Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

As if this were all that there was to be said.

As if twenty-two years, the whole kit and caboodle, were just a short stop on the way back to this; as if all one could hope for was closing the circle, was ending right back in the gray, in the ash.

“Not good enough, Olu!” shouted Olu. “Not good enough! That’s what you said when my answers were wrong. That’s not good enough, Olu! Lazy thinking! Think smarter! Not good enough, Kweku—” and would have gone on were it not for the sound of a door down the hall creaking open and footsteps approaching. High heels. Hard to say now where the pep talk was heading, or if it had worked where his father might be, whether Olu could really have spurred him to action, convinced him to come back to Boston. Who knows? There she was, suddenly, a shape in the doorway, some slim Other Woman with long tiny braids, rather sharp in her pantsuit — and that was that, really, his second trip to Ghana concluded.

“Hallooo!” A dense local accent very carefully strained through the sieve of affected inflections. “How ah you?” She stepped toward Olu. “ Akwaaba . You ah welcome.”

“J-June,” stuttered Kweku. “I didn’t know you were home.”

Olu stood blinking, unable to see her, to take in her features, to move or to speak. The woman said something in Ga to his father, then blew them both kisses and breezed out the door. Kweku tried “I—” “You—” “We’re not—” before choosing, “It isn’t what it looks like. But I should have let you know.”

“Let me know what? That you live with this woman?”

“For now,” answered Kweku. “It’s only for now. She’s helping me set up a practice in Ghana. It’s hard to break into this market. Are you listening?”

Olu wasn’t listening. He was shouldering the backpack and marching, straps gripped, to the still-open door. Kweku reached out to detain him. “Don’t touch me!” he shouted, and left.

Down the stairs.

Into sun.

Then back to the airport, on foot to the junction, where the backpack made him look like a hitchhiking teen; an old jeep full of students, mostly German, stopped to get him, dropped him kindly on the airport road covered in dust; to the check-in desk, pleading to change his departure to fly out on standby that night. Back to Yale. The day after commencement, the campus half-dressed like a debutante stumbling back home from a ball.

To think of the smell (Jean Naté, fainter: mothball) fills Olu still now with the need for fresh air. He is attempting to yank up the window when someone caresses his back and “Don’t touch me!” bursts out.

“I’m sorry,” says Ling, taken aback, stepping backward. He turns to her, embarrassed, wipes his face with one hand. She frowns at him, worried, reaching up to embrace him, and he feels himself move, ever so slightly, away. “Why do you do that?” she asks. “When I touch you? You flinch when I touch you.” She crosses her arms. “It’s okay if you’re crying—”

“I’m not. I’m not crying.”

“Of course. You never cry.” She sits down on the bed.

He sighs. He can see that he needs to say something to fill in the distance he’s opened between them. “I switched with my sister,” he tells her. “With Taiwo. She’s sharing with Kehinde and I’m here with you.” He sits down beside her and touches her shoulder. She leans in against him, her arms at his waist. He kisses her head but, his own arms gone leaden, he can’t hold her back in the way that she’d like.

vii

Kehinde comes in and sees Olu there sleeping, then sees that the form is too small to be him. He gets into bed and lies waiting for something, a crack in the silence.

“I saw him,” they both say.

Kehinde turns over. He was going to tell Taiwo what he just shared with Sadie. Instead he says, “Who?”

“Uncle Femi,” she whispers, not turning to face him. “In Ovation magazine. There was one in the den.”

The name slices through, a clean line through his center. His lungs spit up air, split in half. “In this house?”

“In a picture with Niké…,” she begins. “Just forget it.”

“I can’t ‘just forget it,’” he says.

“Yeah, well, try.”

“I have tried,” he says.

“Yeah, well, try a little harder.”

“Taiwo,” he says.

“What do you want me to say?”

Kehinde doesn’t know what he wants her to say. Has never known.

“Forget it,” she says. “We should sleep.”

He hears her readjusting her position in bed and is reminded of that other little bedroom they’d shared, of their first night in Lagos; can see them there, dumbstruck; can hear their sick uncle, “Show our twins to their rooms.” Can see Auntie Niké saying, “This one’s for Taiwo,” and pushing in his sister, her face as she turned, a wild pleading in her eyes as she looked at her brother with a look that seemed to say don’t leave me in here alone . But Auntie Niké pushed him forward, down the hall, to the next room, a much smaller bedroom with two little beds. “This is yours,” she said coldly. There was a crib in the corner. Auntie Niké saw him noticing. “We’ll have that removed.” He entered the room while she watched from the doorway. “Someone will bring up your things, ehn ? Just wait. Sleep if you want to. We’ll call you for dinner.”

“Thank you,” he mumbled.

“Thank you, Auntie .” She left.

He sat for some moments looking around the little bedroom, the veined marble floor, barred-in windows, large crib. He looked out the window at the back of the building, a large well-kept garden and huge swimming pool. A gardener was working here, trimming the hedges. Reminded of Fola, he turned back around. A houseboy was standing at the door with his suitcase.

“Good evening, sa,” the boy said.

“I’m Kehinde,” he replied.

“Kehinde, sa,” the boy said. Bowed slightly. “Your suitcase.” Before Kehinde could respond, he walked quickly away. The apartment was like that: people appearing in doorways, bowing slightly with their eyes down, then hurrying away, a huge staff, twenty people at least, for the four of them: chefs, gardeners, houseboys, guards, all of them male. All of them dressed in white pants and white shirts, without shoes, slender boys, without names, in their teens, the one blurring into the other, slipping in and out of doorways bearing food and drink and whatever else, then hurrying away.

He lies, stiff, unspeaking, and thinks of his sister a shape in the doorway that first endless night, appearing suddenly in moonlight, her voice like a lifeboat. “Can I sleep here, Kehinde?” He should have said no. “It’s too cold in my bedroom,” she said. “I can’t sleep.” “Yeah, me either,” he said, and she climbed into bed. The other, by the doorway, too far from the window, too hot in the night with the broken A/C. He’d wake one week later to find that she’d slipped in with him in his bed, with her feet by his pillow: a girl and a boy in thin Disney World nightclothes, a version of themselves that he hasn’t seen since.

viii

Fola lies staring through the darkness at Sadie, who snores as if sighing across the huge bed with her hands in small fists as they are when she’s sleeping, a habit she’s had since the day she was born. Alive if not well , Fola thinks, with a frown, suddenly wondering whether this is enough after all? One of six dead, the five left all unwell? For she feels this, she sees it, she knows they’re not well.

A single sensation overwhelms her, a new one, not dissimilar to panic, or the feeling of drowning, as if she’d been floating in flat lukewarm water — her face to the sky, and her arms and legs out — and abruptly began sinking, unexpectedly, irreversibly, too weary to stop herself, drifting down, down.