Ghana Must Go

by Taiye Selasi

  Glittering garden.

  Glittering wet.

  Kweku stops on the threshold and stares at this, breathless, his shoulder against the sliding door, halfway slid open. He thinks to himself, with a pang in his chest, that the world is too beautiful sometimes. That there’s simply no weight to it, no way to accept it: the dew on the grass and the light on the dew and the tint to that light, not for a doctor like him, when he knows that such things rarely live through a night; that they’re in but not long for the world as he’s known it, a brutal and senseless and punishing place; that they’ll either be broken or break away free, leaving loss in their wake. That the N.I.C.U. had it right.

  • • •

  They don’t promote naming in the N.I.C.U., as he discovered during his third-year pediatrics rotation, that heartbreaking winter, 1975, with his mother just dead and his first son just born. If some ill-fated infant wouldn’t last through the weekend, they discouraged its parents from picking a name, scrawling “Baby” with the surname on the incubator label (“A, B, C Surname” on for multiples). Many of his classmates found the practice uncouth, a sort of premature throwing up of hands in defeat. These were Americans, mostly, with their white teeth and cow’s milk, for whom infant mortality was an inconceivable thing. Or rather: conceivable in the aggregate, as a number, a statistic, i.e., x% of babies under two weeks will die. Conceivable in the plural but unacceptable in the singular. The one gray-blue baby.

  The late Baby Surname.

  To the Africans, by contrast (and the Indians and West Indians and the one escapee Latvian for whom Baltimore was comfortable), a dead neonate was not only conceivable but unremarkable, all the better when unavoidable, i.e., explicable. It was life. To them the nonnaming was logical, even admirable, a way to create distance from existence so from death. Precisely the kind of thing they always thought of in America and never bothered with in places like Riga or Accra. The sterilization of human emotion. The reduction of anguish to Hallmark-card hurt. The washing, as by sedulous scrub-nurse, of all ugliness off grief’s many faces.

  Faces Kweku Sai knew.

  To him, who could name grief by each one of her faces, the logic was familiar from a warmer third world, where the boy who tails his mother freshly bloodied from labor (fruitless labor) to the edge of an ocean at dawn—who sees her place the little corpse like a less lucky Moses all wrapped up in palm frond, in froth, then walk away, but who never hears her mention it, ever, not once—learns that “loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind.

  Even then, at twenty-four, a new father and still a child, a newly motherless child, Kweku knew that.

  • • •

  Now he stares at the glittering, arrested by beauty, and knows what he knew all those winters ago: that when faced with a thing that is fragile and perfect in a world that is ugly and crushing and cruel the correct course of action is: Give it no name. Pretend that it doesn’t exist.

  But it doesn’t work.

  He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal—logical-admirable refusal—to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality of beauty, much less of beauty in fragility in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die.

  He sees this so clearly he closes his eyes. His head begins throbbing. He opens his eyes. He tries but can’t move. He is glued there, overwhelmed.

  The last time he felt this was with Sadie.

  4.

  Winter again, 1989.

  The delivery ward at the Brigham.

  Fola propped up in the hospital bed, still bloody from labor and clutching his arm.

  The twins, nine years old, fast asleep in the lounge in those ugly blue chairs with the yellow foam stuffing, arranged as they always were, locked into place like some funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle: Taiwo’s head on Kehinde’s shoulder and Kehinde’s cheek on Taiwo’s head, a girl and a boy with the same amber eyes throwing sparks from their otherwise gentle young faces.

  Olu eating apple slices, already so healthy at fourteen years old, reading Things Fall Apart, the single visible sign of his mounting distress the rote up-and-down bounce of his femur.

  And the newborn, yet unnamed, fighting for life in its incubator. Losing.

  Baby Sai.

  • • •

  In the rancid delivery room.

  “What’s wrong with Idowu? Where are they taking her?”

  She clutched his bare arm. He was still in his scrubs, nothing else, arms uncovered. He’d been stitching when she went into labor (too soon). A friend at the Brigham had had him paged over the intercom, and he’d run through the snow from Beth Israel here with the swirling flakes clouding his vision as he ran, and the words, two words, clouding his thinking. Too soon.

  “It was too soon.”

  “NO.”

  Not a human sound. Animal. A growl rumbling forth from the just-emptied belly. A battle cry. But who was the enemy? Him. The obstetrician. The timing. The belly itself. “Folasadé,” he murmured.

  “Kweku, no,” Fola growled, her teeth clenched, her nails piercing his goose-pimpled skin. Drawing blood. “Kweku, no.” Now she started to cry.

  “Please,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”

  She shook her head, crying, still piercing his arm (and other pierce-able parts of him neither perceived). “Kweku, no.” As if changing his name in her mind now from Kweku, just Kweku, to Kweku-No.

  He laid his lips gently on the crown of her head. Her crowning glory, Fola’s hair, reduced by half by fresh sweat. A cloud of tiny spirals, each one clinging to the next in solidarity and smelling of Indian Hemp. “We have three healthy children,” he said to her softly. “We are blessed.”

  “Kweku-No, Kweku-No, Kweku-No.”

  The last one was shrill, nearing rage, accusation. He had never seen Fola unraveled like this. Her two other pregnancies had gone perfectly, medically speaking, the deliveries like clockwork, instructional-video smooth: the first one in Baltimore when they were still children, the second here in Boston, a C-section, the twins. And now this, ten years later, a complete accident, the third (though they were all complete accidents in a way). She was different with this one almost right from the start. She insisted upon knowing the gender at once. Then insisted he not tell anyone, not even the kids, not (a) that she was expecting and then (b) what it was. Both became obvious that evening in summer she returned with four gallons of pastel pink paint. She chose the name without him, for “the child who follows twins.” This didn’t so much surprise him. She’d become kind of precious about her Yoruba heritage after becoming iya-ibeji, a mother to twins. He didn’t like the name, the way Idowu sounded, and less what it meant, something about conflict and pain. But he was relieved that her choice wasn’t something more dramatic, like Yemanja, the way she’d been acting. Building shrines.

  And now this. Ten weeks early. There was nothing to be done.

  “You have to do something.”

  He looked at the nurse.

  A drinker, he’d guess, from the paunch and rosacea. Irish, from the trace of a South Boston a. But no trace of bigotry, which often went with this, and gentle eyes, grayish-blue, glistening. The woman managed to frown and to smile simultaneously. Sympathetically. While Fola drew blood from his arm. “W
here did they take her?” he asked, though he knew.

  The nurse frowned-and-smiled. “To the N.I.C.U.”

  • • •

  He went to the waiting room.

  Olu looked up.

  He sat by his son, put a hand on his knee. Olu abandoned Achebe and looked at his knee as if only now aware it was bouncing.

  “Watch your brother and sister. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check on the baby.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  Kweku looked at the twins.

  A funny wooden Japanese logic-game puzzle. They slept like his mother. Olu looked at them, too. Then pleadingly at Kweku.

  “Come on then.”

  • • •

  They walked down the hospital hallway in silence. His cameraman walked backward in front of them. In this scene: a Well-Respected Doctor goes striding down the hallway to save his unsavable daughter. A Western. He wished he had a weapon. Little six-shooter, silver. Two. Something with more shine than a Hopkins M.D. And a clearer opponent. Or an opponent less formidable than the basics of medical science. The odds.

  Presently, Olu. “What is it?”

  End scene.

  “Nothing.” Kweku chuckled. “Just tired, that’s all.” He patted his son’s head. Or his son’s browbone more accurately, his son’s head having moved from where he remembered its being. He looked at Olu closely now, surprised by the height (and by other things he’d seen but never noticed before: the wide latissimus dorsi, the angular jawline, the Yoruba nose, Fola’s nose, broad and straight, the taut skin the same shade as his own and so smooth, baby’s bum, even now in adolescence). He wasn’t pretty like Kehinde—who looked like a girl: an impossible, impossibly beautiful girl—but had become in the course of one weekend, it seemed, a really very handsome young man. He squeezed Olu’s shoulder, reassuring him. “I’m fine.”

  Olu frowned, tensing. “The baby, I meant. What is it? The gender?”

  “Oh. Right.” Kweku smiled. “It was a girl,” then, “It’s a girl,” but too late. Olu heard the past tense and glared at him, wary.

  “What’s wrong with the baby?” he asked, his voice tight.

  “The curse of her gender. Impatience.” Kweku winked. “She couldn’t wait.”

  “Can they save it?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Can you?”

  Kweku laughed aloud, a sudden sound in the quiet. He patted Olu’s head, this time finding his hair. His elder son’s appraisal of his abilities as a doctor never ceased to amaze or delight him. Or appease him. His other son couldn’t have cared less what he did, irrespective of the fact that they lived off his doing it. He didn’t take this personally. At least he didn’t think he did. At least he didn’t show it when his cameraman was around. He was an Intelligent Parent, too rational to pick favorites. A Man’s Man, above petty insecurities. And a Well-Respected Doctor, one of the best in his field, goddammit!, whether Kehinde cared or didn’t. Besides. The boy was un-impressable. Perpetually indifferent. His teachers all said the same year after year. Preternatural ability, exemplary behavior, but doesn’t seem to care about school. What to do?

  Kehinde doesn’t care about anything, Kweku told them. Except Taiwo. (Always except Taiwo.)

  “No,” he answered Olu, his laugh lingering as a smile. Olu’s eyes lingering on the side of his face. Then falling away. They walked farther down the hallway in silence. Suddenly, Olu looked up.

  “Yes, you can.”

  • • •

  All these years later when Kweku thinks of that moment, he can picture the look on his fourteen-year-old’s face, when Olu seemed to become—in the course of one instant—an infant again, raw with trusting. The boy was transfigured, his whole face wide open, his eyes so undoubting that Kweku looked down. His elder son’s appraisal of his abilities as a doctor broke his heart (for a second time. He hadn’t felt the first). He shook his head weakly and looked at his hands. His fingers still frozen from running through the snow. He was teetering on an edge, though he didn’t know which, some strange gathering force building within and against him. “She doesn’t have the heart for it—” he started, then stopped. They’d reached the glass door to the nursery.

  • • •

  Kweku peered in.

  There it was.

  On the left.

  Three and a half pounds, barely breathing, barely life.

  With all kinds of patches and tubes sticking out of it, it looked like E.T. going home.

  Olu pressed his hands to the Plexiglas window. “Which one is it?” he asked, cupping his hands around his eyes. Kweku laughed softly. Olu didn’t say she. Only it, one, the baby. Little surgeon in the making. He pointed to the incubator, the handwritten tag. “That one,” he said. “Baby Sai.”

  • • •

  It was the simplest thing, really, just the littlest slip (Sai), speaking aloud as he tapped on the glass, but he’d been teetering already on an edge when it happened, when pointing to the incubator he spoke his own name. And the two put together, like combustible compounds—the sound of his name breathed aloud in the space and the sight of the neonate fighting for breath—suddenly somehow made “Baby Sai” his. It was his.

  She was his.

  And she was perfect.

  And she was tiny.

  And she was dying. And he felt it, felt this dying, in the center of his chest, the force gathered, raw panic, overwhelming his lungs, filling his chest with a tingling, thick, biting, and sharp. He heard himself whisper, “There she is,” or something like it, but with the constriction of his larynx didn’t recognize his voice.

  Neither did Olu, who looked up, alarmed.

  “Dad,” he whispered. Stricken. “Don’t cry.”

  But Kweku couldn’t help it. He was barely even aware of it. The tears came so quickly, fell so quietly. She was his. That precious thing there with her toenails like dewdrops, her ten tiny fingers all curled up in hope, little fists of determination, and her petal-thin skin, like a flower that Fola could name by its face. Fola’s favorite already. And she. Waiting, hopeful, still propped up in bed, sweating, bloodied. His, too.

  You have to do something.

  He had to do something. He wiped his face quickly with the back of his arm. The salt stung the wound there. He squeezed Olu’s shoulder. Reassuring himself.

  “Come on then.”

  • • •

  The next ninety-six hours he stayed: in the staff lounge, befriending bleary interns who slept there as well, consulting colleagues, researching treatments, obsessively reading, barely sleeping, until his opponent was defeated. Until the newborn was named. And not Idowu, that goat-meat-tough name Fola loved for the long-suffering child born directly after twins. He picked Sadé when they brought the child home from the hospital on the grounds that two Folas would become too confusing. His first choice was Ekua, like his sister, “born on Wednesday,” but Fola had established sovereignty over naming years back (first name: Nigerian, middle name: Ghanaian, third name: Savage, last name: Sai). Sadé picked Sadie when she started junior high on the grounds that her classmates pronounced Sadé like that anyway. But a nurse picked Folasadé in the first place, inadvertently, that last night at the Brigham.

  Another accident.

  He was alone in the nursery with the infant after midnight, in the scrubs from the appendectomy at Beth Israel days before, fully aware that some parent passing the Plexiglas window might mistake him for a homeless man and very well should. The bloodshot eyes, the matted hair, that half-crazed look of consuming obsession: he looked like a madman, a madman in scrubs, gone broke trying to win against the odds. (He had no way of knowing he would one day become this.) The nursery was dark, save the lamps in the incubators. He rocked in a chair with the girl in his lap. The girl had been aslee
p for over an hour at this point but he carried on rocking, too exhausted to stand. The chair was too small, one of those tiny plastic rocking chairs that hospitals put in nurseries, apparently for neonates themselves.

  The Irish-looking nurse with the paunch and the rosacea appeared in the doorway with her clipboard and paused. “You again.” She leaned against the door, frowning-smiling.

  “Me again, yes.”

  “No, no. Please don’t get up.”

  She entered without switching on the overhead fluorescents, kindly sparing them both the sudden violence of light. She made her rounds quietly, scribbling notes on her clipboard. When she reached the little rocking chair she looked down and laughed.

  The infant’s hand, with its five infinitesimal brown fingers, was attached to Kweku’s thumb as if holding on for life.

  “You must really love her,” she said. Boston accent. Luff-ha. “You’re here more than I am, I swear it.”

  Kweku laughed softly so as not to wake the baby. “I do,” he said simply. “I do.”

  The two words returned him to Baltimore, to his wedding day, to Fola, young, resplendent in maternity dress in that low-ceilinged chapel, red carpeting, wood paneling, their first night of marriage, ginger ale, plastic flutes. Whereon two other words came sort of floating like little bubbles to the surface of his thoughts. And popped. Too soon. Had they married too soon? Become parents too soon? If so, what might that mean? That it wasn’t “really love”?

  The nurse, still in Boston, turned off the lamp in the incubator. Kweku, still in Baltimore, closed his eyes, rocked back and forth. “But I do really love her.” The nurse didn’t hear this. She checked the label on the incubator. Baby Sai. No given name.