Author: moseara

All the way home I am paying attention to the trees. These are my champions, companions, and friends. The morning after disembarking from far-off chilly-cold and fairytale Berlin I was scattering the pawpaw seeds from my first breakfast in a scarred yoghurt tub in the sun to dry: in order to make more trees.

I rode home on the back of a bike and feeling the cool night time breeze in my ears. We rode past Ghana International Airport, where a few of the letters have dropped out so that it says Ghana Inter nal Airport. You could fly to Kumasi. You could fly to Ga. If they only had an airport, in Ga.

As we were approaching my friend’s house where I am staying I leaned forward in the highway breeze and said to my ride, What is something you really like — about ME. He said, steering suavely, “You are beautiful.” He said it vehemently but without any hurry. I felt filled with wellbeing, and dropped down under the spreading trees where I walk home and as I walked up around the curving nearby street a man who guards the block of flats painted blindingly white stuck his head out of his tiny guard hutch to greet me. “Hello!” I said. When I passed last week he was hanging on the barred gate and I had the impulse but didn’t say, Don’t they let you out? Should I free you from there? because it seemed to me so amusing. I am easily amused and it’s something I have held onto. Now in the thrum of the generators he said, My sweet friend. How are you. Long time. And I said, Chairman. Long time. How be. The night rose up around us like a steam built from all our bodies and their exhalations and their sleep. I love to be free and alive at such times…. Don’t you.

Today I was walking down the street wearing shorts and within a block two men had slowed down to call out to me. One was up high, in a truck. Yo yo yo! he said, sweeping his arm to show the shape of me. Gee thanks. Second guy riding past on a motorbike, at my eye level. He slowed way way down. Bent his head towards me and said, very slowly, You. Got really. Good. Legs.

Gee thanks.

Reason I was walking down the street in the paralysing heat is I had an appointment at the physiotherapist, my forty-fifth, trying to slowly heal the damage to my right arm from the shoulder where a third man, someone I have no connection with who was sitting drinking and took exception to me, got up and charged at me from behind swinging his motorcycle helmet on its straps. He walloped me like a mace. It was like a cannonball. His blow has shattered the flexibility of my beautiful shoulder possibly forever, second MRI scan this week is not looking good, this was more than a year ago and I am still in pain when I try to comb my hair or play the guitar. Or, you know, uncap a bottle of water.

Gee. Thanks.

On my way home from the physio a man called to me, Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hellllllllloooooo! until I had turned the corner to escape him.

This is what it is like living under male rule.

I met the grandmother of the chief of the tiny coastal village near where I am staying, and she has been extraordinarily gracious. Today I went to visit, bringing with me two bottles of a spicy local ginger and hibiscus drink called bissap. She wanted my name and the name of the town I come from and wrote everything down in a beautiful script on a folded piece of lined paper. Her little grandson set out plastic chairs from a stacked pile. Local children crept closer and closer until they were crouching underfoot and they leaned in, leaning on me from all sides, patting my hair and coiling it softly in their tiny fingers, cuddling against me confidingly so that every way I looked up, there were three or four more little faces leaning in and gazing. They treated me as though I was an exotic curiosity but at the same time, like someone they had already loved and trusted all their lives and had been kept away from for too long. The most beautiful feeling. “My friend my friend! Picture me! Picture me!” And when I did, they melted like a froth of sea foam into a thicket of accomplished gangster gestures, cool and hilarious at once. And when I did, all the photos were blurred but one, because eighteen children leaning in on all sides made the body of us jostle as one, like a kind of dance. 

I am crying all the time this week and in order to get anything done, I have to keep working while I cry. Screens are a blur, phones get wet. I cried in the taxi all the way to East Legon and cried in the Uber home. We passed through some heavy intersections where people from the North whose mothers feared vaccines are living out their groundfloor days on handmade skateboards and, if very lucky, in a wheelchair. A sweet-faced lady in a chair was trolleyed past my window. She recognised white and put out her cupped hand. Mami, how are you today? I am fine, I told her, leaking water like a can of honey tapped full of holes. Thank you, I told the beautiful man shriveled from the waist down whose crossed feet were flippers on the eroded wood, he was selling keychains and lighters and I wanted to open my purse but all I could do was say, I’m sorry I cannot help you today. I’m so sorry. I had gone over there for a massage, my first since packing up Berlin in a tower of boxes, an overdue luxury that must have cost his three month rent. On the table I lay face down crying through the hole. The masseuse passed me kitchen towels at intervals. Her name was Beauty, no, Gifty. That used to be my name, too. Today all I had was the remnants of myself a lover leaves us with and self pity lit like a beacon flaring and travelling across several hills. I had the cheap Chinese canteen in which a man in his seventies asked How are you, and I said, cheerfully, very hungry, how are you, and he said, not the best, and I sat down and he began to speak.

We had a conversation which consisted of his facts delivered with no gift wrapping. He didn’t even need me to say really? wow, that’s incredible. He told me about Australia, it is very large, a country but also a continent. Yes, I said. I’ve noticed. He told me we grow wine in Australia. Some few minutes in I told him this is not a real conversation, you have not asked me one question apart from the obvious gambit of where are you from, and now you’re handing me information I already have as though you’re teaching me something, men treat women like this all the time and I have had a bellyful, I’m tired. He looked at me as though I had spat across him. Then he said, I have two daughters. I waited for, they tell me this, and I realise now I have never listened to them. Instead he began to hand me information of a more personal kind, one lives in LA and one on the peninsula where he grew up, they have good husbands but they’re neither of them happy. This was an accusation I recognised. Why had I left the man who says he loves me and who won’t stop calling even now. Why break my own heart. Why can’t we be happy. I said, interrupting again, maybe that’s because they are living in a world where men treat women the way you are treating me right now, it is tiring, you don’t let us be fully human, you don’t find out who we are. He looked startled. Then he said, I grew up on a peninsula in Italy, it is just as hot there as here but we don’t have the humidity. Humidity is worse than heat. No, I said. No! I put up my hand, put up my whole arm. My food arrived and I gathered it in with the crook of my free arm. “I’ve given you two chances and that’s all you get. Why not treat women more graciously. Why not learn from us for a change.” It is not, of course, really him I am speaking to, it is all of them, each one a replacement for the traumas of the last, I was crying as I paid my bill and crying as I waited in the thin shade for my taxi and my belly aches like wood left underwater.

I met six (6) beautiful British-Ghanaian men, who were sitting at the next table to mine. They had all just landed the night before, that is, last night: apart from ‘one idiot’ who inexplicably somehow booked a ticket for tonight and whom they were just about to haul down from Kotoka. “Do you smoke weed?” ‘Thanks, but I’ve done my time.’ By the end of the night it was, “I love you, Cathoel. No I really mean it, I just really really do.” He had to stand up to say it, putting his hands either side of my face but somewhat far away, not like lover distance, more like new friends. The ringleader whose name was on their band t shirts saying, “Wait, no! put the camera on me. I need to say. I love Cathoel. I just love her! She, is,” and we roared in sympathy as another round of whatever was brought and whatever and I essayed my theory, which is: Ghanaians say to each other, Chairman, Big Man, Bossu, Original, and they particularly say so whenever they need to ask for some service. Can you clean this asphalt under my feet. Can you bring me another cold beer. We ordered skewers and said, soft one, though, Boss — soft one eh. My theory is from how enslaved men once they had escaped into jazz called each other man, yeah man, right, man, that’s a good idea, man. And that this was (so I heard) because they on the plantations were always and forever called Boy. So I think it’s related. The conversation changed. We were talking about the music we’re going to make. That music will be partly Australian, part Ghana, part how did we get here. It is only half past ten I feel stony warm sober and I am in a different world.

The littlest member of drawing group was handed over in a hurry and he settled down, put his sticky little hands up on my neck and his face on my chest and decided seemed he liked it. When he woke up I put him down and since then every time we meet and draw when he is hauling himself around under the table he looks up and even if I’m frowning with concentration he just gazes at me with these big juicy one-tooth grins. He likes to put my discarded shoes in his wet mouth because that is how babies converse with this world. I was pregnant once after longing forever for a child and that child’s father who is two metres tall got angry and jostled me in a doorway and roared and shouted and I refused to cower but stood up to him saying I dare you, too proud to remind him I am with child and then he knocked me to the ground in our tiny house and walloped me over the head with a book so hard he broke its spine and I miscarried and that child will now never be born and I miss the joy and the tedious frustration and the chance to love and care for her or for him, every day, and I will be sad not all the time but every week about the death of this life I carried inside me here until the afternoon of the day I die. 

The long trotro ride from Accra Mall to the middle of nowhere. The long wait under an awning while a second trotro very slowly filled. The long trotro ride to a small town with a big market. The share taxi to a smaller town with a driver so tender he slowed almost to a stop to get us all over the deep potholes seamlessly. The cute okada rider who followed us until it was time to disembark. The swift and zipping moto ride thorough narrow winding woven-palm-wall and rammed-earth village laneways, past a stream of local men each of whom greeted us gravely as it grew dark, “You are welcome.” The two intelligent teenagers who helped us carry our stuff over the sandy lanes and along under the trees (Lydia is backpacking for a month and I had three different books to read), the trudge over a small rickety bridge with beautiful handpainted fishing prows moored under the palm trees. The lumps in our burning throats when all we had to give them was money but they asked, sensibly, for ‘a book’ to assist with their education. The resolve to carry even more books from now on. The fences built from compilations of old and faded hand painted boat legends, such as GOD IS IN CONTROL/CONSUMING FIRE. The first night sleeping in a sweetly made plump low bed as soft as straw ticking, under a grass roof, on a soft sand floor, within four palmleaf walls, which a gentle man named Mawuli later showed me how to weave… the sea on one side and the freshwater estuary on the other .The fishing boats passing at dusk and at dawn. The annoying rasta who wanted us to pay him too much attention, who took the huff when I politely told him you talk plenty and listen little and you have tired us, please we don’t want your company today. The little black and white doggoe who fell in love and came to coil around my feet everywhere I sat down. The overpriced food und undercleaned toilets. The stripey palms, one of whom had capsized into the river. The water soft and idle and fresh and fast moving on our skins. The sensation of sleeping 13 hours at a time like a sunken ship. The whistling breezes. The bonfire. The night. The night! The night!

Looping conversation with a lady sitting on a park bench. She had met her husband at the age of sixteen when she stuck her hand up through the sand of some faraway place and took his. Maybe on the other side of the world. Maybe Australia. This was painful, she explained, “because I’m just 5’4″ and the earth is 40,000km deep.” So, ah: that’s how you met? Well, no, we actually got married earlier, when I was five. She sat between three bulging sports bags rimed with grease. She’d been homeless for 93 days. A very long summer. The conversation had first started up with her objection to the idea that, Well, it was cold, but it’s autumn. “I prefer ‘late summer,’” she said. I passed her my tray of chips and she sat with it on her lap, half laughing, before passing it back, unable to share. “Ordinarily, I would love to. But I’m too drunk.” She was intelligent and kind. She had polished off a bottle of apple schnapps and was working up the energy to go buy another. A friend of hers, a fifty-year-old punk with a seamed face and combat jacket, stopped behind the fence and they talked about collecting bottles. At the centre of the green, fenced square a brindle dog leaped at one passing furry friend after another, demanding play. After her punker friend had gone I brought the conversation back round to her husband but still can’t work out how it all was supposed to have happened. We kept looping away from the questions I most wanted to ask. When you met, how did you work out it was him? How did he work out it was you? Did, like, both of you remember this strange experience, feeling someone take your hand from the far side of the world? Why didn’t it work out between you? Or did it? As he is still “my husband.” So then is he homeless too? Where is he now?

This is a story from a strange encounter back in Berlin, eight years ago today.