Like Slices of Yam

By Yolanda Kwadey

/ Fiction /    

My sister said they cut her, that one of the babies wouldn’t turn the right way, and that she was in breach even past the forty-two weeks. So, she let them cut her open, seven layers of tissue in all. Nobody in my family was really known for their patience. There were scars to prove it, old streaks of torn skin from Ma’s canes when she’d lose whatever smidgeon of patience she possessed. The people of my generation in this part of the world call it abuse; we called it discipline. But, of course, there were miserable words for everything that made Ghana home, like “black tax”, when really it was about caring for the village that had cared for you. It took a village until the village was old, decrepit and wanting. People always asked how I was so stellar, how I carried myself as if life’s troubles and the people it used to conduct its misery were just passing wisps of cloud. When I told them the wonders of the cane, they gaped at me. Ashleigh, blonde cascading hair and blue eyes said, “Baby, that’s abuse.” But when it was the Black Americans, there were giggles, nods of understanding coupled with a stupid nostalgia for the old things.

“Hey, what works works,” I told Ashleigh that time. Now she was just a girl that I knew in the undergraduate part of my higher education, a social media follower who tapped occasional buttons on things I showed. There is an uncanny assurance in that—like a lingering sense of needing to pee right after you have already peed after holding it too long, that assurance that your bladder isn’t busted.

Now I stopped; didn’t talk about the cane anymore. After years in the United States, the cane was a careless reminder of what was wrong with my homeland, of the insufficient empathy for the young, and my own agonizing need to be right always—prim, proper, perfect. Occasionally, I convinced myself the Westerners were right, but when I looked at a child in a Walmart in a seizure of outrage and entitlement concerning a toy or candy, or a teenager on a video screaming the irreverent at their mother, I was doubtful. And really, how did it concern me?

* * *

My sister’s cutting happened around the time that my semester had fully waned, when the English Department had concluded the spring and the other students struggled to finish, fueled by anxieties and opioids. Evaluations were concluded, and there was a small window where a two-and-a-half-hour domestic flight didn’t cost a kidney. I booked one. Higher education teaches its patrons that escapism can only last so long; physical elusion is the one, true high. I was excited to leave town.

I was also exhausted. Seminars had gotten painful, with big buzzwords which still made little sense to me—what in Christ’s name was “the performative”? And why did we have to write like old, white men born in the sixteenth century? And for God’s sake, why did I always end up in the mean professors’ classes? It had to be me fiefoɔ abayifoɔ; those godforsaken mystical house witches that we learnt about from old Ghallywood had to be responsible. I spent some of my childhood days—sometime between ages eight and eleven—wondering which aunt or uncle, grandmother or grandfather could be the family witch. I knew they struck at the midnight hour, morphing into goats that bleated behind my window at night, or some meowing cat in the early dawn. I knew sometimes they flew. One time, a cat wouldn’t stop yowling outside. My heart thundered in my chest till my skull throbbed against my skin. It was that period I was learning to sleep without any lights on. So, clutching a pillow, I whispered, “Jesus’ blood comes against you!” over and over again till I was quivering and in tears, snotty and ashamed of my limited faith. The cat left a while later.

* * *

On a Sunday, I hopped on a flight to someplace in New England. I slept the whole time, woke up with a pain from twisting my neck too far in one direction, and we’d arrived. Two and a half hours total. That is how long it takes to travel from Awoshie to Koforidua. I holidayed in Awoshie many times with cousins that weren’t really cousins, daughters of one of Ma’s oldest friends who both scared and loved me. We loved this “aunt” for her vulgarity, found it hilarious how many times she’d refer to anything and everyone in her way as their “mother’s cunt”. Ma herself only ever spoke like that around her, but she always warned me never to speak like that, to do as she said, not to do as she did. And these “cousins”, they always fought. This one stole that one’s blouse, and that one was tired of doing this one’s chores, and this one had stolen a piece of chevon from that one’s bowl. 

There was that day that the eldest, Stephie, had fought with the middle one, Albie. There were three of them in all, the third the same age as I am. The sun was scorching in that way that seems to sear your skin till you’re tugging aggressively at the neck of your clothes in hopes that air will slip between the fabric and your skin. There was an elevated, wide slab of cement on which we sat sometimes, they cooked sometimes, they handwashed heaps of dirty clothes and sneakers on the weekends. Handwashing in giant basins with frothy water—which tends to leave your fingers raw and your skin peeling painfully—is satisfying in a way that the white man’s washing machines and dryers can never be. But these cousins on this day used that slab as their boxing ring, locking arms, twisting each other this way and that way, yanking at coily and relaxed hair. Stephie’s hair was relaxed in fine, straight albeit discolored black hair; Albie’s was still dark and coily. She has permed hers now too.

I stood on the porch, under the shade of the awning in awe, didn’t remember ever fighting my sister in such a manner, although to be fair my siblings are, at least, a decade older than me. That’s why I holidayed so much at Awoshie. Beside me, Adomaa, the third that is the same age I am, yelled, “Yes, Stephie, beat her. She’s a thief,” and waved frantic hands of support. A week later, we would find Albie’s denim shorts buried in Adomaa’s drawers too.

In the darkened window of my aunt’s room to the left of the porch, there was my aunt’s face, its expression too unseeable, but the face was right there. She said nothing, yelled no rebukes, as if—what is it they say?—she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

A fresh gash across her cheek, chest heaving, fingers pointing at her sister—Stephie was tired. “You thief!” she said, “Don’t ever touch my things again!” 

Albie was crying, and her hair was disheveled, her knee scraped from being dragged along the cement slab. She said, “Oh, fuck off,” but in Twi as: fa fri me so.

Then my aunt said from the window, “Are you tired yet?” She said there was a pot of jollof on the kitchen stove, everyone left, but I just stood on the porch for a long, long time.

* * *

In New England, my sister looked happy to see me, said she really was, and handed me one of the babies after I washed my hands. The room smelt light, floral scents here, sweet baby powder there, wonderful amalgamations that make any sane person inhale harder than anybody should. There were never any twins in our family, and now that the seal had opened, I wondered, would this thing strike me too? The twin in my hand kicked against my gut, the bikini line, the place where I’d be cut seven times if I ended up like my sister. The baby was beautiful—rosebud lips with a helpless innocence. I was relieved that I, in fact, care about her.

We were in the basement of our aunt’s house, this one my mother’s cousin. The aunt was a nurse, working double shifts, only free on weekends to support my sister. My sister had only flown here to birth, to manipulate the so-called lottery of birth, keep her babies from ending up like me with the infinite limitations of an F-1 visa. I hugged the twin in my hand and said, “You should write like I do, but you’ll get those fellowships and make all that money because you’ll be a citizen soon.” 

I tried not to think, stop the recalling of my visit to the international center a few weeks earlier. My department was short-staffed and needed the six of us master’s students to hold down the graduate teaching fort over there, said they’d pay us double, and Lord, did I need it. I couldn’t work anywhere else outside campus, wasn’t allowed to, would be sent home otherwise. But visas—if you’re third-world scum—promises freedom to dream and then binds your hands with a million restrictions. I remember hearing about the nonimmigrant visa interview: “You’re guilty of being an immigrant until proven innocent.”

At the embassy, I’d lowered my head, kept to myself, talked to no one. I’d practiced my answers, they said I wouldn’t make it through otherwise. People around me, floating on dreams and academic aspirations, chattered. They said:

“I’m Selasi. You?”

“Did you remember to get the copies of the two-by-two passport photos?”

“What do I say if they ask me about my relatives? I have an estranged uncle in Wisconsin. I should say no, yes?”

“Anybody have an extra clear file?”

“Shh… look, someone is coming out. Do you think they got bounced? They seem sad.”

I was too prepared, didn’t say a word, was afraid if I said anything apart from what I’d prepared to say to the interviewer, I’d lose everything. I was certain I’d fumble my opportunity, and after all that money too—a fee here, a payment there, a charge everywhere. My heart was throbbing inside my head, and there were maggots crawling around my intestines. I tried not to think about vomit. Inside, after the person in front of me was rejected, I stood behind the glass screen, stared into my interviewer’s long, brown hair. She said:

“How many schools did you apply to?”

“Why did you choose this university?”

“What are your plans after school?”

I don’t remember most of what I said anymore, only the loud banging of my heart against my brain and the back of my tongue lodged in my throat. Then I was done and walking out the doors, sobbing and shaking, and wondering if anyone said about me: “Look how her shoulder’s drooping… is she crying?... Oh, she got rejected…. Good, she was a snob.” But I got it, got the visa. Years ago. And that was what I was thinking when I was walking away from the international center after the lady at the front desk had said, “No, you’re not allowed to take on more work.” When I was trying not to cry or be angry because I really had no right to be. I was a nonimmigrant, and I felt like I had no rights, and I was only entitled to a little money for a lot of work as a graduate teaching assistant and a wonky dream. My immigration papers were crammed into my backpack as usual, just in case someone asked, I wasn’t sure who. But I didn’t cry. My throat burned, and the sun was scorching too hot. Ma told me on the phone that I was strong for it. She said, “I’m so proud of you, my baby.”

* * *

The first night with my sister in that basement, the babies wouldn’t sleep. Our aunt descended to our room, in mismatched scrubs—yellow shirt, burgundy pants. She washed her hands and took my baby, cooed sweet things at her while my sister and I watched. The she returned the baby into my folded arms, took the one without the rosebud lips from my sister, rocking her, telling her and us about work. She’d argued with a white woman about if spirituality is a mental disease. I said someone in the English Department called it religious psychosis. Our Christian hearts couldn’t take it. She left after about half an hour to shower, cuddle her husband, drag herself from bed at five a.m. for her next shift. It was almost one a.m. when she stumbled off. 

“She’s great,” my sister said.

“Yeah.”

The blue light was on to signal to some part of the babies’ brains that it was time for bed, but no. We fed them too many times to count because babies don’t care what the pediatrician says about how much formula and how often to make it. Mine never burped, but I put her down an hour later and the food poured out through her mouth and nose, and then my sister had to suck the residue out of her nose with her mouth. So, we stayed awake, in the smells of baby powder, used diapers, that formula Similac, and she told me about how she couldn’t produce breastmilk, pointed to the pump in the glass locker. It was still in its box. I couldn’t see the writing on the packaging because the lights were too dim and blue.

“I tried Fante kenkey and fula. Auntie even found tigernuts at the Ghana store downtown and soaked them and pounded them and milked them,” my sister said.

“And still?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“Then it’s good to use the formula. And look how they eat too! Feeding twins one after the other, then together, so often? That’s crazy. I wonder how the other women do it.”

She said, “I know, right? Even now, when they’re crying at the same time, I put one on my laps and wiggle my leg to rock her so that I can feed the other in my arms.” She took the one in my arms from me to demonstrate what she was saying. The fridge at the back of the room was humming, calling me to sleep. The digital clock beside the lampstand said it was almost four a.m. The last time I’d slept was on the plane.

Around seven a.m., a twin fell asleep against my sister’s chest, and my sister with her, and I hummed an old lullaby to the twin in my arms, the one about the good baby shepherd. But the baby just stared at my face. I thought how horrible it would be if my sister had to wake up because this one baby wouldn’t nod off, screamed every time she was laid on her back too. That was what happened when I wasn’t around. Our Ma was the nurturer of our family, raising this aunt’s baby, bathing that cousin’s newborn, caring for this one and that one. And there was my cousin that lived with us, there was my brother, and there were relatives and grandparents that lived in cozy, concrete houses nearby, so that no mother had to do it all alone, no father either. But my sister was here and alone, juggling sleepless twins, one nestled against the wound in her abdomen. To be so far from a loving husband, from home, from the village it took, a fee here, a payment there, a charge everywhere for the sake of the future…. I stared into the baby’s face and whispered, “Your mama’s good. Be kind to her and go to sleep.” She didn’t, cried a little instead, and I took her to the sofa to rock her into silence.

* * *

In the throes of sleep deprivation one of those days I spent in New England, I said to Ma, “I don’t really want kids.” It was five a.m., nine a.m. in Ghana, so Ma was awake. The babies had cried all night, refusing sleep, spitting their food, fussing about nothing. I prayed, my sister prayed, but nothing came of any of it. My sister had dozed off.

“No, don’t say that,” Ma said, angry, dismayed, disgusted.

“But look at Elsie. She’s on the edge of a depression, and I’m tired. I’ve forgotten what rest tastes like.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ma said, “Everyone’s motherhood differs. You’ll curse yourself into infertility this way, and then you’ll join those on the prayer mountains here in Aburi, rolling in the sand, crying and begging for a baby.”

I wanted to say that infertility didn’t matter if I didn’t want a baby anyway, but I found that instead I said, “Okay.” And then when the call ended, I cried while feeding the twin in my arms. What if Ma was right? I wanted to cut off my mouth, throw it in the sand, stomp on it. Mouths do that often—say things that you have crushed into emotions—and without permission too. I wished my mouth would stop doing that.

In the morning my sister received a package, an opaque plastic bag filled with lotions and serums. She beamed at me, let them fall onto the bed beside the napping twins. We’d placed bets on how long we figured they’d sleep for, thirty minutes for me, twenty minutes for her. We were only twelve minutes into this respite, but instead of sinking into our own beds, we washed dirty bottles, swept, folded this and that, sorted dirty laundry from clean. We worked swiftly and without speaking. Then we were looking at her skincare products, the ones that just came in.

“I’m bleaching,” she sang with joy, waved the orange thing in her hand.

I blinked and said, “Oh.”

She raised her nightgown and rubbed her protruding belly. The skin was stretched and sagging, waves of cellulite strewn from one side to the other. A dark, black line reached from underneath her breasts where the dress was bunched into her two fists and down into her adult diaper. “Say bye-bye to all this blackness.” She was still singing and wiggling her shoulders, reminded me of those ads in Ghana about this ointment or that dewormer, this painkiller or that condom.

“Oh, wow,” I said with a large smile, “fancy.” But I didn’t really mean it.

We gushed over the other products, but my mind had wandered again, far into that time my uncle had bought me a bleaching cream. I was born as dark as my brother, lighter than soot, darker than the earth’s loam. Nobody has ever said to my brother, “You’re too dark, you should bleach,” but they said to me some time in junior high—middle school if you want—to consider it.

“Lighten your skin a little, not too much that you end up with the splotchy, uneven skin.”

“Oh, why do you look so black?”

“The way your skin’s burnt isn’t good at all.”

There was that senior in our large high school—a boarding school because that is just the way it is in Ghana—that found me by accident on a WhatsApp group chat, texted all throughout the long school break. He was one of those lovers of anticipation, who shut their eyes until they are ready to see, so we exchanged no photos. I thought he was strange. Maybe he was ugly. I imagined him with the face of a goat, with dead eyes and a bulbous nose, maybe a rule-breaking beard. Didn’t know why I thought so.

“I want it to be a surprise,” he said.

“You might be disappointed,” I warned.

“No,” he said, “I just know you’re beautiful. I can feel it in my bones.”

We met on one of the stairs of the junior block, walls painted all white, countered with a streak of black on each possible edge. It was a cloudy day, and the teachers were away in a meeting with the school board. The prefects were in charge, but they were tough on freshmen and juniors, lax with seniors. That was when I met with him. He was dark, darker than I was, as short as my shoulder. I smiled at him, anxious, thrilled, relieved that the anticipation was over. His ears were too big, his eyes too far apart, but his clothes were pressed, and he smelt like wood and fragrant herb. Most importantly, he did not resemble a goat.

I said, “Hey!”

He said, “Hey, I didn’t know you were this black.”

Then I ran down the stairs, as far as the girls’ bathroom on the neighboring block, and I hid. I didn’t stop crying until the bell rang from the administration’s tower, demanding that we assemble for the lunch the pantry-women had prepared for us. I only picked at my food, listened to the familiar clanging of the aluminum saucepans and ladles, metal plates and cutlery. That was the last time I ever saw him. Later, I begged Ma at the telephone booth to transfer me to another school. She said no.

In the boarding school, parents and guardians were only allowed to visit the first Sunday of each month. The one immediately after my meeting with the senior, Ma couldn’t make it. Everyone was busy, don’t remember why, so my uncle came with the things I needed—snacks, juice boxes, gari, shito, and lotion. He showed up with a bleaching cream, orange packaging, smelt like milk and a rotting corpse. 

“That’ll bleach me,” I told him.

“Really?” he asked, “You know I’m no expert in creams. I asked the seller for a good cream, she asked your skin shade, I told her, and she gave me this.”

I stared at the bottle in my hand, thought of the senior, thought of everybody else, then I smiled widely and said, “That’s okay, Uncle. I’ll use it.”

He is as dark as I am. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes.”

But then my cheeks and forehead lightened while the skin on which my hairline sat, my ears, my chin and neck stayed dark. My inner arms yellowed, and they made my elbows look darker. Every time I was self-conscious, someone complimented me.

“Wow, you’re glowing lately,” they said.

“You’re looking gorgeous today,” they said.

“We’ll have to hide our boyfriends if you keep glowing this way,” they said.

One lighter skinned girl in my dormitory came up to me after lunch one day, touched my shoulder. I looked at all the hyperpigmentation splattered over her face, but at least she was fair. They say you’re either dark or fair in complexion back home. I was dark, she was fair. She asked me, “Are you bleaching?”

I said, “No.” Then I walked away.

In the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, hours after the bell demanded that we sleep, I grabbed the orange bottle, found a trash can, and buried it. And the darkness of my skin, a toxic ex, eventually returned to claim its place on my skin. 

* * *

And that’s how the days with the babies swept past, with no sleep, a lot of fussing, and too much remembering. There was something about the familiarity of my sister, the euphoria of finding home again after stumbling about in cultural uncertainty, that reminded me of the good and the bad, the past and the present. On the flight back, I brought a piece of West African yam with me, stowed it in my carryon so that I wouldn’t lose it. I had tears in my eyes, remembered my sister’s face from the airport… both times. The first time, I was a zombie, brain too shocked to process my way through the Kotoka International Airport, headed to the US to pursue a dream. My sister was taking many videos and photos of us, for our mother because she had work and couldn’t drive three hours at midnight to say goodbye. Hundreds of people were milling about, hugging this loved one goodbye, that loved one welcome home—Mema wo yaakɔ, akwaaba o. 

“Do it like this…. Put your hand on the suitcase handle like this. Erherh! Then hold the flight tickets between the passport like this…. Look away…. Now smile…. Now pretend to be looking down at your shoes. God, I’m so proud of you!” she said.

Three flights. It took three flights, and twenty-five hours, and fourteen hundred dollars, or a hundred and forty-four thousand Ghana cedis to get here. My entire life was in two suitcases, one carryon, one personal item, far from anybody I ever knew, the village which cared, identity, culture, safety. Then I thought of my sister’s face the second time, an hour ago, huge smile. She said, “I’ll miss you. Take care. What am I going to do without you?”

I was crying in the window seat to myself, the type of crying that pulls at your throat’s strings, yanks at something in your chest, pushes mucus down the back of your mouth. And the whole time I was brooding over something Ma had said some years ago. I was peeling a yam in the kitchen to fry for dinner. It was dirty and brown on the outside, promised to be white and fresh on the inside. It was, indeed, white and ripe all around, but rotten black in the middle. I couldn’t scrape out the bad parts, had commixed with the better parts. I was so upset, I kept cutting and cutting, getting angrier with every disappointing slice. I hunched over the kitchen counter and began sobbing, hungry, frustrated, impatient. Ma came and asked what was wrong and I told her. She had a mud orange cloth wrapped around her torso, had only a few minutes ago awoken from her famous post-church nap. She patted my back and said, “Don’t be sad. That’s just the way life is.” We ate rice that night instead. But on the plane from New England, I couldn’t stop thinking of that yam. I was crying and patting my knee, assuring myself that this misery was another passing wisp of cloud, another rotten part of a generally good yam though I myself was the color of rot in a sea of white. I was alone, but on my way, back to dreams that were halfway there. With a million restrictions. And no real home. My immigration papers were still in my bag. They just always are.