On Leaving Ghana
By Maame Blue
Here are some things I know about being Ghanaian; things that have shaped my upbringing and my navigation of the world.
We are accustomed to leaving. And it means something when we stay.
‘The fates had willed that he was the one child the right age to go, the seed picked by the bird of chance.’
In Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ latest novel Azúcar, leading man Yunior leaves Ghana in 1983 following drought and food shortages, heading to the Caribbean as a teenager to the fictional country of Fumaz on a scholarship. Yunior embodies the quintessential immigrant story, where educational excellence is his ticket to ‘a better life’, where he can eventually make his family back home proud.
He enters Fumaz as Oswald but soon becomes Yunior under a lazy teacher’s tongue. His previous life is put away, and he twists himself into the Spanish language, becoming endeared to a new place. Subsequently, he does all the things a young man away from home might do. He falls in love. He works hard. He lets his new home subsume him; getting involved in the politics there, his green fingers and agricultural education adding colour and life to a new community still vegetating, trying to grow roots out of revolution.
He visits Ghana again only once he has found financial comfort, and his return feels like a weather-beaten boomerang – he found his way back but the journey and time away have left him changed. He speaks fondly of Aguana, Fumaz to his siblings in Ghana, and they note how he is easier in nature; a naturally gifted musician with the ability to pick up an instrument and find his way to melody with it. He attributes it silently to his playing of the drums as a child; a thing he never even considered a skill, just something that was.
‘The most beautiful thing in Aguana is not the buildings (which everyone always talks about), not the beach – even though I love it – it’s the peopleist approach, which we sort of have here too – even though it’s not official.’
Perhaps this is why he stays in Fumaz; because he can do what he was unable to in Ghana. He can create community and work towards never repeating the pain of the past – never going hungry again. And soon by exploring his love of music, he becomes fuller, easy in the way he glides into adulthood, into a life in Fumaz. One he found only after leaving home.
*
I think about what it feels like when we travel in the hope for something better, and find only disappointment on the other side. When it happens, it can come through in the way we might then speak of home and of the new place we’ve ventured to, and they can be jarring side by side. It can feel like a fracture, a split down the middle of us between the past and the present.
In Krystle Zara Appiah’s novel Rootless, her character Efe attempts to reconcile her new life in England with the one she thought she would have in Ghana.
‘For weeks she’s felt cut loose from the world, without the strength or desire to tug herself back to the ground. Now, just like that, one foot brushes against the earth.’
Efe arrives in London with her younger sister. She is planted in her aunt’s flat with shock, as if moments before she was walking freely along the sun-soaked streets of Accra. She wants to succeed and make something of the life she has been thrown into, but under the weight of well-known parental and cultural expectations, she buckles. She is hounded by failures in fact, underscored by early trauma and an ever-fleeting sense of herself. There is a floundering to Efe, as she tries to connect who she becomes as a mother, to the path she didn’t take; the one that she might have wanted much more. And if there are cracks along the route she has chosen, Efe falls down them time and time again, caught at intervals by the man she loves. Yet, it is his desires that soon overshadow her own, and she hops fretfully along the tightrope of family life she has found herself clasping on to, despite her verbal doubts.
‘Efe nods, wringing her hands. “I know. I just worry. We’re not always on the same page. Sometimes I think I’m going to let him down or screw things up. He wants us to be a family with kids and all of that, and I want him, I do, but not the rest of it. He says it’s fine, right now, but he’ll just keep pushing and -” Efe’s voice cracks. Tears gather in her eyes.’
This is the length of Efe’s journey; she is fearful of expressing her own wants and needs because they feel at odds with what is expected of her. And it continues to be a battle, even in moments of great love and joy and hope for the future. Efe is always fighting to keep her feet firmly on the ground, even as she tries to leave what she has built in order to grow roots elsewhere. *
It can be painful when you can’t quite find that footing anywhere; when that concept of home feels elusive, no matter how used to leaving you are. Sharon Dodua Otoo’s novel Ada’s Realm personifies what it is to always feel on a knife’s edge in the search for home, or just somewhere to stop for a time.
‘The bits and pieces Ada had learned of her had been stitched together from scraps and shreds of other people’s words, and even much of this was still mere fantasy. All of which I found completely appropriate. After all: What is the past, but a project of the imagination?’
Ada is a fractured being that spins through time, searching for home, meaning and justice in her womanhood. Following Ada at speed will surely give you whiplash, because she traverses time with abandon. It feels at first disjointed – embroiled in ceremony on the Gold Coast in 1459, on a beach in Totope moments before a Portuguese invasion; to England in 1848 as a noble woman; then careening into a Nazi concentration camp in 1945; and finally trying to find rest in an apartment in Berlin in 2019. There, Ada is heavily pregnant and fearful of what Brexit could mean for her newly acquired British passport. The modern iteration of Ada is compelled by the things many of us British Ghanaians were feeling at the time – uncertainty daring to shake us just as we felt we might find equal footing in a country not of our origin but of circumstance.
‘In Ghana, Ada had tiptoed her way to womanhood and scarcely noticed the transition. In Germany, Ada had suddenly become Black, and she felt it immediately.’’
Ada inhabits many things, pieces of history or key moments on the timeline of her life that hold meaning, that dictate what steps she takes next. At turns she is the British passport on her side table. Or she is the four walls in a concentration camp, watching the human version of herself forced into sex work, her body never belonging to her, her mind long since disconnected from what it has been subjected to. Or she is a breeze; a flow of air or movement of the ocean before colonisers arrive to cause havoc, to convince a community that what they have will never belong to them again.
In Ada’s case, there is a continuous thread of things being taken from her, of pieces of herself being chipped away. And it is only in remembering everything, in trying to piece together all the ways that she has been split apart through time, that she returns to a whole, finding footing in her present reality.
*
All of these characters – born from the minds of British Ghanaian authors – take leave of their homeland at some point for new pastures. They become scattered, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. This is the Ghanaian migrant story. We are travellers, explorers, curious to discover other places, always with a hope to stumble back home – even if ‘home’ changes shape and location.
It feels baked into every milestone of my life – being on the move to another place and somewhere else after that – and in my family it is the norm. Maybe it is the reason why, when I finally found ‘home’, it was neither where I was born, nor where my parents grew up.
I don’t know if that makes me quintessentially Ghanaian, but I do know how to leave a place. And I know what it means to stay.