kwasia

I am leaving Accra today. I said goodbye to Nii and Kadija and Mariama, the littlest neighbours, and gave away all my pot plants. Unless I can earn enough money to come back from time to time to make music, that is the end of Ghana for me.

In five years it’s been so difficult and fraught. I leave studded with injuries, hauling one stiff leg from the torn ligament where a man calling himself Black Jesus kicked me, savagely, in the main street one night because I didn’t give him any money. I arrived five years back with a sore heart, longing to find or build some humble way to contribute to the personal, partial, overdue reparations I feel each of us in the hyper-industrialised world need to be making to support our oppressed and exploited neighbours. Last night I learned that the man I’ve spent the last two years trying to love has ‘a beautiful rasta woman’ as he put it and that this has been going on perhaps the entire time. He may have targeted me for my kindness, which would have been evident in the spot I was sitting when he approached me, from the friendships I have with local street vendors passing and the courtesy to all the serving staff. I have learned Ghanaians tend to see this as weakness. Not all of them, but some. Before this man I had first come here to spend time with someone who also said in love and love, a police officer whose entire family welcomed me with such generous kindness, and in the end once I had managed to struggle with five consecutive lawyers in Berlin over 15 months and had brought him to Babylon it quickly transpired he and his family and his entire community had been fooling me for three and a half years. He walked out while I was at the park, in the middle of the lockdown, in winter, taking only his passport and my key. And for months I sat trapped on the couch in that silent apartment with its white sky and ticking heating, trying to build a better novel from what I had written, trying to make a new business that would bring opportunities here to Ghanaians and to myself. I very slowly grasped reluctantly what had happened between us, which was not what I thought. I rang him and asked him to come back for the suitcase full of gifts he had left behind, things I had collected for him in second hand shops, the €20 pure wool handmade suit, the thick Danish sweater, the handmade shoes. He said, I don’t need those things, just put them out in the street. So I put my love out there, on the street, on my sleeve, and came to Ghana alone two years ago this month in a hail of his innuendoes and threats.

I came in secret. He knew if I came back here I would come across phrases like ‘mugu,’ an exploitation, a con, and I would start to piece together why he had listed himself on a dating site in Berlin in the first place.

In Ghana ‘kwasia’ means you stupid, you nothing, you are nobody to me. I have never experienced such a long con of a thousand million approaches from this ingenious and determined, near universal, relentless and ruthless exploitative smiling opportunism. Alongside ‘thief’, in Ghana ‘a foolish man’ is one of the worst insults. I have been foolish. I have loved and hoped, have planted seven gardens in seven humble rental properties where subsequently someone came and dug up the maturing plants to sell or they just died of neglect or got paved over. Foolishness is joyful, as it brings so much celebration and appreciative focus, and there is sweetness in every leaf but my heart is swollen and it burns and I long to be a part of someone’s life. I feel alone. It is ten years since I lived in Brisbane and everything has changed. My brothers now have glorious teenaged families and I go home to the final realisation at last that the babies of my own I longed and long to love will now never be born. My nephews and nieces are strangers because at an earlier stage in our painful family history I was not permitted to get to know them. I want to have a cat on my lap and a garden outside my window, I want to have a window, I want an arm around my shoulder sometimes, I want a hand to hold. Life doesn’t seem to offer these precious everyday treasures to so many of us, no matter how we are willing to work for them. But I cannot give it up, I yearn to be absorbed in something other than writing and trying to learn to draw and compose music and sharing with such glee the everyday streetlife joys of existence with a hundred dozen thousand strangers. I long for something more personal, more lasting and filled with dishes and meals, errands and home time. Will I ever know a household as the world comes to its end. And all this big love inside me that aches like sunburn, will it ever find its channel and home, its child, its tree, its man.