Reflection

So it's been almost a year since my trip. I wrote a creative piece for my writing class that's based on my experience in Ghana. Here it is...
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Awkwaba is the word for welcome. I remember the first time I stepped on African soil. I did not have any sort of epiphany like I had fantasized so many times before. Instead, I was struck with the realities of the here and now.
I was sleep deprived, having traveled for more than thirty hours; I was hungry, having turned down the unappealing airport food, too heavy with emotion for an appetite; and I was lost with no one searching, having arrived ten hours behind schedule in the middle of the night. One look at my pale, ivory face, taxi drivers waiting outside the airport’s doors swarmed towards me like moths to a bulb. A rush of Ghanaian accents overwhelmed me, a cold slap in the face, a stark contrast to the humid air. “To the University of Ghana,” I said in the most un-American, confident voice I could muster.
There were billboards and some naïve part of me thought there wouldn’t be—that this was some exception to the marketing consumerism I had wanted to escape. I had only a backpack with me and I clenched it tight to my chest. My checked baggage had been lost; no surprise after five airports. The paved road had stopped and I felt my blood turn to fuel, igniting every limb. We drove in circles through the darkness of the night, the dirt roads making my vision blurry with the bounces.
He stopped the car and got out to speak with a guard at what looked like a checkpoint. From the backseat of the car I could hear the shadowed figures yelling in angry foreign tongues, staring and pointing to me. I had red ash all over my shirt from the seatbelt. Earlier, as I had reached for it I saw the cab driver’s look, as if the belt that belonged to his car was as foreign as my face. It was obvious the seatbelt had not been used for quite some time and I had regretted putting it on.
I should have been nervous, but my whole life had been yearning for this day, and nothing could make caution besiege me. I had been craving a thrill and I embraced wherever this cab would take me.

*
Time in America does not move at the same pace as Africa’s time. I was at the small market near campus buying a fresh pineapple when I realized the lack of walls. I would spend full days outside and even when I was indoors, I wasn’t completely confined. Buildings are designed in a way that brings the outside in, and the inside out. This openness to the outside world made clocks superfluous. Later, soon, sometime but never never. Time is slow and living is communal. Make eye contact, talk to strangers, hug strangers, share your story. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t completely shake my American ways—this urge to fold inward—but I surely tried.

“What is the name for purple,” Naima says in her English accent. Our professor looks at her funny and says, “what do you want to know?” eyebrows raised, the way they always are when we interrupt his lecture with our dominating questions. Naima looks at the printed handbook he’s made for us. It’s loosely bound and titled, “Introduction to Twi.” She holds it up and says, “Purple isn’t listed—how do you say purple?” I look at mine and I see the translations for black, white, red, blue, green and yellow. Our professor, in his raspy agitated voice says, “there is no name for purple.” “Well what do you call this color,” she says tugging at her purple dress that covers her thick coco skin. He tightens his posture, let’s out a sigh, and with an expression that suggests they don’t understand and they never will, he says, “…it’s a shade of blue.” He continues with his lesson, explaining how to conjugate verbs.
Race is social construct—something that has been instilled in my head in every diversity course, the gift of a liberal education. On the 1820 United States’ official census there were seven races identified: White, Black, Quadroon, Octaroon, Indian, Asian, and Chinese. Close your eyes and try to imagine the hate that must have existed. I heard Brazil recognizes sixty-sum races on their census, inheriting the Latin view of race. Race in the United States has always been used to impede identity, rather than elucidate it.
In Ghana I am an Obruni. The literal translation is “white man.” “Obruni, Obruni, Obruni” they would holler at me as I walked along the open-gutter streets. It was neither negative nor positively loaded—it just simply acknowledged what was blatantly obvious: I was a white foreigner on a beautiful black land.

It is estimated that about 12 million African slaves were captured and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. On the reunion of Cape Coast’s liberation, I took a tour of the slave castles. In one of the cells I saw a blue flowered heart. Our guide points out that President Obama left this gift when he visited not too long ago. Obama is idolized here. His face hangs on taxi cabs’ rearview mirrors, as painted graffiti on the sides of building, walking through the crowds on the backs of t-shirts. It is even common for little shop huts to be named something like “Obama bless us hot food,” or “Freedom Obama hair salon” To them he represents the final stages of closure, some equalizing force, but those who have been schooled know the world is not quite there.
I walk through the “door or no return,” named so because once slaves walked through the wooden double-doors, they were herded into ships, bound to the Americas—land of the New World—never returning to their homeland again. Ironically, the door leads to the most beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean, though daunting in its vast shades of swirling blues. There, standing on the cracked cobblestone in the courtyard—below me steep cliffs, above a row of cannons pointing to the endless horizon—I close my eyes and try to imagine what it must have been like then, to be a slave in the Diaspora. As much as I try I know it’s impossible. I will never know, but the blood is engraved in stone. I am brought back to the present by the sounds of the parade, people dancing and drumming through the streets.

Olivia is the woman in the Busch Canteen Market who braids my hair. Another woman sits on a chair near us holding Olivia’s six-month-old child. Olivia makes goo-goo faces at her when she starts to cry, pulling my hair as she turns away from my head. “Her name is Andeshi,” she says proudly. “It means independence.” A shop nearby is cooking banku and fufu, and the ashes swarm around us. Olivia yells something I can’t understand to the cooking woman. My head is forced still but my eyes look around and see the chaotic nature of market life. Barefoot children running through the narrow aisles, some stopping to poke around at the brick-red clay dirt. Woman with giant pots balanced on their heads, walking gracefully through the crowds with a baby strapped to their back. Their beauty and their endurance is enough to make me breathless—these women are the bread-givers. I look at Andeshi and wonder if she will become one of these women. I hope no matter what she holds here back as proud.

*
There are moments in life that hold the weight of years. We drove most the way by trotro to the Volta region—the most mountainous area in Ghana. It was late November but the weather was as warm as a mid-July’s day back home. Growing up in Wisconsin, I judged the passing of time by the changing seasons. Here, it seemed I was forever in a perpetual state of stillness—frozen in the present.
My Rasta friend Afro wanted to show me his home village and his family’s small coco plantation. When we were several miles dew west, we had to hitch a ride on the backs of friendly passing motorists. In my backpack I carried two bottles of potent island rum, as Afro had suggested it custom to bring such a gift. From there, we walked several miles through coco, cassava, and bean fields until finally the crops gave way to a circular opening. There were dirt huts lining the edges, and some made of concrete.
“You must meet Grandfather, the Chief, first,” Afro explained. “Wait here,” he said as entered the largest hut. Around me the children stared. I felt their eyes digging their way through me, until they got to the center to ask why are here? I tried to make my eyes explain my intentions, but truth is I did not know myself. I did not know myself. I was looking for something authentic, something not structured for my foreignness. I wanted to do away with the guides and dormitories. The smallest boy inched his way to where I rested on a fallen log. He looked at him, then back at his siblings, and then back at me, over and over, until finally he reach and touched my arm—as if to see if I was real.
Out of the hut came a figure dressed in a grand bouboue, with an overpowering statue. My legs jumped up and the rest of my body tensed with fear. I had been hoping to be impressive with my skills of the Twi language but Afro had crashed my spirits when he announced his family was Ewe. So I knew going into this language would be a barrier. We shook hands and sat underneath the shade palm tree. “Kofi, go fetch us some coconuts,” he demanded of the boy. Kofi climbed the tall tree with ease, got out his machete, and coconuts fell to the ground. “I don’t have much but whatever I do have, I offer to you, my guest.”

At dusk the children built a fire and when the moon rose, everyone gathered around. The Chief took the island rum in his hand and offered a long pray to the ancestors, when he was finished he poured the first drops to the ground as an offering—and with that the night began. We passed the bottles around and around. Drummed on the bongos and shook the gourd rattles. Topless women danced around the blazing fire. And I sat back, drunk off the rum, taking it all in. Late into the night, as the fire was dying, I lay on a bamboo mat in the middle of this openness, staring at the clearest night I’ve ever seen, as I pictured the stars in the sky as ancestors looking down on me, on us. The arrow of time striking me, in this eternalized moment.

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