‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ she said dreamily.
‘You really think so?’ I asked.
‘Mmm. You don’t?’
‘There’s no context, no explanations. It’s as if nothing has happened, no revolutions, no post-colonialism, no deconstructions, no Said.’
‘I think the curator was going for an aesthetic, rather than an anthropological, investigation.’
‘Investigation?’ I almost choked.
‘It might have been interesting to put them next to African photographers’ portraits of the time.’
‘Exactly…’
The open-shirted man cleared his throat. ‘If it’s not too much bother, of course, I wondered if I could give you my card? I’d be very interested in taking some photographs of you…’
‘No, thank you,’ I said.
‘Ooh,’ China said, ‘how exciting. Maya, take it.’
I looked at China’s face. The excitement was genuine; it spoke of a youth spent trying the enlightening substances of all the different peoples of the world and of an old age spent dancing in the nude in experimental theatres, trying somehow to nullify the passing of time. I took the card for China, because I wanted to please her, in the same way I would have pushed a little girl on a swing even if I did not want to. I walked away without looking at the man. Richard Hunter, the card read, Chartered Surveyor. He wasn’t even a photographer, just a horrible old pervert. I stopped and stood in the middle of the room, looking for James Murray.
‘Splendid,’ China was saying. ‘Oh, Paula Jones is going to speak. She is fabulous. A dear old friend.’
A woman with long red wiry hair, a loose linen blouse, a flowing patterned skirt and very large beads around her neck and wrists, began speaking. Her voice was deep-throated and velvety in the manner of women who sipped Chardonnay in country gardens in Hunter wellies and ethnic scarves. ‘I’d like to tell a little anecdote from my travels.’ She threw her hair back. ‘It happened whilst I was amongst the Luba peoples last year, taking photos of their beautiful features, and teaching the girls how to bead. I asked the chief if there was anything I could give to his people as a gift. I had brought pens and chewing gum, obviously. But, in front of his people, the chief told me, with the help of a translator, that yes indeed there was something I could do for them, and that was to show my breasts.’ Here, she leant back and paused theatrically to allow the audience to laugh, which they did in a civilised way.
A man behind me shouted something.
‘Excuse me?’ Paula Jones asked, cupping her ear.
‘I said: boobies!’ the man shouted again in a faintly Teutonic accent.
‘Yes, quite. As I was saying, the chief asked me to show the village my breasts in return for having photographed them bare-breasted, and I said—’
‘Boobies!’ the man shouted a third time. ‘Boobies!’
I and all around me turned to see who it was, but I could not make him out through the throng.
‘Will you be quiet?’ It was the wiry man James Murray had been talking to.
‘So I tried to explain to him that this would be difficult for me,’ said Paula Jones, beads clanking, ‘I’ve had three children, after all.’ She laughed and the crowd laughed with her.
‘Boobies!’ the man shouted once more and this time the crowd began to murmur.
‘I tried to offer him all kinds of alternatives: money…’
‘Motherfucking boobies!’ the man shouted out, this time with venomous force.
‘Now that’s quite enough of—’ the wiry man started saying, but was cut off.
‘Motherfucking boobies! Motherfucking—’
There was a scramble near the entrance and I could see two of the museum guards taking out a young man in pressed jeans and shirt. I went nearer to get a proper look. Just as I did, a young woman with shiny tawny hair dropped her leather trousers and knickers to reveal that she was cleanly shaven. There was a commotion as another guard tried to grab the woman in an awkward manner and haul her up the stairs. I began to laugh.
‘Friends of yours, are they?’ James Murray was standing beside me.
‘Not yet.’
‘Disgraceful act of anarchy.’ His friend had also moved closer to the door to see what was going on. ‘Utterly pointless. I can’t think…’
‘I think they might have been demonstrating the obscenity of the continued objectification of the colonial subject,’ I said.
‘I don’t think they had to be quite so rude.’ He looked at me quickly and walked towards Paula Jones.
‘Neither did you when you colonised us,’ I smiled.
‘Gideon’s upstairs. Have a word with him,’ James Murray said. ‘I’m off to Spain for the summer so I’ll leave you to each other, and hopefully the outcome will be to both your advantages. Now, you’d better come with me.’
‘How brilliant was that?’ I asked. ‘At least someone cares enough to make a stand against the whole charade.’
‘And you will too one day, but in a far more articulate, coherent and considered way. They just made fools of themselves. And no one knew what on earth they were doing.’
‘Yes, but I wish I didn’t have to compromise myself to do it.’
‘We all have to sooner or later in life. That’s one of life’s laws.’
‘Is it really?’
‘I have to rush for my train. Try and stay out of trouble. Bye for now.’
I stopped on the staircase and looked once more at the mostly sacred objects that had been bought or taken for the entertainment of others. I heard running and shouting from upstairs, craned my neck and barely missed being hit by an onslaught of magazines being thrown down by the same young woman who had lowered her trousers before.
A security guard grabbed her from behind, while another picked up her kicking legs and carried her out to the soundtrack of loud shrieking and screaming. I looked at what had been thrown down. They were porn magazines. Another of the guards came down and gathered them up from the floor, but left me holding one, on the cover of which was a picture of a woman on her knees in front of a broadly grinning man. I placed the magazine on top of a glass cabinet and headed up.
Gideon stood at the top of the stairs. ‘Walk with me?’ he said.
I nodded.
‘I think we’re both trying to do the same thing,’ he began. ‘And I think you need me—’
I stopped. ‘I need you?’
‘Yes, I can help you, give you the infrastructure, support you—’
‘No, thank you.’ I began to walk towards Oxford Street.
‘Wait.’
‘Why not admit that you need me, that you don’t have a museum without me?’
He looked at me, annoyed. ‘OK, I need you.’
‘What is it you actually want?’
‘I want to help…’
‘I’m sure. Like all the NGO workers in Ghana with their four-wheel drives, servants and swimming pools. You know, we’re not going to get anywhere, unless you tell me what you honestly want.’
‘Generally, or specifically?’
‘We can start with generally.’
‘I want to be happy.’
I laughed. ‘That’s a start. And specifically?’
He paused. ‘I want to be part of something.’
‘That sounds honest, we can work with that… I need to finish something first. You’ll have to give me a few months.’
‘OK,’ he said, but he did not.
He called every day, until the book I was writing faded slowly into shadow. We would have to gather objects, I told him, from as many of the kingdoms and groups as we could; have a section on the birth of the nation state in the context of other cultural independence movements, like the Négritude movement in Senegal and the Zaria art movement in Nigeria. The dream of a pan-African state stalled. An exhibit of the present, with all its different strands – all the paintings, sculptures and installations that came out of the academies based on foreign models, as well as those of our fr
iends – that would point to the future as much as the past. And yet, slowly, until it was unavoidable, article after article came out, in newspapers and magazines, pronouncing as Gideon’s the narrative I had crafted.
He asked me for lunch, as he did most days.
I agreed and tried to swallow my anger when I saw him, but could not. ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Hello to you too.’
‘What is all this?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Maya.’
I had no time for false innocence. ‘Don’t you see how damaging this is to us? How it is repeating the same old story? How the white man just comes in, takes over everything with no regard for what he found, for our agency, our truth? That this is not the time, not the place?’
‘You know, for someone who seems very smart, you’re acting like an idiot right now.’
I had rubbed at something that mattered; even his voice had changed.
‘Did you just call me an idiot?’
‘It’s just the way I talk, Maya, to all my friends. Everyone knows that.’
‘Really? You’ve never talked to me like that before.’
‘Maybe it’s about time. You’ve always said that you wanted to write anyway, rather than all this. So I’ve decided that, instead of us being co-directors of the project, you’re stepping down. It gives you more time for writing. I’ll pay for it. You can still advise us.’
As I walked away, I wondered if it was really I who had opened the door to this reality, when I thought I was doing all I could to upend it.
I found out now and not before that Gideon had taken the plans for our museum from Kojo, and had begun laying the foundations for it even before Kojo had died; that the architect Kojo had worked with to design the museum, stone by stone, so that its very form was directed by its narrative, had left to work with Gideon; and that, the night he died, Kojo was on his way to destroy the foundations; to burn and uproot what he could.
I thought of Kojo now, and how fear and anger had consumed him.
I thought of my mother and her shattered hopes.
I thought of my father, who told me, constantly, to call if there was anything I needed, and how I had stemmed myself against him for what I thought of as his weakness.
I thought of my wider family, and of how they were now again where they had always thought they should be; of how Kojo and my mother, who had dreamt so hard, were no longer there to witness it.
I thought of the man at home, and of all the obstacles and worries, and of how despite them, if you were clear enough, it was whatever was true and constant that shone through, and connected with what was so in you, even if you could not define it.
28
I returned home, as she had always wanted, and yet there was no resonance in the things I knew.
The leafy buildings in Cantonments and Airport Residential Area, the large-trunked shade-giving trees had been torn down and replaced by new anonymous condos. I walked the few old streets remaining, past trees flecked with fuchsia. At the traffic light, a girl stood with headphones, tight pink Lycra leggings holding in her fullness as she danced to the music in her ears. She was full of joy, and the sight of her made me, for a moment, so happy I wanted to stop and tell her I loved her; but we did not live in that kind of world.
I walked down the dusty back roads, until I reached a shack with wooden benches outside. There was a small TV inside with boys crammed onto the plastic chairs and on the floor. Some of them had their shoeshine equipment and barrels with goods to sell next to them. All over the walls of the shack, there were posters: of two black angels exorcising a white devil; a horned creature from Star Wars with a man draped in a leopard skin brandishing a spear next to a priest holding a Bible; a Bosch-like tree behind two goat-headed creatures poking out the eyes of a bound man; of another man being rescued from a Jurassic Park dinosaur by two giant dwarfs with red-pointed hats and backward-facing feet. They were showing a film, in which the man was going to a traditional priest, who had white caked make-up on his face and seemed to be having a fit, all rolling eyes and tongue, half Godzilla, half goon. In the next scene, a woman on her knees prayed with a pastor for deliverance.
I walked to the corner shop, which was also a hairdresser’s, and stopped to buy food and water.
The hairdresser asked me if I wanted my hair braided. I nodded and sat down. Her little girl came to sit in my lap.
‘How many children do you have?’ I asked.
‘Please. Three.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
We were the same age.
‘How long have you been married?’
‘Five years.’
‘You’re still in love?’
She laughed. ‘Love? What is falling in love? He calls you. You call him. You go and see film. One time. Two time. Then you are bored.’
I laughed. ‘So you’re not?’
‘Sister. Eh. Don’t get me wrong. I love my husband. But the most difficult part of all is to live with him, not to be in love with him. To see him every day and to accept who this man is. I work with one girl at the shop. She is saying, “I am waiting for the right one.” When she says it, I laugh. Tchya. You keep on waiting and see.’
‘You don’t think there is a right one?’
‘Of course not.’
‘But what if there is? What if there is and you’re not ready, because you’re not fully yourself yet, because there is so much left to do before you become yourself?’
‘Become yourself? You people and your book learning. What are you now?’
‘I don’t know. I feel like there’s so much I have to see, and learn, and get rid of, before I can give myself to someone else… Are you happy?’
‘Of course I am happy. I have my husband, my children, my family. I go to church. I see my friends. Don’t go wandering round-round looking for something you are not going to find, eh?’
I looked out into the courtyard; her grandmother was outside asleep in her wheelchair, her mother was hanging up clothes on the line, her daughter crawled on a blanket on the ground.
My mother occasionally used to sing the song ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’, and when she did, it was full of pathos, and mourning.
I had learnt from her to be a woman and now I was painfully giving birth to myself.
I had made the same mistakes we had been making for centuries, even though I thought I could see better, and yet I knew the outcome would not be the same.
I felt the beginnings of relief and release from centuries of obligation; from the fear of never doing, never being, enough.
Just like the girl in the pink Lycra, before I was my mother’s daughter, the seed of my ancestors, I was a child of the universe, and perhaps we did live in that kind of world.
I thought of the cycles of belonging that bound us, that had written our paths even before we were born; of the wordless whispers that had been with me since birth.
I thought of the stool house, a room within a room, in which stood the symbols of our past and our reincarnated future.
I thought of the vision of a bare table covered in layered faded scrawl, of the empty chair that stood before it, of the shadows of those who had long left, and of the open door through which, if only I wanted, I could walk.
Appendix
The Book of Histories
Fragments of the Life of Yaw Gyata
The four of us were always together then, and what we shared, or so it seemed, was the same grand sense of entitlement. Kwamena, son of a cocoa farmer. Your mother, Amba, granddaughter of a slave and daughter of my father’s chauffeur. Your aunt, Yaa, royal princess. And I. Amba’s sense, like Kwamena’s, came from knowledge, but unlike he who always seemed to know everything best, she knew it all first. All the market women, the traders, the palace courtiers knew Amba by name. She, the daughter of the only one of my father’s staff who never drew any criticism from him. Paa Kwesi polished m
y father’s Imperial, Studebakers and Chryslers with such fervour and wore his uniform with such precision that my father kept him with him at all times. When Amba arrived, she did not at first seem prone to her father’s fastidiousness; she wore only a printed wrapper around her body, and no sandals on her bare dusty feet. Her eyes, large in her closely cropped head, surveyed the stone room, the pots and bowls and rugs and furnishings my mother had received as gifts from my father and her brother, Uncle Kagya. Then, when my mother left to spend the night in my father’s quarters, she filled the space, by busying herself with the bowls they had eaten from, with more authority than I had in my own house. She became my mother’s silent and unbidden helper, rushing to Yaa as soon as she got home from school, tying her to her back to lull her to sleep, as if the silent satisfaction of the child gave her everything she needed. We sometimes played parents in those days, she and I. I more indulgently, she with the deathly seriousness that was her wont.
When I think of you as a child on her back, it is really your Aunt Yaa that I am thinking of, as we pamper and feed her, until she erupts like the volcanic mountains of Sicily. I hope you have seen Sicily in your time. Your mother never did. I never took her.
But perhaps she already knew then that I would one day leave, just as she knew before us all that the Amantoomiensa would try to take the sandals from my father’s feet, while he still slept the sacred sleep of forgetting, and that Yaa would fall in love with Kwamena.
The dryness that began in April persisted, as did the court case, and with it everything dissipated.
My mother built on the plot of land she had kept, a house so small that we could not fit the remainder of our furniture and clothes in it. We had to give away those we could not sell at the market.
She began to farm, as if she had done it all her life, getting up before the sun and returning home after it was long dark. I accompanied her and did, as she did not, complain at the harshness of the sun. She did not complain even when the droughts truncated the growth of the cassava, yams, plantain and kontomire we planted and we barely had enough to eat, let alone sell, for Yaa and Amba’s school fees. After school, the girls sold the produce we harvested at the market.
The God Child Page 17