We are walking down the road in the middle of the night. The road is made of mud. Our new home is in a village and it has no address. An urban village, lapped on all sides with villages that make up to capitol, one storey high and crowded with tiny chickens and little soon to be eaten goats as far as I can see.
Should I look nicer, I said, tonight on our way out, rumpled in my unironed skirt. Oh no, he said, Cathoel you are a white lady – you always look dressed up automatically.
Every time he remarks, casually at the door when I have loaded him with parcels, “My loads are plenty,” or, when after a cross cross-cultural fight we start really finally hearing each other, or when he pronounces ‘automatically’ with its six distinct syllables as indeed it deserves, or when I say ‘hippopotamus’ and reduce him to peels of crying laughter — each time I fall a little bit deeper into love as though it were a big bowl of soup.
Here is a church. Already they are moaning and they’re wringing their hands. One lady paces foot to foot, waiting for transportation to start and eulogy to have set in. The whole road will have to listen to their dismal rejoicing. Further along, a few shops are still open. One is called Reggae Spot, selling tins of condensed milk and mosquito coils, though Ghanaians laugh at malaria.
On the weekend we rode nearly ten hours north on bad roads festooned with craters in a tiny bus leaking dust from its frayed with rust underside. Under my mother in law’s mango tree I asked her when she offered tea, do you have any condensed milk? No, she said, I only have normal milk – producing a tiny costly can of condensed Carnation milk, as normal as canned be.
In our village house the water is piped in from a truck to a large polytank on a concrete stand. A chicken is roosting on her nine eggs in one of the pots I have planted and I greet her every morning, “Good morning, Lady Chicken, still working hard I see.” I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert, another white lady dressed up in her handknit white life who took an entire year away from work and spent it in Italy (eating), in India (praying), and on Bali (falling in love). Her book Eat, Pray, Love became such a sensation and attracted so many privileged rich seekers to the island that Balinese took to wearing t shirts which said Eat, Pray, Leave.
In her ashram Gilbert riffs through two pages of the startling innocence that characterises unearnt privilege. Americans don’t know how the rest of the world sees them; men don’t know that women understand them all too well. When she writes of her friendship with her fellow floor scrubber Tulsi, she describes the girl as ‘cute.’ Tulsi is far cuter now that her glasses have smashed, and due to poverty she cannot afford to replace them. “Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw,” Gilbert writes, calling up one of a wardrobe of Indian tropes she has prepared earlier, “even cuter since one lens of her ‘specs’ (as she calls her eyeglasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them.”
It doesn’t seem to occur to the author who is scrubbing floors voluntarily as part of her search into herself that looking out from inside that webbed lens might not be pleasant. That being unable to do without the glasses now smashed and damaged is not the same as a cute, manga-kid stubbornness refusing to give up a favourite garment which has torn.
Tulsi describes her prospects: she will turn eighteen soon and will be married off to some boy she dislikes, or is indifferent to. A “teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family,” she loves hiphop and lists for her oblivious interlocuter, oh, so interlocutely, the flaws which can prevent a girl from marrying. Her skin is too dark. She is old, 28 for example. Her horoscope is wrong. Not one of these flaws is anything a girl can do anything about, except that she must not be too educated, or have had an affair with someone.
We’re left wondering if in the conversation itself Gilbert found the time to commiserate with her feisty, spirited, trapped companion or whether she just floated directly from this listing of someone else’s sufferings – so many someones – into fresh contemplation of her own inner self. “I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society… At least my skin is fair,” she concludes, innocently. “I have only this in my favour.”
Meanwhile in this village house, which we intend to rent out as a kind of guesthouse so that other privileged oblivious whites can come here with their cameras and render all our neighbours objects in the background of their own selfies, I am scouring and cleaning too. When I bought this broom the woman who had made it asked, “But do you know how to use it, though?” By turning it upside down and stabbing the dirt I made her laugh. “Like this, right?” I am too shy some days to leave the house. I feel like an intruder. Daughter and grand daughter of intruders. We have stolen so much. Africa produces 75% of the cocoa that fuels the world’s $75 billion chocolate industry, and earns 2% of the profits. Like an American in her ashram I am doing what I can, so lazily, so slowly, to clear away the cobwebs and look out on this bold world more plainly. I am trying to become aware of the crazy-making stain of sharp edges that my Ghanaian boyfriend has to see past every time he tries to achieve anything at all. I am perceived as being well dressed without putting in any effort. I am addicted to my own comfort. And as I weigh my prospects I try to imagine how that effort spared in grooming and combing can best be spent.