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.