Taiye Selasi - Ghana Must Go

It hangs there like moisture, so thick he can feel it. There is no place to put it, and no place to go. He stands in the doorway and hears in this silence his heart beating, hard, to the sound of her breaths. He closes his eyes and he sees in that darkness, that deep, sparkling darkness that lives behind lids, like a slideshow: their flight, Monday evening, to Ghana, with Ling there beside him, her head on his chest, then their flight to Las Vegas, the chapel, October, their first night of marriage, the tacky motel. He remembers making love to her; a difference, already; to think the word wife of the woman below him, to place his wide palm on the side of her face and to hear her “We’re married,” to whisper, “I know.” It wasn’t the idea of being married that changed things — he’d never much cared for the language, the show — but the idea of a beginning, in which began every ending, the thing he’d been running from, for fourteen odd years.

Fola used to tease him for calling Ling “partner,” for refusing to say “girlfriend” (“your lab partner,” she’d joke). They had no anniversary. They had no beginning. “You’re not Asian,” she said, and he loved her. Fait accompli. He’d wax philosophical about the puerility of the language, “boyfriend/girlfriend,” about the emptiness of “falling in love,” about the physiological underpinnings of desire and attraction, the senselessness of exalting the instinct to mate, and the rest of it. Really, he was terrified of endings. He couldn’t understand how people loved, then didn’t love. Loved, then stopped loving. As a heart just stops beating. (Of course he knew how , but he couldn’t see why .) Dr. Soto once told them that the reason for dating — the only real reason for dating as opposed to mating for life — was to acquaint oneself, viscerally and immediately and nonlyrically, with the fact of one’s “personal mortality,” nothing else. One of the junior attendings had just called off his wedding and was moping around the OR with a look on his face that suggested he might do himself harm with his scalpel. Dr. Soto convened them all after surgery to say:

“the only point of a relationship is to play out, in miniature, the whole blasted drama of life and of death. Love is born as a child is born. Love grows up as a child grows up. A man knows well that he must die, but having only known life does not believe in his death. Then, one day, his love goes cold. Its heart stops beating. The love drops dead. In this way, the man learns that death is reality: that death can exist in his being, his own . The loss of a pet or a rose or a parent may cause the man pain but will not make the point. Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death.”

Olu listened, laughing. But what of the opposite? What if love never dies, what if love wasn’t born? What if it had always existed since they touched pouring punch at the Asian-American Cultural Center Open House at Yale? What if there was no relationship to end? No boyfriend/girlfriend? No “now we are” and therefore no “now we’re not” down the line? This is what he had with Ling Wei, he was thinking. The dramaless life of a love unbegun.

Then they got married on a whim in Las Vegas. After, they made love with her face in his palm. That night he lay still with her cheek on his breastbone and thought of an “ending” and wanted to cry. Many years earlier he’d vowed not to do so, teeth grit in the mirror, alone in his dorm, so just stared until dawn at the pink neon heart blinking on and off, huge, on the ceiling. In the morning he asked could they keep it a secret, not tell what they’d done, let it be “just for them.” What he wanted to say was, “Don’t die, don’t go cold, don’t stop beating,” but knew it was useless. Now he stands at the door in this break in the action and thinks what he thought in the bedroom before: that he can’t bear to lose her, to let her drift further, or drift off himself in the way that he’s done, but that “forward” or “closer” are his only two options, not “back,” as he’s hoped, that they can’t unbegin.

And so he begins, “I have something to tell you.”

She looks, sees his eyes closed, and starts to stand up. He hears that she’s stirring and shakes his head. “Please. Please just listen.” (She does, sitting back, on her feet.) “You live your whole life in this world, in these worlds, and you know what they think of you, you know what they see. You say that you’re African and you want to excuse it, explain but I’m smart . There’s no value implied. You feel it. You say ‘Asia, ancient China, ancient India,’ and everyone thinks ooh , ancient wisdom of the East. You say ‘ancient Africa,’ and everyone thinks irrelevant. Dusty and irrelevant. Lost. No one gives a shit. You want them to see you as something of value, not dusty, not irrelevent, not backward, you know? You wish you didn’t give a shit, but somehow you do, because you know , Ling. You fear what they think but don’t say. And then, one day you hear it out loud. Like, your father—”

“My father’s an asshole—”

“Your father was right. I didn’t go to Haiti for that project at graduation. I came here to Ghana to see him. I lied. He kept sending these letters to ask me to visit, to come for my birthday, to just hear him out. He’d gotten this place, this… this ugly apartment. He said it was until he could afford to buy land. I don’t know. I didn’t stay. There was a woman, some other woman, he was living with some woman, I don’t know who she was. I know what he was. He was that man. He was that stereotype. The African dad who walks out on his kids. The way that I’d always hoped no one would see us.” He squeezes his eyes, shakes his head. “And I know . I stand in that house, in that hut he grew up in. The man came from nothing; he struggled, I know . I want to be proud of him. Of all he accomplished. I know he accomplished so much. But I can’t. I hate him for living in that dirty apartment. I hate him for being that African man. I hate him for hurting my mother, for leaving, for dying, I hate him for dying alone.”

Tears. But not as for Taiwo and Kehinde, the dam giving way and the tide rushing out. They begin without noise and he stands without moving, as strange as they feel, left to flow, on his face. He leans on the doorframe, too tired to keep speaking, and hears in the silence the bullfrogs outside. He doesn’t hear the creak of the bed as she leaves it. He feels her small hands on the sides of his face. “Maybe it was the best he could do,” she says softly. “Maybe what he did was the best he could do.” He nods, though it hurts to. He opens his eyes now. She smiles at him, wiping her tears off, then his. He touches the hand that she’s placed on his cheekbone. She thinks that he wants her to stop and pulls back. But he presses his palm to her hand, to his jawbone. “I want to do better.” He kisses her lips.

He can sense her surprise as she turns her mouth upward, the way that she used to when they were at school, when he’d walk her to her door on Old Campus and pause in the lamplight to consider the shape of her mouth. Feeling his gaze, the pink lips would drift up, as if moving of their volition, not their owner’s, not his. He’d kissed girls in high school but never like this, with their lips playing puppet, his eyes playing string. And had never had sex (is the truth he’s never told her, half embarrassed, half touched by his own lack of breadth. He always assumed that he’d want other women, come to desire other bodies as the months turned to years, but he didn’t, and hasn’t, as the years blur to decades. His first is his only). He touches her neck. He feels the pulse quicken beneath his four fingers. He feels his heart speed to the pace of her breath. “I want to do better,” he whispers, through kisses — her chin, then her neck, down the length to her chest. Placing his palm along the curve of her lumbar and applying enough pressure to make her arch back, he kisses her sternum, the cotton-clad nipples, the one then the other, then lifts up her shirt. He presses his palm to her breastbone, five fingers, and kisses the dip of the clavicle, once. The sounds that she makes are small lights on the runway; he flats the palm down to her waist, cups her groin.