Ghana Must Go--Read It Because this is not a novel about Africa, or Ghana, or Nigeria or immigrants (only)

Ghana Must Go (Ghana)



READ IT BECAUSE: This is not a novel about Africa, or Ghana, or Nigeria or immigrants (only)--this is one of the classic novels about family, identity, loss, forgiveness (maybe) that follows you around in your idle thoughts long after you are finished.  

I've long held a personal theory many of these "African" novels would gain more readership and popularity within the United States if the authors gave the main characters Anglicized/American names.  I will admit I struggled a bit to keep track of everyone at the novel's onset.  This is not to say that I believe these authors should stoop to such an artificial construct--in nearly every case the extra effort and careful reading ends up quite a worthwhile investment.  This is more a challenge to all of us to stretch ourselves a bit in what we chose to read.

In Ghana Must Go, Selasi shares the story of family members seeking to escape--their origins, their countries of birth, their assumed identities, their shame.  Selasi's mastery is most evident as she captures the sights, sounds and people of Ghana and Nigeria.  Having lived and traveled in Africa myself I can vouch for her description of one child that Kweku encounters in Ghana: 

The boy was smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty near the equator: an instinct to laugh at the world as they found it, to find things to laugh at, to know where to look. Excitement at nothing and at everything, inextinguishable. Inexplicable under the circumstances.


She writes just as skillfull as she shifts to one character's impression of Accra--offering the reader not only a glimpse of the city but also an indictment of western assumptions concerning development and modernity: 

What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. 

The element that make this such a timeless story, however, is that it's ultimately about the power and indefatigability of a mother's love and hope.  Because in a world telling everyone to 'go', to leave, it is the mother Fola who draws her children back in--not only to herself and each other--but to a place and idea they all believed had vanished: home.  

*One of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.
**See our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

Ghana Must Go: A Novel by Taiye Selasi

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Last annotated on February 27, 2016

the crude oil kings and cowboys demobbed to Greater Lagos, that odd breed of African: fearless and rich)—and

a rich land speculator with Mafia ties and Type II diabetes who moved to Accra because it reminds him of Naples in the fifties,

(and other kinds of distances that are harder to cover, like heartbreak and anger and calcified grief and those questions left too long unasked or unanswered and generations of father-son silence and shame),

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.

The boy was smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty near the equator: an instinct to laugh at the world as they found it, to find things to laugh at, to know where to look. Excitement at nothing and at everything, inextinguishable. Inexplicable under the circumstances.

There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy. Custom: boy-child Gets Out, good at science or soccer, dies young, becomes priest, child-soldier or similar. Nothing remarkable and so nothing to remember. Nothing to remember and so nothing to grieve.

He wants her to be satisfied. He wants this because she can be. She is a woman who can be satisfied. She is like no woman he’s known.

She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way that they’d nod as if, yes, all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, but of course

She felt it in America when she got to Pennsylvania (having been taken first to Ghana by the kindly Sena Wosornu), that her classmates and professors, white or black, it didn’t matter, somehow believed that it was natural, however tragic, what had happened.

he listened intently, the azure eyes burning with knowing that nothing was being revealed, that the facts were a coat with the truth there beneath it, bare skin to be accessed at some other time. •

Rastafarians, the real ones, religious ones, what kind of black girl grows locks? Black girls who go to predominantly white colleges, that’s who. Dreadlocks are black white-girl hair. A Black Power solution to a Bluest Eye problem: the desire to have long, swinging, ponytail hair. The braids take too long after a while, the extensions. But you still need a hairstyle for running in rain. Forget the secret benefit from affirmative action; this is the white woman’s privilege. Wet hair. Not to give a shit about rain on your blowout. I’m serious

“Your baby is crying,” says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanaian way of saying your cell phone is ringing

isn’t a matter of “white,” though it’s true that she’s never had many African American friends, neither at Milton nor at Yale where they all seem to find her inappropriately suburban, nor a “secret” as such. For all of the hoopla about race, authentic blackness (which, as far as she’s concerned, confuses identity and musical preference), it is obvious to Sadie that all of them carry this patina of whiteness, or WASP-ness more so: be they Black, Latin, Asian, they’re Ivy League strivers, they all start their comments with overdrawn ums, and they’ll all end up working in law firms or hospitals or consultancies or banks having majored in art. They are ethnically heterogeneous and culturally homogenous, per force of exposure, osmosis, adolescence. She accepts this without anguish as the price of admission. She doesn’t want to be Caucasian. She wants to be Philae.

Olu a darker-skinned Fola, classically Yoruba, Sadie a lighter-skinned Kweku, classically Ga. “Aboriginal intransigent” he calls this kind of feature set, the marker of a people with a sticky set of genes or else the product of a process of refinement and reinforcement over century upon century of mass reproduction. Ethiopian eyes, Native American cheekbones, the black hair/blue eyes of the Welsh, Nordic skin: it’s a record of something, he thinks, a visual record of the history of a People, capital P, in the world. That he can find, and finds familiar, the same squarish lip shape, the high-riding brow bone and regal hooked nose on his mother and brother as carved out of ivory by sixteenth century artisans on ritual masks, that the face keeps repeating, the one face, over and over, across ages and oceans and lovers and wars, like a printmaker’s matrix, a good one, worth reusing—is wondrous to Kehinde. He envies them this. His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.

Lagos, through the window, was not as he’d pictured, not luscious, the tropics, bright yellow and green. It was gray, urban-gray, the sky smoggy and muted and clogged with tall buildings, a dirty Hong Kong.

As they’d crossed the bridge, leaving the island of Ikeja for the mainland, Lagos Island, he glimpsed a large sign: THIS IS LAGOS. Not Welcome to Lagos, Lagos Welcomes You, but simply THIS IS LAGOS.

Almost ugly, thought Kehinde, though he used the word sparingly, and reverently, like beautiful, equally awed. It was a precious thing, ugliness, in humans, in nature; he noticed this, always, in airports, on trains: that for the most part most people looked fine (if unremarkable) with inoffensive features placed well, or well enough. He found he had to look to find ugliness, natural ugliness, no less than natural beauty, and trickier still, that no sooner had he found it and quietly thought a thing ugly than he found there in the ugliness a beauty of a kind.

This was a man, she had felt, one could live with, build a life with, whatever “a life” might yet mean: who gave all to the living, with deep, trembling breathing, his life to protecting the living from death. Though he knew it was futile. The way he made love, as if now were forever, gone deaf to the rest, as if breathing were music and hovels were ballrooms and all that they needed to do was to dance.

He is sitting with his face to the window, his back to Taiwo, looking out at the road from the airport, at Accra, somehow different than he expected, not like Mali or Lagos, less glamour, more order. A suburb. With dust. There are the standard things, African things, the hawkers on the roadside, the color of the buildings the same faded beige as the air and the foliage, the bright printed fabrics, the never-finished construction sites (condos, hotels) giving the whole thing the feel of a home being remodeled in perpetuity, midproject, the men gone to lunch, the new paint already chipping and fading in the sunshine as if it never really mattered what color it was, stacked-up concrete blocks soldiers awaiting their orders, steel, sleeping machinery interrupting the green.

What strikes him is the movement, neither lethargic nor frenetic, an in-the-middle kind of pace, none of the ancientness of Mali nor the ambitiousness of Nigeria, just a steady-on movement toward what he can’t tell. There are the same big green highway signs seen the world over, proof positive of “development” as he’s heard the word used, as if developing a country means refashioning it as California: supermarkets, SUVs, palms, smog, and all. Children in T-shirts with rap stars’ huge faces run up to the taxi to peddle their wares: imported apples in columns, PK chewing gum, bananas, daily papers, deconstructed exfoliation sponge, matches. The wares beckon cheerfully in primary colors, imported from China, South Africa, all plastic, all manner of plastic and cellophane and packaging as if the poor love nothing more than kitsch wrapped up like gifts.

brown skin and the incidence in America of dizygotic multiples (as opposed to, say, Nigeria where twins were the norm). Effect: thrill of shock, like the trick to a punch line, the eyes zooming in on the sight, unprepared.

Sena had his own tragic tale to unburden: of expulsion from Lagos under “Ghana Must Go,” winter 1983, with the Nigerian government’s summarily deporting two million Ghanaians;

“How is that possible? That you’ve never been to Africa?” “Shocking but true.” Kehinde senses the frown. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says to her quickly. “Our parents never brought us when we were kids.” “Why?” “They were hurt. . . . Their countries hurt them.”

halfhearted wall made of mortar and concrete block starts and then stops like a six-year-old’s smile, with huge gaps between bits of it exposing the goats grazing lazily on grass, in no rush, a large herd.

Incomprehensible, indescribable how this girl moves her body. Virtuosic, without effort, without edges, without angles: an infinity of tiny movements made with thighs, feet, and torso, and in time to syncopation that only she hears, and the drummers: a current, round body electric, the crowd cheering wildly as the hips whirl around, until the one drum goes crack! and she stops before Sadie, her right hand extended, one foot off the ground. Sadie, who is staring, mouth open, breath suspended, doesn’t at first process what the gesture implies. The drummers resume drumming, the girl resumes whirling, the crowd resumes clapping, then crack! She stops again. A hand out to Sadie. Sadie turns to Fola. “I-i-is she asking for money?” “She’s asking you to dance.” “Bra, bra, bra,” says the girl, palms turned upward. “Please sees-tah, come. Come

and dance, please, I beg.” She takes Sadie’s hand, takes a little step back, making Sadie lean forward, then rise off the bench. The assembled crowd claps with delight at this progress. Sadie flushes red, shakes her head, “No, I can’t.” She is seconds from weeping; she feels the thing building, the knot in her stomach, the accumulating bile. She takes a step back, but the girl pulls her forward, and she hasn’t the heart to use force to break free. Her siblings are watching with what looks like a mixture of worry and encouragement, their eyes and smiles wide, as if watching a baby trying to learn how to walk, ready to spring to their feet when she falls. She doesn’t fall. When they speak of it later they’ll say that a girl came to Sadie and pulled her up off of their bench, gave a little demonstration of the base two-step footwork, which Sadie repeated a few times herself, that the drummers, encouraged, started drumming a little faster, that Sadie kept pace, to the delight of the crowd, and that before they all knew it, she was dancing in the clearing as if she’d been born doing traditional Ga dance. No one will know what it is in this moment that overwhelms Sadie, not even Sadie herself, as the insistent lead dancer catches hold of her elbow and repeats, tugging gently, “Please sees-tah, please come.” She pulls Sadie forward, away from the benches. “Like so,” she says, demonstrating the footwork: one, two. There are tears in Sadie’s eyes that will fall if she doesn’t, so she stares at the ground, at the girl’s small bare feet. One two, one two, one two, one two. A surrogate heartbeat. Calmer and surer. She takes a few steps. Hears the onlookers cheering. Goes red with embarrassment. Too late to sit down. She stares at the ground, at her feet, willing movement. The feet obey, shockingly, and move, left to right. The girl cries, “Ehn-hehn!” with great pride in her pupil. Sadie glances up as she moves. “Yeah? Like this?” More movement. More cheering. Transporting, the drumbeat. Tension in the stomach. Which moves to the thighs. Then the knees, then the calves, then the shins, then the feet. Too embarrassed to stop, she keeps moving. Starts dancing. Slowly at first, with her eyes on the ground, on the feet of the girl, which she follows with ease—then a spark, something clicking, a logic inside her, a stranger inside her that knows what to do, knows this music, these movements, this footwork, this rhythm, the body relaxing, eyes trained on the feet, she is moving, not looking, afraid to stop moving, afraid to look up at the small cheering crowd, she is moving, she is sweating, she is crying (I am dancing, she thinks, disbelieving, unable to stop), stomach taut, thighs on fire, lids slack, hips in circles, shoulder up shoulder down, around, foot out foot in, she is outside her body or in it, inside it, unaware of the exterior, unaware of the skin, unaware of the eyes, unaware of the onlookers, aware of the pounding, aware of the drum. Crack! The drum stops. Sadie stops. Sweating, breathless.

Death must take place in the heart to be believed in. After love dies man believes in his death.”

Her appearance is arresting, the effect beyond “striking.” It doesn’t stir up, neither jealousy or awe. It quiets.