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  • the little people

    It’s nine years this July since I came to Berlin for a week and after 10 months away in Ghana it feels so very strange. This morning I got lectured for five minutes by a small child because I had committed some minor infringement. In Australia, in Ghana, this behaviour in a three year old would be a sign of some kind of psychosis. The lockdown has eased somewhat and I went out for a beer with a philosopher acquaintance and we sat in the late sunshine saying yes, it is really quite cold. Summer has gone. This place always seems to me balanced on a deep core of ice that defrosts only partially, for only a few brief weeks.

    What was this morning’s minor infringement, you ask? I have set out, as is customary, about a hundred books in boxes on the pavement to give away. Berliners call it ‘zu Verschenken.’ I also propped up on top a feather pillow which has a water stain but is fluffy and clean and comforting. This little boy and his mother felt that the pillow was ‘dreckig’, a shaming word in German. It means filthy, repugnant somehow. I said, well, I thought as winter is coming perhaps one of these people in the homeless community might like this only I didn’t want to offer it to them personally, I thought if you needed such a thing it might be easier to just come and choose it for yourself under cover of the night.

    I indicated a rowdy crowd of revellers who live around the church at the bottom of our road, one of them in a fragile house ingeniously made from a stack of opened umbrellas. Dreckig, the little boy said again. Das müssen Sie wegwerfen, you must throw it away.

    I said, well, if after a couple of days no one has taken it, I will. But I think also the landfill… Dreckig, he said. Ohh, Germany. This was not the first time I had had the road rules, or communal expectations, explained to me by a three-year-old. Sitting with my friend in the penetrating wind I reflected bitterly how Berlin has allowed me to fool myself: it seems like a community of artists but is in fact a narcissist playground dominated by shallow extraverts. As I was thinking these dismal thoughts a blonde woman came bouncing up and stood in front of us. She was pretty like thistledown and behind her her friend sat sucking Aperol spritz through a stainless steel straw. My expression was unwelcoming and she seemed to falter, then spoke up bravely. Excuse me. I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s just I had to tell you that I find you so extremely beautiful.

  • beautiful is who you are

    I came to visit a Ghanaian friend who runs a very tiny, very humble business. When he had no customers he came and sat down. He saw tears in my eyes and leaned forward to plant his hands flat on the table and make me hear. He said: Cathoel, the strongest woman I’ve ever met.

    We sat by the big tree with the sky drowning our heads and he said, I don’t want to see you cry like that. The rainy season has started at last and due to climate catastrophe, it is months late. I love the rains. I told my friend, it is a luxury to cry. I am many miles from home and to be able to show such strong emotion and not have to hide it from someone, thank you for this gift. He knows I am newly single and the guy who had pursued me many months has turned out to be a fawkes. One thing I cherish about you, he said: one thing I love about you. Open hearted. To look at the world and see its beauty, to want to share that looking. When I sleep, I can’t sleep. I’m always thinking, where is she, is she ok? You are always on my mind. He said, how many people come out this way.

    In Ghana, men come forward as soon as they see any woman unclaimed. All of our friendships turn out to be courtships. The night was withering its breezes all around us and I could feel its slim clouds passing. I began to wonder were we under some kind of spell — the spell of communion, the spell of know each other. You are beautiful, he said, you’re a beautiful woman. I took hold of a plait of my hair and held it. Its smoothness and the fluid stout solidity in my hand. My hair has silver threads like a costly embroidery and like an embroidery they are not real silver. My hair is turning white, I said. No, said my friend, what I mean is: beautiful is who you are. 

    I sat there in silence. You are a beautiful woman, he said, and you will always be what it is. No question about it. I can’t think what other words to use for you.

    Walking home I passed a spot where a local woman with whom I have a fondness was sitting with a group of quiet men. Two of the men were speaking in German, she called me over. He’s not with you this evening? I told her why not. And my friend said, Wow. Well. You need good people around you. She introduced me and I had sweet and intricate exploratory chats with each of her friends in turn. It felt so easy. Sitting under the thin sketch of moon with a big dark tree staining the dark night like a hand. Some women walked by and they greeted each other, I learned the Ewe word for home. Efui. I don’t know how it is spelt but it has a whistle in the f. I stashed it carefully in my modest stock of local words, a few in Ga, a few in Pidgin, a few in Twi.

    The same women walked by more slowly in the opposite direction, one of them had dropped her money and they were prowling the streetside to find it. At our purple plastic table the five of us sat talking. Our conversation was quiet and in four languages, plus Pidgin. One of the men my friend is friends with is a Ghanaian German teacher from the Volta Region who speaks Ga and Ewe and Twi. And I was bathed in the iridescent sense of being among philosophers, not those who use thought to keep life at arm’s length but who make use of conversation in order to swallow it whole, in order to bathe in it and swim right out into it. Conversation is the gift and prejudice of our natural human world. It’s what we’ve lost. It’s what loving relations of any kind regain: a business partnership, a neighbourly friendship, teamwork, collaboration, sharing a bus shelter in the rain. And I was thinking how a marriage is a deeper conversation: that’s what it is. You start talking with some stranger at a party, or at work or in a bookshop, and the two of you just want to keep talking. Before too long it seems your conversation has become precious and it now engrosses kissing, and all the kinds of touching two lovers can invent, which like stories, like songs, are numberless. Your conversation together is interrupted by misunderstanding, or deepened, and interrupted or deepened again with each child and you must now pay attention to the business you have built together, the garden you have grown, the home you tend, the songs you write, the holidays you plan. Sexual closeness is a thread in the conversation and so is sleep. And so is cleaning the house. And one day when you are quiet with age the two of you are going to sit down once more once the business has closed its doors and the children you raised have gone off into their lives, and you’ll resume the intimacy you first started out with, enriched and grown deeper by the years stretched in between.

    You are far out on the wild black sea on the long journey you have built together and wherever you are is always home.

    My three new acquaintance were funny and so interesting I had to keep reaching for my bag to jot things down. The Ewe man insisted he must hear the song in Ewe I had recently recorded and I sang it for him. I said, I have the feeling I maybe sound like an Ewe who has had a stroke, or a little bit drunk. No, he said, judicious and slow: I’ve never heard anyone get so close. And then he tipped his head. Is that really all your hair? I had loosened the elastic and released it like a thick fur collar too heavy to wear during the day. I grabbed a handful of it and tugged my head sideways: Yes. I grew it all myself, in my own head.

    The third man was older and a journalist. He had travelled. Now he was recently retired. He told me, I don’t know what I am going to do now but I know there’s something, and I keep searching for it. I thought of everything I have encountered in Ghana and how I could never have known any of it before I first arrived. So I said, why not just wait to see what comes. Let it emerge. You cannot know it til it arrives. He said, I don’t know how it will arrive when I am sleeping all the time. And I said, napping is perfect for awaiting insight. Because in each new day you get several of those littoral dream times when you’re half woken and your deeper mind can speak to you. Your wild mind will seed ideas you yourself cannot conceive of and let you loose into the radiant last adjunct of your life. Yes! he said. He grabbed my hand and raised it like a trophy we had won. You are a natural conversationalist, my Australian friend! You, too, I said, rejoicing. He called our friend over and in her floral dress she came, riding on her big haunches, all woman and then some. The man set my hand down as carefully as though it were blown glass. My friend sat down and settled her skirt around her knees and he sat back and opened his arms. He was smiling. In any group of people, he said: Cathoel is going to be the heart. 

  • my tiny fellow

    I walked past a group of boys and one of them said, opportunistically but with a sweet formality, ‘I would like to marry you.’ ‘Really?’ I stopped. I put my hands on my hips. ‘But I think I might be too young for you.’ He laughed and showed me the lovely gap between his teeth. He was eleven, maybe twelve. Well, alright then, young prince. I walked home down the narrow path that has its own trees and bought pineapple from a woman carrying pineapples on her head. I walked for hours until the night came down. As it grew dark the moon grew brighter. It is solstice everywhere but on the equator, where we are directly engaged with the sun.

  • Bella’s belly

    In Accra I have four or five street friendships with little doggoes and pussycats who live around the way. Tonight I was walking home late past a famous club when three bouncers slumped over their phones sat up abruptly. A blonde dog with a triangle head shot out of the bushes and raced after me, barking.

    Oi, they said, hey! The biggest one got up. It’s ok, I said, she’s my friend. Then (bashfully) Thank you.

    Oh, she’s your friend? Ohk, and they relaxed into their screens once more. Triangle Dog propped up her feet against my skirt and let me scratch her round the gills. I made some slow, strokeful investigations behind the ears. Her half-grown puppy pressed up behind her, what am I missing? What’s going on. The mother dog closed her eyes with pleasure. Hello, little darling, I said, hello, sweetheart. How are you doing, everything nice, everything good? I told her, isn’t it a wonderful night. For indeed the tropical standing trees were bowing and bending in this sweet night breeze and all the whole time I was walking, I felt accompanied.

    Close to this spot in a compound filled with trees I lived with four fellow travellers and three doggies for three months, nine months ago at the beginning of my three week visit. My seventh visit to Ghana and the first time alone, no loved one to meet me and wait for me at Kotoka airport. I began to unravel what had been done to my financial life and my family’s generosity and have extended my return ticket and tourist visa over and over and moved house nine times. In that first place, leafy and whickering, lived a large Alsatian guard dog, an elderly relative scaly with scurf who unfortunately took a favour to me and I used to have to scour my hands clean every time after greeting her because she was so stinky and kinda scratchy — and then the third and smallest doggie, a white fluffy morsel named Bella. She had dark eyes and a crumpled little tail. Bella got farmed out to a father-to-be and reappeared with her belly bulging. It was evident she had found the process shocking and she seemed shyer and started turning up at my door every other morning, shimmying and cringing. If I stepped aside leaving the door ajar she would bolt inside and climb effortfully onto my bed to stretch out with a sigh, and if I lay down she came and pressed her fullness into my lap. They had a hanging cane chair in the garden and I sat there in the shade reading entire books end to end, there is only one bookshop in Ghana and I had plundered it. Bella came and foisted her pointy little feet into my lap whenever lap was in reach, until I lifted her into the groove she wanted to settle. My little farmer.

  • agree we’re fine

    My date took me to the poolside with his mother. This was an accident. I had already set out from my house and he wrote saying, umm actually, Mum’s coming too. He took us to a fancy hotel where I’ve sat poolside several times writing; because even for writers, a ten dollar coffee isn’t that much more costly than a three dollar coffee. I’ve been using these slivers of luxury to ease myself through life for many years. There we sat, Mum and he and I, on cane loungers under a row of palm trees. I said, brightly, So you realise your son and I don’t know each other at all, we just fell into conversation yesterday at the physiotherapist’s? I am nursing a catastrophic injury from a blow from my landlord, long story. I go twice a week and they use pressure, massage, heat and manipulation — not unlike a bad relationship. I sat down and said, Good afternoon, and this large man with bright eyes said, Good afternoon, and I said, Are you fine, and he said, I’m fine, and you, and then we began to laugh because “If we were really fine, we wouldn’t be sitting at the physiotherapist’s.” I said, imagine you turn up at the desk and they say, Fine? Oh then I will cancel your appointment. 

    At the hotel I had left my phone on charge at the front desk with a glorious young man who said, I like your hair. Thanks, I said, twitching a plait: I grew it myself. This, in Ghana, is more unusual than in Australia because an entire generation of black women have been persuaded their own natural hair is somehow missing something or wrong. When it rains they all dart away for shelter, clutching handkerchiefs over their heads. I told the waiter, you know I am envious of yours, right? It’s so curly and the colour is so good. We stood grinning. So when I rounded the pool in my sixties hostess gown and bare feet and went inside, masked, to retrieve the phone, I passed under a broad big-leafed tree which thrust its roots out into the broad-bladed lawn in runnels of neatly maintained root-ridged soil. It made a pattern like an outline on paper of a hand. I squatted down under the palm trees to gather the cerise palm nuts so ripe they were falling out of their neat pale creamy cases. I could hear a Ghanaian bird singing a long, descending trill. I could hear four men standing facing each other in the pool discussing marketing and strategy, two words I just can’t stand. I took my handful of red nuts back to our row of loungers and showed them to my date and his mother. In the background they were playing ‘Still the One’ by Shania Twain, which another man had sung to me a mere few weeks back at a drinking spot in Legon: the only one I dream of/still the one I want/for life. I let my legs lie flat so they overhung the too-short chair and put on sunglasses and closed my eyes. Then the waiter turned up with his round black tray and began to decant drinks from a frosted pitcher. It’s always summer here.

  • superlative

    I am in Africa. I walked home the long way late and carrying a huge bracket of flowering branches, which I plan to set in water til they root and then plant them out to be trees. A man sitting on the bonnet of his car yawned hugely. I stood and we gazed at one another. Eventually I said, “I agree,” and lifted my hand to drop. He gave me his impish grin for free. The moon high above our heads was rancid with cloud and I have been doing good business all day today, I worked hard. Good night, youngest continent. See you in the morning under such a sun, a wild and good sun. Good night! Good night.

  • birthday season

    Have you noticed how racists feel the description of their racism is worse than the actual offence? Someone will say something that’s steeped in hatred and if we say, that’s racist, they bridle. “Are you calling me a racist?” To name the crime, it seems, hurts worse than the attack itself.

    It’s also true of men who use violence. So many of them are cowards who seem to feel that the description of their deeds — a story like this one, anonymous and public — is more unforgivable than threats and intimidation, insults and blows.

    Last night I learned the violence of the man I had been learning in recent months to slowly love. He seemed so outraged by the deliberate pain inflicted by my ex. He showed his gentleness and all his curiously and then, all of a sudden, over nothing: you dirty, nasty, evil woman.

    Get your stinky white skin away from me. Skin cancer sick old white skin.

    He was lounging on my tiny verandah as he said this, using my light socket to charge up his phone. You have to go, I said. I was trembling with rage and fear. And he spat. In my face. And that is what I’ll always remember.

    Imagine spitting in somebody’s face. This is how we treat genocidal dictators and men who rape children. No fury could ever carry me there.

    So I shoved him. I threw his shoes over the verandah. Just go. Go now. He doubled up a fist and shoved it towards me, to show me. I’ll punch you.

    Paunch, he said. I’ll paunch you. Like a come-on from a cruise ship Lothario.

    This was around twelve hours ago.

    We need to learn to stop teaching our men to train all their rage on us and blame all their anger on women. All around you don’t you see it so incessantly: in advertising, in porn, in the entitlement of cat calls, in the idea that any man becomes a woman when he says so, in the women who say when they phone, sorry, it’s only me, in the girls who are told if he pushed you — it must mean he likes you.

    This man does not like me and this is not love. When he left he said over his shoulder You are a loser, no one loves you. It’s my birthday in eight days. Birthdays hurt in this season of my age when I tried so hard and hoped so long and longed to have a child, when I was so measurably fertile and no decent man made himself known. It rained heavily overnight and this morning I went down to the garden and brought in this bouquet.

  • tabletop head

    I just learned that Ghanaians call ketchup catch-up.

    I learned this from a poster advertising tomato catch-up.

    The poster is in a kenkey boutique.

    Kenkey is a fermented paste made from corn and wrapped in corn husks. I hate it but my sweetheart loves it and it’s what he eats every day.

    He eats it by the roadside with dried fish and red pepper. The local cats and their kittens gather between his legs to gaze imploringly upwards and he ‘dashes them’ small, frequent donations.

    I don’t know why the serving place is often called a boutique but I am going to find out. Maybe just to be fancy. We were sitting under an awning while he ate kenkey with his long fingers, drinking sobolo, which is purple and made from hibiscus flowers, when a man walked past selling tables, that he made, from his table shop, which is his head. He was a long way down the road before I remembered that we needed a table and I thought of running after him but it’s hot and I’m drowsy and I’d never ketchup.

  • grandpa Ghana

    There is a plump old man near where I’m living who is so extremely sweet that every time I pass he is surrounded by small children. They press on him and rest their starfish hands on his big knees and when I walked by on a visit to friends this week he was lying at his ease on a wooden bench under a weeping tree, with three babies perched along his side riding him like little chickens. I said instantly as I’m so often saying in Ghana, would you like to have a photograph of yourself right now? I will take it if you like and then I can send it to you. Two of the children jumped down at once to come and see and the third girl lay luxuriously full length at last, grandpa all hers. A glorious day.

  • lifesaver

    A man saved my life today, deftly and in German. He sped past on his bicycle and veered in to make me stop. Excuse me, your brake cable is dangling and it’s gonna tangle in the spokes.


    I didn’t understand what he had said, my mind was on the sky and at first I just stared blankly. He got down to show me the cable. It was indeed dragging on the ground like a lightning tape from an old car and he bent down and coiled it into a ring and made it fast. I sat down under a tree at the roadside and ordered a bright orange summer drink. Life goes on, today, thank goodness, thank kindness.