Ghana Must Go Read online

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2013 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Taiye Selasi, 2013

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Excerpt from “Approximations.” Copyright © 1962, 1966 by Robert Hayden. From Collected Poems of Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  “a word forgot to remember what to forget . . .” by Renee C. Neblett.

  Used by permission of the author.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Selasi, Taiye.

  Ghana must go / Taiye Selasi.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60577-6

  1. Families—Ghana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.E456G43 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2012039674

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  for Juliette Modupe Tuakli, M.D.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Pronunciations

  Family Tree

  Part I: GONE

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  Part II: GOING

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  Part III: GO

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  Acknowledgments

  Not sunflowers, not

  roses, but rocks in patterned

  sand grow here. And bloom.

  —ROBERT HAYDEN, “Approximations”

  A word forgot to remember

  what to forget

  and every so often

  let the truth slip

  —RENEE C. NEBLETT, “Snapshots”

  Pronunciations

  PRONUNCIATION

  MEANING

  ORIGIN

  ACCRA

  ah krah

  (as in afar)

  Capital city of Ghana

  Ghana

  BABAFEMI

  bah bah feh mee

  (as in absolutely)

  “Loved by his father”

  Nigeria

  EKUA

  eh kwee ah

  (as in Evita)

  Girl born on Wednesday

  Ghana

  FEMI

  feh mee

  (as in Emmy)

  Short form of Babafemi

  Nigeria

  FOLA

  fo lah

  (as in cola)

  Short form of Folasadé

  Nigeria

  FOLASADÉ

  fo lah shah deh

  (as in absolutely)

  “Wealth confers my crown”

  Nigeria

  IDOWU

  ee do woo

  (as in peekaboo)

  Born after twins

  Nigeria

  KEHINDE

  ky in deh

  (as in yesterday)

  Second-born twin

  Nigeria

  KOKROBITÉ

  ko kro bee teh

  (as in absolutely)

  Coastal town near Accra

  Ghana

  KWEKU

  kway koo

  (as in Quaker)

  Boy born on Wednesday

  Ghana

  LAGOS

  lay goss

  (as in famous)

  Largest city in Nigeria

  Nigeria

  NIKÉ

  nee keh

  (as in ginseng)

  Short form of Adeniké

  Nigeria

  OLUKAYODÉ

  o loo ky o deh

  (as in only Saturday)

  “God brings happiness”

  Nigeria

  PHILAE

  fy lee

  (as in highly)

  Southern limits of Egypt

  Greece

  SADÉ

  shah deh

  (as in André)

  Short form of Folasadé

  Nigeria

  SAI

  sy

  (as in sigh)

  Surname

  Ghana

  SENA

  seh nah

  (as in henna)

  “Gift from God”

  Ghana

  SOMAYINA

  so mah yee nah

  (as in Serafina)

  “May I not travel alone”

  Nigeria

  TAIWO

  ty wo

  (as in Cairo)

  First-born twin

  Nigeria

  FAMILY TREE

  Part I

 
GONE

  1.

  Kweku dies barefoot on a Sunday before sunrise, his slippers by the doorway to the bedroom like dogs. At the moment he is on the threshold between sunroom and garden considering whether to go back to get them. He won’t. His second wife Ama is asleep in that bedroom, her lips parted loosely, her brow lightly furrowed, her cheek hotly seeking some cool patch of pillow, and he doesn’t want to wake her.

  He couldn’t if he tried.

  She sleeps like a cocoyam. A thing without senses. She sleeps like his mother, unplugged from the world. Their house could be robbed—by Nigerians in flip-flops rolling right up to their door in rusting Russian Army tanks, eschewing subtlety entirely as they’ve taken to doing on Victoria Island (or so he hears from his friends: the crude oil kings and cowboys demobbed to Greater Lagos, that odd breed of African: fearless and rich)—and she’d go on snoring sweetly, a kind of musical arrangement, dreaming sugarplums and Tchaikovsky.

  She sleeps like a child.

  But he’s carried the thought anyway, from bedroom to sunroom, making a production of being careful. A show for himself. He does this, has always done this since leaving the village, little open-air performances for an audience of one. Or for two: him and his cameraman, that silent-invisible cameraman who stole away beside him all those decades ago in the darkness before daybreak with the ocean beside, and who has followed him every day everywhere since. Quietly filming his life. Or: the life of the Man Who He Wishes to Be and Who He Left to Become.

  In this scene, a bedroom scene: The Considerate Husband.

  Who doesn’t make a peep as he slips from the bed, moving the covers aside noiselessly, setting each foot down separately, taking pains not to wake his unwakable wife, not to get up too quickly thus unsettling the mattress, crossing the room very quietly, closing the door without sound. And down the hall in this manner, through the door into the courtyard where she clearly can’t hear him, but still on his toes. Across the short heated walkway, from Master Wing to Living Wing, where he pauses for a moment to admire his house.

  • • •

  It’s a brilliant arrangement this one-story compound, by no means novel, but functional, and elegantly planned: simple courtyard in the middle with a door at each corner to the Living, Dining, Master, and (Guest) Bedroom Wings. He sketched it on a napkin in a hospital cafeteria in his third year of residency, at thirty-one years old. At forty-eight bought the plot off a Neapolitan patient, a rich land speculator with Mafia ties and Type II diabetes who moved to Accra because it reminds him of Naples in the fifties, he says (the wealth pressed against want, fresh sea air against sewage, filthy poor against filthier rich at the beach). At forty-nine found a carpenter who was willing to build it, the only Ghanaian who didn’t balk at putting a hole in a house. The carpenter was seventy with cataracts and a six-pack. He finished in two years working impeccably and alone.

  At fifty-one moved his things in, but found it too quiet.

  At fifty-three took a second wife.

  Elegantly planned.

  Now he stops at the top of the square, between doorways, where the blueprint is obvious, where he can see the design, and considers it as the painter must consider the painting or the mother the newborn: with confusion and awe, that this thing which sprang to life there inside the mind or body has made it here to the outside, a life of its own. Slightly baffled. How did it get here, from in him to in front? (Of course he knows: with the proper application of the appropriate instruments; it’s the same for the painter, the mother, the amateur architect—but still it’s a wonder to look at.)

  His house.

  His beautiful, functional, elegant house, which appeared to him whole, the whole ethos, in an instant, like a fertilized zygote spinning inexplicably out of darkness in possession of an entire genetic code. An entire logic. The four quadrants: a nod to symmetry, to his training days, to graph paper, to the compass, perpetual journey/perpetual return, etc., etc., a gray courtyard, not green, polished rock, slabs of slate, treated concrete, a kind of rebuttal to the tropics, to home: so a homeland re-imagined, all the lines clean and straight, nothing lush, soft, or verdant. In one instant. All there. Now here. Decades later on a street in Old Adabraka, a crumbling suburb of colonial mansions, whitewashed stucco, stray dogs. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created—

  except Taiwo, he thinks suddenly, a shock of a thought. Whereon Taiwo herself—with black thicket for eyelash and carved rock for cheekbone and gemstone for eyes, her pink lips the same color as the inside of conch shells, impossibly beautiful, an impossible girl—sort of appears there in front of him interrupting his performance of The Considerate Husband, then goes up in smoke. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created alone, he amends the observation.

  • • •

  Then continues along the walkway through the door into the Living Wing, through the dining room, to the sunroom, to the threshold.

  Where he stops.

  2.

  Later in the morning when the snow has started falling, and the man has finished dying, and a dog has smelled the death, Olu will walk in no particular hurry out of the hospital, hang up his BlackBerry, put down his coffee, and start to cry. He’ll have no way of knowing how the day broke in Ghana; he’ll be miles and oceans and time zones away (and other kinds of distances that are harder to cover, like heartbreak and anger and calcified grief and those questions left too long unasked or unanswered and generations of father-son silence and shame), stirring soymilk into coffee in a hospital cafeteria, blurry-eyed, sleep-deprived, here and not there. But he’ll picture it—his father, there, dead in a garden, healthy male, fifty-seven, in remarkable shape, small-round biceps pushing up against the skin of his arms, small-round belly pushing out against the rib of his top, Fruit of the Loom fine rib A-shirt, stark white on dark brown, worn with the ridiculous MC Hammer pants he hates and Kweku loves—and try though he will (he’s a doctor, he knows better, he hates it when his patients ask him “what if you’re wrong?”), he won’t shake the thought.

  That the doctors were wrong.

  That these things don’t “sometimes happen.”

  That something happened out there.

  No physician that experienced, never mind that exceptional—and say what you want, the man was good at his job, even detractors concede this, “a knife-wielding artist,” general surgeon without equal, Ghanaian Carson, and on—could’ve missed all the signs of so slow-building a heart attack. Basic coronary thrombosis. Easy peasy. Act fast. And there would have been time, half an hour on the low side from everything Mom says, thirty minutes to act, to “return to his training,” in the words of Dr. Soto, Olu’s favorite attending, his Xicano patron saint: to run through the symptoms, to spit out a diagnosis, to get up, to go inside, to wake up the wife, and if the wife couldn’t drive—a safe bet, she can’t read—then to drive himself to safety. To put on slippers for God’s sake.

  Instead, he did nothing. No run-through, no spit-out. Just strolled through a sunroom, then fell to the grass, where for no apparent reason—or unknowable reasons that Olu can’t divine and damned to unknowing can’t forgive—his father, Kweku Sai, Great Ga Hope, prodigal prodigy, just lay in pajamas doing nothing at all until the sun rose, ferocious, less a rise than an uprising, death to wan gray by gold sword, while inside the wife opened her eyes to find slippers by the doorway and, finding this strange, went to find, and found him dead.

  • • •

  An exceptional surgeon.

  Of unexceptional heart attack.

  With forty minutes on average between onset and death, so even if it’s the case that these things “sometimes happen,” i.e., healthy human hearts just “sometimes happen” to cramp up, willy-nilly, out of nowhere, like a hamstring catching a charley, there’s a question of the timing. All those minutes in the gap. Between first pang and last breath. Those particular moments Olu’s great f
ascination, an obsession all his life, first in childhood as an athlete, then in adulthood as a physician.

  The moments that make up an outcome.

  The quiet ones.

  Those snatches of silence between trigger and action when the challenge of the minute is the sole focus of the mind and the whole world slows down as to watch what will happen. When one acts or one doesn’t. After which it’s Too Late. Not the end—those few, desperate, and cacophonous seconds that precede the final buzzer or the long flatline beep—but the silence beforehand, the break in the action. There is always this break, Olu knows, no exceptions. So, seconds just after the gun goes off and the sprinter keeps driving or pops up too soon, or the gunshot victim, feeling a bullet break skin, brings a hand to his wound or does not, the world stopped. Whether the sprinter will win or the patient will make it has less to do finally with how he crosses the line than with whatever he did in these still prior moments, and Kweku did nothing, and Olu doesn’t know why.

  How could his father not realize what was happening and how, if he realized, could he stay there to die? No. Something must have happened to debilitate, to disorient, some strong emotion, mental disturbance, Olu doesn’t know what. What he does know is this: active male under sixty, no known history of illness, raised on freshwater fish, running five miles daily, fucking a nubile village idiot—and say what you want, the new wife is no nurse: it is futile to blame but there might have been hope, chest compressions done right/had she just woken up—doesn’t die in a garden of cardiac arrest.

  Something must have arrested him.

  3.

  Dewdrops on grass.

  Dewdrops on grass blades like diamonds flung freely from the pouch of some sprite-god who’d just happened by, stepping lightly and lithely through Kweku Sai’s garden just moments before Kweku appeared there himself. Now the whole garden glittering, winking and tittering like schoolgirls who hush themselves, blushing, as their beloveds approach: glittering mango tree, monarch, teeming being at center with her thick bright green leaves and her bright yellow eggs; glittering fountain full of cracks now and weeds with white blossoms, but the statue still standing, the “mother of twins,” iya-ibeji, once a gift for his ex-wife Folasadé, now abandoned in the fountain with her hand-carved stone twins; glittering flowers Folasadé could name by their faces, the English names, Latin names, a million shades of pink; glowing sky the soft gray of the South without sunlight, glittering clouds at its edges.