Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

“Seems nice,” Olu said.

“You wouldn’t remember your first trip to Ghana.”

“I don’t.”

“No, of course. But the place has transformed. The change is remarkable.”

Olu nodded, saying nothing, unsure if Kweku’s subject was his country or himself.

• • •

They turned into a side street off Independence Avenue and wound their way slowly through a maze of small streets to a clump of large houses set back from the road with chipped white stucco walls overgrown with dry blossoms. Stray dogs milled here and there nosing indifferently the small heaps of trash. Fruit skins, black plastic bags. A woman near the end of the road in a lappa and incongruous red Pop Warner Football T-shirt was turning meat on a grill like the black one they’d had at the first house in Boston, a half of a globe. Behind her the road stopped in overgrown weeds, a huge plot of dry grass with a lone mango tree.

Kweku stopped the car by the woman, engine idling. “I know you must be tired.” He leaned forward, looking out. “I just wanted you to see this before we go back to the house — to my house — to the place where I live.”

Olu peered out at the woman. “Who is she?”

“The land. I’d like to buy it. To build us a house.” He took off his glasses and wiped them off carefully as Olu sat frowning at the sound of this us . His father continued shyly, “It’s just for perspective. We’ll go now. I just thought we’d make that quick stop. The place that I’m living in now is quite humble. I’ve never believed, as you’ve noticed, in rent. I’d rather rent a modest place — some might say an ugly place — until I can purchase on the scale that I want. My father never rented, see, designed his own property. Quite striking—” He caught himself rambling and stopped.

But Olu turned, interest piqued, surprised at the mention of this father, whom Kweku had never discussed. Both of his parents were famously tight-lipped on the subject of who their own parents had been. “Died a long time ago,” was the general impression, to which Fola added only, “My mother died giving birth.” They didn’t have photos, such as Olu found lining the stairs of the homes of his classmates in school, faded, framed and important, generations of family , at which he’d stand staring until someone inquired, “You like our family pictures, ey?” Usually the father, who’d thump him on the shoulder blade, offer a tour (the fathers of friends rather loved to be near him, loved to thump him on the shoulder blade, eyes bright with awe, as if nothing in the world were more wondrous than Olu, a prodigiously intelligent athlete in dark chocolate skin). He’d tour their homes aching with longing, for lineage , for a sense of having descended from faces in frames. That his family was thin in the backbench was troubling; it seemed to suggest they were faking it, false. A legitimate family would have photos on the staircase. At the very least grandparents whose first names he knew. “What did he do?” Olu asked, suddenly hopeful.

But Kweku answered vaguely, “He did the same thing as me.” He put on his glasses and started the engine. “Come on then. Enough. You must be tired, and starved.” He bought them four pieces of chargrilled plantain wrapped in newsprint and served with small bags of smoked nuts, then drove back, past the junction, and parked by a row of low beige concrete buildings, most missing their doors.

“Is this where you live?” Olu asked as they entered, unable to mask his dismay at the stench: two parts deep-frying fish, four parts urine and mothballs intended to neutralize the smell of the urine.

“When one rents in Ghana, one has to pay twelve months upfront,” Kweku said, “and I’m saving for land. As you saw. It’s not much, but the rent is near nothing and no one disturbs me or knows that I’m here.”

Olu didn’t ask him whether this was a good thing, to live without anybody knowing where you were, thinking, later, they’d get to the heart of it later , never suspecting that ten minutes later he’d leave. They climbed up the three flights of stairs to the flat, which was unexpectedly large, the whole uppermost floor. And clean, if monastic, bereft of decoration: a table, two chairs, velvet loveseat, the statue. He didn’t bother asking how his father had shipped it, just swallowed his laughter at seeing her here, this stone thing that they’d hated but could never get rid of. Like everything hated, she never disappeared.

He sat at the table and opened his backpack. He was rifling for his toothbrush at the bottom of the bag when he found the small tent he had squashed there last summer when hiking with Ling in New Hampshire. “My tent.”

“I thought we could share the one bed in the bedroom,” said Kweku, glancing over.

“No, I brought it by mistake.” Now Olu did laugh, and his father did also, a strange sound, much sadder than shouting or crying. He reached in again, found a gray Yale sweatshirt. “It’s graduation.” As he remembered it. “It’s graduation today.”

Kweku was running water into the kettle in the kitchenette. “You said?” He turned the tap off. “Couldn’t hear you. It’s what?”

“It’s Yale graduation. Today’s my graduation.”

The clatter of the metal kettle dropped in the sink.

Kweku turned, heaving. A realization, not a question. “I forgot your graduation.”

“Yes, you did,” Olu said.

“Why did you — how did you — how could you miss it?” He took off his glasses. “Why — why aren’t you there? Why are you here ?” Wiped his eyes. “Graduation.”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“How can you say that?”

Olu shrugged. “It didn’t seem worth it.”

“What do you mean?!” Kweku persisted. “You should be there in New Haven, not here —”

“So should you.”

Kweku fell silent. He started several answers with “I—” “You—” “We’re not—” and then settled on, “Look. They’re two separate issues and you know it, Olukayodé.” Olu frowned, recoiling at the use of the name. No one ever called him by his full name but Fola and only when angry, so practically never. “You can’t do that…” his father said, weakly now, faltering. “Give up when you’re hurt. Please. You get that from me. That’s what I do, what I’ve done. But you’re different. You’re different from me, son—”

“I’m just like—”

“You’re better.”

What was the thing that arose out of nowhere now? Pity? Shame? Longing to see the man whole, not to see him here standing in a barebones apartment, his trousers still ironed as if he were home, but not home, in this hellhole, a prison of his making, in exile, cut off from the family and worse: with this look on his face of a man without honor, at least of a man who feels this is my lot ? He still couldn’t say what he thought he would find when he touched down in Ghana, but this wasn’t it, this hot, half-finished apartment, the half man here in it, now backing up, sitting down, too shamed to stand. How had his father come to wear this expression: defeated, and willing to accept the defeat, not resisting, not objecting, as if somewhere inside him lived someone who felt quite at home in this place, in these halls, dirty windows, bare bulbs, stink of urine, the concrete, chipped paint, never mind the pressed pants? It was he Olu hated, this man inside Kweku, with whom he felt anger, at whom he now shouted, “It’s you who is better, goddammit, not me, I’m no different. It’s you . You are better than this.”

To which Kweku, very softly, “This? This is what I come from.”