’s deep laughter outside through the screen is a rumble of thunder before rushing rain, that perhaps he went seeking some final betrayal? It seemed obvious enough at the time why he left, with the lie about a poorly timed volunteer trip, “Doctors Without Borders,” he said, producing a pamphlet for Ling, saying that Fola should be with the twins, he didn’t mind: not to face the thing squarely, his father’s indifference. His greatest achievement, and Kweku forgot. He wept in his dorm room, alone, thirty minutes, then typed out a letter to say he would come, wiped his face, slapped his cheek, clenched his teeth in the mirror, silent vow no more crying, man , left the next week. Metro-North to the city, crowded subway to the airport, little shuttle to the terminal space reserved for Ghana Airways (now defunct), a funky alcove on some back lot at the airport where the circus act of check-in was just getting under way, ticketed passengers bumped at random off the flight protesting loudly, louder check-in agents shouting “There is no reason to shout!” entire families pleading mercy for their overweight baggage with tearing of sackcloth and gnashing of teeth, bags unpacked and repacked on the floor around Olu (gifts, foodstuffs, cans, clothing, toys strewn at his feet), up the stairs to the aircraft, then ten hours later down the stairs to Accra.

To forget the occasion.

But there was something else also, apart from the horror at imagining himself on a stage in the sun with no family there cheering, neither parents nor siblings. For proper cauterization, still more was required. To scorch away hope — as he must have intended, he thinks, must have wanted — he needed what happened: a thing still more searing than being forgotten, the burn one knows only at being betrayed.

• • •

His father looked younger, or smaller, than he remembered. He’d always been short, as per Benson, “not tall,” maybe five foot ten, same height as Fola, and sturdy, with strong arms and shoulders, a runner’s lean legs — but looked small in the crowd that was gathered there waiting, a density of primary color and sound, men and women, the men rather short, Olu noticed, all strong-armed and smooth-skinned and, shockingly, brown.

For all of his life when he’d looked for his father, like this, scanning quickly to spot Kweku’s face in the bleachers at meets or the seats at recitals, he’d scanned for the contrast, first and foremost for brown. A bluish color brown appropriately likened to chocolate and coffee, the complexion that he had himself — and that no one else had, no other father in Boston. He could always pick out Kweku in an instant by the color. Here at the airport his eyes, as conditioned, scanned quickly for contrast and blinked at the shock: they were all the same color, more or less, all the fathers, his own blended in, indiscrete, of a piece. When his eyes at last settled at the edge of the gathering on a man in pressed khakis, a crisply white shirt, squarish glasses, brown shoes, with his hands in his pockets, so much smaller than remembered, his feet set apart, Olu saw with some awe that his father stood out like the proverbial thumb from the men in the crowd. Though their skin and their height and their builds were the same, more or less, his own father was different.

He paused at the door between baggage claim and exit hall (the old airport exit, before renovation) and stared through the glass at the throng of brown men, shifting his bag on his shoulders but not stepping out. Not quite recognizing his father, or overwhelmed by recognition, as if seeing the man clearly for the first time in his life, suddenly seeing him singular, without the benefit of contrast, without the backdrop (on white) and still different (on brown). This is what stopped him and held him there staring, the way Kweku looked, like a man on his own, small and strong and apart, the one not like the others; all the familiar peculiarities more peculiar somehow: how his trousers were creased down the front, tightly belted, his cuffs rolled back once, thinning hair neatly cut, those same wire-frame glasses, scientist-immigrant glasses, the same ones as wore his professors at Yale (as if all nonwhite postgrads in America in the seventies had arrived from their homelands and received the same pair). Kweku. Not a father, a surgeon, a Ghanaian, a hero, a monster, just one Kweku Sai, just a man in a crowd with an odd sort of bearing, a stranger in Accra as in Boston. Alone. He couldn’t see Olu concealed by the doorframe so stood like a child told to wait without fuss, with his hands in his pocket, his eyes on the exit, his shoulders relaxed as if all things were well, the single visible sign of his mounting distress the rote up-and-down bounce of his foot on the ground.

Someone clipped Olu on the calf with a luggage cart. “Excuse me,” said the person, Luther Vandross it seemed. Olu turned around and saw Benson (a stranger). “Didn’t realize you were stopping there…”

“Sorry. You’re right.” Olu stepped aside to let the stranger wheel his luggage through the doorway, but he didn’t. He was smiling, pausing, too.

“Were you on the flight from New York?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Yes, I thought so. I saw you. God, this may sound strange, but I thought — just, you look like a woman I knew once. The wife of a friend.” Olu shook his head no. The stranger looked embarrassed. “Well. Welcome to Ghana.” He left with his cart, disappeared in the crowd.

Feeling somehow discovered — as the coward at the door, if not the son of Fola Savage — Olu looked at his dad. What is a man who cannot face his father? he thought. As a shame or a threat or a lark, as a small thing, too small in his lone peculiarity, or a large thing, too large per the shadows he cast: the root angst didn’t matter, the thing was the facing, and here he was hiding, afraid to step out. “Go,” he mumbled softly, rearranging his backpack (the one he always traveled with, the one Taiwo mocked, further proof of the “white boy” who lived inside Olu, guzzling water from Nalgenes, wearing Tevas in snow). He stepped into view, gripped the straps at his chest as if preparing to skydive. Called, “Dad.”

• • •

They drove into town from the airport without speaking, Kweku clutching the wheel, Olu clutching his backpack, the three years of silence a solid between them unsoftened by presence, proximity, flesh. Olu gazed intently out the passenger window, trying to work out the color of what he was seeing: the roads were lined thickly with wild shrubs and palm trees, but somehow the vista read brown and not green. It reminded him of Delhi (without the auto-rickshaws), the small honking taxis, good cheer, dusty haze, well-planned roads somehow wanting for order, retail signboards with hand-painted faces — but something was new. The color , he thought, it was back to the color, the newness of majority, seeming familiar to oneself, chancing to catch his reflection in the window of a passing car and thinking for a moment he was looking at the driver.

When they stopped at the junction between Liberia Road and Independence Avenue, Kweku cleared his throat. “T-this is our N-national Theatre,” he began haltingly. He gestured through his window at the structure. Modern, white. “We have a National Symphony Orchestra and the National Theatre Players. They built it five years ago. A gift from the Chinese.”

“Interesting,” Olu said politely. “Five years ago.” Back when his father was part of their world.

Kweku rubbed his brow, sensing his error, falling silent. The stoplight turned green and he tried a new tack. “It’s changing, this city, not quickly, but changing. I think you might like it.”