Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

He doesn’t see the man. He sees the one metal table bearing basic tools for woodwork and medical exams, wooden benches by the walls, single window by the doorway, rusted ceiling fan squeaking with every slow turn. Incongruously, at odds with the torture cell effect, a string of white Christmas lights blinks on one wall. The window is closed, as are three massive shutters that make up the top of the wall at the back. The only illumination is bright whitish sunlight thrown in from the door to the rough slatted floor. Even so, eyes adjusting, Kehinde makes out the coffins that hang more like boats from the beams overhead: one a car, one a fish, one a rose by the look of it, absurd in one sense, wild, fantastic in another. The idea of it. Coffins in shapes, like kids’ birthday cakes, celebratory, colorful, laughing at death. Sangna would love these , he thinks, with a start, caught off guard by the thought, by this flash of her face:

Sangna’s narrow brown face with its ill-fitting features reviled by their owner for being “too big.” An image out of context. On the backs of his eyelids. Her face on that screen in that space in his mind where such images materialize when his thoughts begin to wander, when forms replace words, like a photo exposed. (This is how paintings begin, and revelations, a form floating up out of dark on that screen, at first blurry, then detailed, then clear as a memory, as if to “create” were in fact to recall.) Here on that screen appears Sangna, lovely Sangna, whose narrow brown face passes by all the time, a flash here, a flash there, while he’s working in Brooklyn or writing her texts or while they talk on the phone — but whose face he has never really properly considered, like this, out of context, on its own. In other light. As he thinks of it now, he can see that she’s right, that her features don’t fit in their slender-cheeked frame, that there’s something too big about the teeth and the brows, a man’s eyes, a man’s nose, a man’s mouth, a child’s chin. An exquisite imbalance , he thinks, even thrilling, with the tension it creates when he sees her again after months and feels nervous those first thirty seconds, as if watching a juggler, afraid and amazed: they’re still there , all in order, those huge gorgeous features at war with their borders but not yet seceding.

That face.

And her laughter.

“So you want to make coffins,” he hears Sangna laugh. “You just started the Muses! You’re mad. But I like it, man. ‘Kehinde Sai, Coffins .’ Materials list Monday. And please no more dirt.” A home , he would tell her, he thinks, for the homeless , a home in the space after bodies, before. The thing he’s been after perhaps prematurely, a home, not a coffin. His next major show. Fantasy coffins. A museum installation. When he finishes the paintings in Brooklyn of her, of his sister as each of the Muses, huge portraits—

the thought of which sends up a warm wave of grief. The image shifts abruptly from Sangna to Taiwo: the girl on her back on that rococo chaise in the Minnie Mouse nightdress, her voice in his head a faint whisper please help me, and after, her face. After, when he’d done all their uncle instructed so the jaundice-eyed guard wouldn’t touch her instead — after, when he looked at his shorts, as did Taiwo, and saw there the wet spot — the look on her face. He hadn’t been able to brook the expression, had run from the room like a coward, a fool, but can see the face now, that one glimpse of it, frozen, held steady before him as if he were there: the pure shock in her eyes at this proof of his pleasure, the strange spreading wet spot, the strange spurting shame.

This was the first time that he learned he had a body, that he was bound inside this body, trapped, an airborne being caged. In his mind he’d been elsewhere, far, farther than snow, had been floating with Taiwo in space beyond space: they were drifting in nightclothes like Wendy and Peter, her hand in his hand, not his fingers in her. He heard Uncle Femi and did as instructed, could feel the walls’ smoothness and warmth and the wet, but his mind wasn’t joined to his finger; was with Taiwo, perhaps where they started? Then his body began. The beginning of having a body: that moment. The feel of the liquid a snake on one thigh. The clapping, Uncle Femi, “ E kuuse , o, Kehinde!” His mind coming back.

To that look on her face.

How could he tell her that he didn’t enjoy it, when here was the proof that he had, on his shorts? When the body had betrayed him, and her, inexplicably? How could he persuade her? What could he say? He couldn’t say anything. Or didn’t. And hasn’t. Not for the week that the thing carried on. Not when they flew to New York to meet Fola, when they got back to Boston, for the next fifteen years. He has never said anything (nor she) of the moment, has never once revisited her expression until now: at the door to this storehouse of coffins and stethoscopes, from the dim of which someone says, “You, are you sick?”

Kehinde turns, startled, to the bench by the doorway and finds here a man with a paper, reclined. The man is quite old, dressed in trousers and T-shirt and worn leather sandals and dirty white coat, short and stout, with a belly and Coke-bottle glasses, with none of the famous Ghanaian good cheer. He has lowered his paper to glower at Kehinde but doesn’t get up, just repeats, “Are you sick?”

Kehinde shakes his head, caught off guard, stepping backward. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”

“Of course, there’s no light. Too hot with the light. Me, I don’t like the heat, oh. I see in the darkness. You look like you’re sick.” He sets down his paper and stands with some effort. “You came from Big Milly’s? A rastaman, ehn ?”

“N-no,” Kehinde stutters. “We came for my father. He lived here. Grew up here, I mean. Now he’s dead.”

“Your father?” The man shuffles closer to Kehinde. “That one, the Sai boy? I heard that he died.” Kehinde nods, silent. “It’s a coffin you want then. What’s your name?”

“Kehinde.” He holds out his hand.

The man takes the hand, starts to shake it in greeting, then turns it face up to examine the palm. He leans in to squint down at Kehinde’s raised calluses. “Rough. You are a laborer.” Kehinde shakes his head. “Then why are your hands so, so rough like my own? The Sais I knew, self, they were thinkers .” Sarcastic. “At least that, the first one, could put up a house. But the boy? Good for nothing but thinking, thinking, thinking. He thought he was smart, ehn , too smart to break wood. Tss . Your hands are good, rough, like my own. Like a man.”

“I’m an artist,” says Kehinde.

The man starts to laugh. “An artist.” Pronounced ah -teest. “You are a Sai then.” He drops Kehinde’s hand and goes waddling to the shutters. He unlatches and pushes them out to rich light. Kehinde shields his eyes with one hand and squints, blinking, at the workspace now visible at the back of the hut. Half-finished coffins lie in piles by a worktable. Four men are painting what looks like a loaf. “We can’t make a new one in time for the funeral—”

“What does that mean, sir? ‘I am a Sai then’?”

The man turns to look at him, surprised by the inflection. Kehinde, surprised also, looks down at his hands. He presses them together, holding left hand with right, thumb to palm, trying to rub out the burning beneath. There is something in the smug, dismissive manner of this stranger that calls up aggression, a strange thing itself, to feel anger, simple anger, this burning sensation, this urge to do violence to some yielding thing. He is so rarely angry he finds himself nervous, alarmed by the feeling, the heat in the hands. He is certain that the stranger can sense his aggression, but the man just keeps talking, still laughing, “ Chalé . Go and see that one, the house in the compound. The first one, he drew it. An ah -teest like you. Then came the boy, that your father, an ah -teest. His mother would send him to watch me, you see. They said he was coming to learn how to doctor, but no: he was just like his father. Just drew. Drawing and drawing, tss , all the day drawing. Never learned about bodies, never learned about wood. They were ah -teests. Like you.” He looks closely at Kehinde. “You see. Now you’re crying. You Sais, all the same.”