Owusu

My father’s death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

I wanted to grab his cigarette from his rough lips. I wanted to burn my flesh—any cigarette-sized section of flesh—with it. Then, for just a second, I wanted to burn his flesh instead. Perhaps I wanted to see physical pain in his eyes because I couldn’t see my own pain, not really, not clearly. I was horrified by my thoughts, but my horror did not quiet them.

If I could not find belonging in my story of my father, in my grief, where could I find it? If I belonged nowhere and to no one, then what was I? Who was I?

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the fact that I had multiple selves, or a divided self, and that I needed to behave differently with the different groups of people that made up my life. All people do this to some extent, but some must be more skillful at it than others.

I had my mother’s face, but because of the color of my skin, I didn’t look to the world like I belonged to her.

Not only did being biracial mean that I looked out of place, but I also didn’t always know how to behave within the norms of my chosen nationality: Ghanaian. My English was too posh-sounding, courtesy of my time in England. It earned me the nickname Lady.

Ghana, America, England, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda—I could not lay claim to any of those places in an incontestable way. It has always been difficult for me to say the word home with any conviction. When I was a child, I often felt like an outsider among my own family. Between me and them were borders—geographic, spiritual, cultural, linguistic. And no sooner had we arrived in a place than we had to prepare to leave it.

I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.

Any luck finding a therapist?” my psychiatrist asked as she handed me a credit card slip to sign for my copay. She always had me pay before we talked.

“Still looking,” I lied. So many times, I had taken her printed list of recommended therapists, but I had never actually called any of them. I didn’t want anyone digging around in my mind. They might not know when to stop. They might go too far and break the mantle that protected the hot, molten core.

At that appointment, I half-lied about the voices. I heard voices, but they were all versions of my own voice or echoes of voices from my past. Those voices were not, I decided, the ones she was asking about. And I lied when I did not tell her about wanting to burn myself and the cook. I lied when I did not tell her about the door that had opened: The only solution is a permanent solution. My psychiatrist did not ask if there was a seismometer in my midbrain that warned of fissures that would widen into deep chasms and, eventually, into an all-consuming abyss. If she had asked about that, I might have answered honestly. It’s difficult to say.

My room was a desert because it was barren. True, it was filled with books, photographs, clothes, lotions, hair creams, perfumes, a bed with a firm mattress, blankets knitted by my grandmother, bad paintings, candles, old letters, and new shoes. But those things had lost their meaning. It was as though they belonged to someone else whose life I had been dropped into, whose life I wouldn’t have minded torching until it was nothing but ashes.

He was my baby brother and I was supposed to take care of him. The fact that I had nothing to give him filled me with shame. The fact that I didn’t want to talk to him filled me with shame. I didn’t want to talk to him because I knew he would talk about Anabel. I didn’t want to think about her, so I couldn’t think about him. I shoved my phone back in my purse, left his text unanswered. My father, I thought, would have been disappointed in me.

The first time I rocked in the blue chair, it felt familiar. It felt like the kind of peace you find when floating in shallow water. It felt almost like sitting on my father’s lap. It comforted me like all the rocking chairs that had come before it. I rocked and rocked for hours. As I rocked, everything else seemed farther away, almost inaccessible: my desert room, my roommate playing video games on the other side of the door, the street below. Nowhere except the blue chair mattered. I wanted to rock forever.

To answer my unsolved questions, as I had done my whole life, I turned to literature. I turned to the women I had long imagined as a council of mothers: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara. They had advised me, consoled me, sustained me, saved me before. I needed them now more than ever. And, I turned to memoirs of madness.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron argues that depression, despite the cold, precise terms in which we currently discuss it, is more than anything a disease of disorder and loss of control. He writes that “our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness.

I found some relief in seeing my present state mirrored in the experiences of another. But this relief was, I knew, only a balm. To heal, I would need to look inward as well as outward. I would need to examine my memories. I would need to interrogate the stories I told myself—about myself, about my family, about the world. My unsolved questions were about my mothers and my father. They were about loss, longing, and fear; about my abandonment. They were about my upended, dislocated body and mind. They were about the geography and geology of my experience— about who I was and how I’d ended up in the blue chair. They were about finding my way out of it. But they were also about the borders and boundaries and fault lines on which we all live. They were about fractured surfaces and tectonic forces; about energies unleashed. This, I knew, was a reckoning. God of fire help me, I begged, or if you cannot help me, then show me how to set my world ablaze.

And as for what my father said about Africa, as much as I wanted to belong to Africa or to any place for that matter, I knew that I didn’t. Not really. Not completely. In countless ways and for countless reasons, I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.

In this world, my mother can weave back together her grandparents’ dreams that unraveled in Turkey. She won’t work in factories like they did. She will write and paint. She will sing the lyrics of her grandparents’ songs to music of her own invention. She will teach her daughters to sing too. She will show them that anything is possible. Perhaps dreams can be passed from mother to child through blood, or through whispering to womb, or through the sheer power of faith that can cross oceans and mountains and estrangements, because my mother’s dreams have always been my dreams: to create beauty from ink and thin air.

In this world, my father can carry his father’s dashed hopes of an academic life across continents. In his late forties, my grandfather got the university degree colonization had denied him. He studied literature. My father got a PhD in his twenties. He dreamed he would return home with his knowledge and use it to help build the Africa the generation before him had fought so long and hard for. As a child, I watched him do this. As an adult, I believe it might have killed him—the heartbreak from all of the suffering he could not end. Yet his dream, like my mother’s, was in me too.

The space between the family in the photograph on my dresser and what became of it is gaping and largely unknowable. My parents rarely spoke of each other. They rarely acknowledged that the family in the photograph ever existed. My father died before I was old enough or brave enough to ask him all my questions about the end of our family. Once or twice, we stumbled onto the topic, but those conversations were terse and awkward. I worried that he would take my curiosity for ingratitude, that he would think the life he had given me was not enough. My mother, when we were still speaking, would reveal only scant details. I did not push her. Our relationship was too fragile. And, always, below us, vibrations moved through solid rock.

It is from this journal that I know how my parents believed their love and the birth of their daughters to be a part of something important—a movement fueled by borderless love. The poems, or at least my interpretation of the poems, mourned not just a lost love but also a certain measure of lost optimism about the current condition.

The girls who picked on me were neither persuaded nor deterred by my recitation of this history. But my father was right on one count: their words no longer pierced my skin. When they approached me, I stuck my nose in the air imperiously and walked in the opposite direction. To their insults, I did not respond. I acted as though they did not exist.

My father continued to teach me about Ghanaian history after discovering that the entire continent of Africa was excluded from my world history textbook, except for Egypt. And the illustrations of ancient Egyptians in the book made them look decidedly European. “Nonsense,” my father said.

This seemed to be in direct conflict with the pride Ghanaians had in their own culture and precolonial history. I recall a song—my father’s favorite—by the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti called “Colonial Mentality.” Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization. He be say you be colonial man, Kuti sings in his beautifully rough voice, his Nigerian pidgin clear and defiant. You don be slave man before / Them don release you now / But you never release yourself.

On our bookshelf Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nurrudin Farah, Mariama Bâ, and Kofi Awoonor held the place of honor in the center of the top shelf. In our music collection Fela Kuti was joined by Miriam Makeba, Salif Keita, Youssou N’Dour, and E. T. Mensah and the Tempos Band. Yet I saw in my father’s use of the word bush evidence that the colonial mentality existed even in him. This scared me, though I couldn’t quite articulate why. Now I know it scared me because it spoke to a fault line in the African body —my body, my father’s.

What does Osei mean?” I asked. “It means noble,” he said. “I was named after Osei Tutu.” “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. He was, of course, writing about the experience of African Americans—of people whose ancestors my ancestors sold into slavery. But, this double consciousness is true of Africans as well. It is related to colonial mentality. It is related to my father being both Charles and Osei. It is related to my great-grandfather eating fufu with a spoon. It is related to the pride of being Ashanti and the shame of being bush.

It is difficult to speak in simple terms about Nkrumah’s legacy. He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief. He decried tribalism and jailed those who disagreed with him. He hated colonialism and loved the Queen of England—a photograph of himself with the Queen at her estate in Balmoral was one of his prized possessions. Those same tensions that existed in Nkrumah still shape the lives of many Ghanaians. The old way and new ways coexist. People pour libation to their ancestors and proudly sing the national anthem. Members of my family were jailed for opposing Kwame Nkrumah, but both my grandfather and father saw Nkrumah as the father of modern Africa.

When I came up gasping, my father grabbed me and tossed me back in. When I remember that day, I remember soaring through the air and landing with a splat. I remember myself unattached from everything and yet made of everything. I was the air and the water. I was made of living fragments. I was past, present, and future at once. I felt, more than ever before, and perhaps ever since, deliciously free.

But harmony is a fragile thing, and so is justice. They bend and break easily. We bend and break them with greed, with violence, with lies and obscurations. The people sold into slavery are modern-day Ghanaians’ ancestors too. Their backs and hearts broke under whip and weight. The incomplete story Ghana tells about slavery is a breach. Ashanti culture was breached by colonization. My family broke before and I knew it might break again. The earth broke from the force of a meteoroid, which sent shock waves in every direction.

There is no simple answer,” he said. “Your mother grew up in a family that lost everything, and the trauma is in her blood. I think that’s what made her leave.

Being Christian in Turkey had gotten Armenians killed. In America, it bought them whiteness. This meant that, despite their “dark complexions,” my family could be naturalized as full citizens of the United States with the rights to vote, hold office, and seek good jobs.

My grandparents don’t call themselves white, and neither does my mother. They call themselves Armenian. But America does not agree. To America, they are white. That was precisely what my great-grandfather hoped for. Whatever they call themselves, whiteness has claimed them. Whiteness cloaks them and keeps them safe.

As for injuries, pain is not always felt when and where it is inflicted. Grief is slow internal bleeding. And it turns out that my father was right, or almost right, about trauma being in the blood.

When I read that study, I thought immediately of my father telling me about trauma being in my mother’s blood. Add to that despair and detachment. Add to that an inability to follow rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt. Those are all things that are also true of me, in some measure. They are the qualities I most detest in myself. They are qualities that would make it difficult for me to be a mother.

She loves you in the ways she can,” my father said of my mother. I tried not to think about the ways she couldn’t, the ways she never would, except perhaps in that place between dream and daylight, in the split second between here and gone.

In the chair, you rock back and forth and mutter to yourself. The chair feels like a coffin. But to be in a coffin is the better alternative, the other alternative being to be in your life.

Reading about madness convinces you that you are, in fact, going mad. But it also makes you feel real, like what is happening to you is happening to you. Most of the time, you feel as though what is happening to you is happening in someone else’s bad dream. In the dream, there is a chair, a blue chair that rocks when you rock it. Everything else—the rest of the world—rocks on its own and there is no way to make it stop.

Let’s also say you allowed your body to eat itself so the spaces between your bones look like valleys. The smell of food, even the smell of plain, unbuttered toast, is so strong that vomit rises in your throat. When you force the strong-smelling food into your mouth, it tastes like cardboard. You are starving but you cannot possibly eat. The only thing you can bear to consume is alcohol. In fact, you can more than bear it—you need it. Alcohol is now water. You drink water only to flush your system of old alcohol to make room for more alcohol. Alcohol still tastes the way it’s supposed to. Whiskey is whiskey. Wine is wine. Tequila is tequila. But chicken is cardboard. Broccoli is cardboard. Chocolate truffles, pizza, hamburgers: cardboard, cardboard, cardboard. If that happened to you, what would you google?

What if you are so terrified of your own thoughts that you ripped the pages of your journal into tiny pieces? When the pieces still felt too big, did you rip them up even more, picking up each piece individually and tearing it in half with the tips of your fingers? When you threw the even tinier pieces into the garbage can in your room, could you still hear them talking to you? Did you have to fish the pieces out of the garbage can—every last one? (Did you make sure you got every last one?) Did you put the pieces into a sandwich bag? Did you dispose of that sandwich bag in a garbage can down the street so the words on the pieces could be drowned out by banana peels and half-drunk sodas? If you did that, does it mean that you are mad? If so, is there a name for that kind of madness? Is there a cure?

I am thinking about how a leak is matter escaping through an opening. I am thinking about water leaking, oil leaking, blood leaking, spirit leaking. I am thinking about madness, about how madness is an opening from which the spirit leaks.

Very true,” my father said, tapping me on the head with his newspaper. My father said Nyerere had tried to create an African system that was not understood solely in relation to Western philosophies and systems. “We in Africa have no more need of being converted to socialism than we have of being ‘taught’ democracy,” wrote Nyerere. “Both are rooted in our past.

Some things are out of the gods’ control. And some matters require more from us than hope or prayer. They require us to see and support one another. They require us to defend one another. We must all, in the end, make peace with that.

I am not proud of this, but when I met Agatha and noted that we were to be the only two black girls in the dorm, I was relieved she was dark-skinned. I was relieved she had a wider nose, coarser hair, and fuller lips than me. I was relieved because this meant I would not be at the bottom of the racial pecking order. To be clear, I did not believe that this pecking order was just or right. My father was dark-skinned, as were many of the people I loved and respected the most. But it did not matter what I believed. The rules had been written long before I arrived at St. Mary’s, long before Agatha and I were born. I knew the rules well because they had shaped my life, and because I was obsessed with reading historical texts and literature about people like me: black people, in-between people, people who complicated the rules.

When I encounter strangers from my tribes, they are startled by my attempts to communicate. They do not recognize me as one of their own. They laugh, charmed and perhaps a little disturbed by the discrepancy between appearance and sound. When I explain myself, they think me a curious hybrid. They speak to me, always, in English.

When it changed, did it change who you are in some fundamental way?” (Almost certainly, yes. Our voices, I think, are not just the vehicle through which we express ourselves, but also affect how we process and translate the world, how our dreams are made.)

I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me; nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the back roads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. I never did get to know my body that way.

We know aftershocks are coming, but we don’t know when exactly. We don’t know how many. And we don’t know how long they will last.

Even then, you were so self-sufficient,” she said. That phrase that is synonymous with independent. That phrase that is the antidote to feelings of responsibility, of obligation. With it, I believe she aimed to soften the glare of all the time I spent longing for her.

The final sentence in the story: I have to make sure I don’t get left behind when we move. This sentence was underlined.

It wasn’t as though checking that box changed anything. That my father was dead, that my mother left when I was a toddler, that she and I had not spoken in almost a decade—these were all facts that had been true for a long time. But the box, I suppose, formalized their absence, gave it a name. Knowing and accepting the inevitable are two different things.

But what I really felt was something between panic and penitence. I was certain the end of us was coming, that I had caused it. I was sorry for that. But, again, I was not ready to accept the inevitable. At the first sign of disaster—the chorus of barking dogs, the glass of water shuddering on the table—we scream until the silence is tolerable. We cannot prevent what happens next, but we can forestall feeling the full force of it. We can distract ourselves from the terror with the awful sound of our own voices.

For years, from my fear, I distracted myself by reading studies about orphans. Those studies provided strange comfort. Emotions were reduced to cold science. I reduced myself into them. It was a different kind of denial. Through the studies, I learned that children raised in orphanages often reach out their arms to be picked up, but as soon as they get what they seem to want, they kick and push and wriggle away. Then, once they have escaped, they throw themselves on the floor in utter despair and demand to be picked up again. The first time I read about that phenomenon, I laughed out loud. The story of my life, I thought. Then I curled up on the carpet, closed my eyes, and told myself that reading the studies was enough, that they contained all I needed to know. Into my own soul, I reassured myself, I needn’t go deep.

A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people’s earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.

Coltrane’s musical freedom, like most freedoms, was hard-won. He spent many hours a day practicing—rediscovering, investigating, and revising his ideas from the day before. He was determined to keep digging until he hit bedrock—the solid, essential truth at his own core. He wanted to share that truth with others. Music, he believed, was the language through which to do it. “You can’t ram philosophies down anybody’s throat,” he said, “and the music is enough!

He knew that when that time came, the only thing left to do would be to lose control. He wanted to open me to the beauty in abstraction, in complexity, in wild things.

When our stories require us to pass judgment, to inflict shame on ourselves and others, to set ourselves apart, we cause harm. Bigot, prig, the voice in my head calls me. And, I must answer honestly. I must answer yes. I want to make it not so. I have work to do on myself. I need a new story.