New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  He was last seen bawling on a 45 bus to Peckham.

  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

  An American-Ghanaian author of Powder Necklace (2010), which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”, she has had short fiction published in Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara, African Writing, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Sunday Salon. She was a 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar, a 2016 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, a 2015 Rhode Island Writers Colony Writer-in-Residence, and a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship Shortlistee in 2015 and 2014. She co-leads a monthly writing fellowship at Manhattan’s Center for Faith and Work. Also noted for her personal style, Essence magazine and the New York Times have featured her fashion looks. Recently, she co-founded made-in-Ghana apparel line Exit 14. She is working on a new novel.

  After Edwin

  Mawunyo Hodasi woke up to the familiar pam! of a tambourine accompanied by the sharp vibrato of her father Albert’s experimental therapy children’s choir. Poor, abandoned, or ravaged by rare and pitiable diseases, the kids’ voices rang without doubt.

  “Jesus loves the little children! All the children of the world!”

  By now, Mawunyo thought, they had to know, Jesus’s love notwithstanding, life didn’t love them the same; the world loved some children more than others. But still they sang, employing all the elements of faith—desperation, determination, surrender, obedience, hope—in spite of life and the world.

  “Hausa, Ga, Ewe, Akan! Rich and poor—yes, everyone! Jesus loves the little children of the world!”

  For years, Mawunyo would roll her eyes at her father’s earnest remix of the classic chorus as she watched the ragtag juvenile hospice chorales Albert started in different hospitals across Accra. Now, as she left her bed, she mouthed along, desperate for the song’s heavenly truth to transcend the reality on the ground, her heart pounding with self-loathing and relief.

  An eight-year-old was dead because of her. A little boy who, according to the death announcement posters plastered along Spintex Road, “never even hurt a mosquito.” Yet the sinking, throbbing shame she felt was shadowed by an irrepressible feeling of invincibility.

  In the immediate wake of the collision that had killed Edwin Ampah, Mawunyo had not had to submit to questioning. There hadn’t even been talk of a breathalyzer. There had just been her mother and father flanking her, leading her into their car, ThyWill their driver waiting at the wheel to take them home; Uncle John—her mother had started teasingly calling him “Uncle Inspector” after he was named Inspector General of Police—leading the way in his Land Cruiser.

  Every visit to Ghana, Mawunyo railed at her parents’ easy acceptance of the serf-like hierarchy that entrenched Ghana’s caste system. She confronted them about how guiltlessly they paid their maid the equivalent of $40 a month even as they gleefully did the math when their Social Security checks hit their accounts, simultaneously lamenting and rejoicing that the cedi’s value had fallen again: 4.75 Ghana was $1 now. “What can that buy? Tell me,” her father complained, because petrol was now 4.8540 Ghana per liter and the cars needed servicing and the roads needed tarring and the gutters needed rethinking and the street sellers needed removing and the government needed replacing because they were all chopping-oh. But now that her parents and Uncle John were “handling this business directly with the boy’s family,” Mawunyo went silent.

  She trembled when she remembered Edwin’s blood seeping like water from a punctured sachet, pooling around his opened face. She thought of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and the countless Blacks who had died without legal vindication. How many citizen justice petitions had she electronically signed demanding due process? How many Facebook posts and tweets had she liked and shared? In college, she had written reams of papers analyzing White Supremacy and the psychology of White entitlement, righteously prescribing the need for White people to give up their privilege for true equality to be had. At church, she petitioned God for justice. “Whatsoever you do to the least of My people, that you do unto Me,” she had sung through tears of transfiguration the morning before she encountered Edwin Ampah.

  She had meant it all—still did—until it meant her.

  In that colorless hour between night and dawn, on the street without lamps just after the tunnel, when Mawunyo felt her car slam into body, bones, organs, blood, soul, and cement blocks, and, finally, a signboard advertising a new apartment complex with condos starting at $77,000; all she could think of was herself, her business, and the lone policeman at the checkpoint half a mile ahead.

  On ordinary nights, when they approached the officer on the way home after an evening out, her father would suck his teeth. “If I refuse to stop, he has no car to chase me,” Albert would say. “All he can do is radio the next checkpoint. He is powerless to do anything but collect bribes.” Her mother would blink as she always did when she was faking a smile, then dutifully push the overhead light on and tilt her head out of the car as the officer shined his flashlight inside.

  “Ɔkyena, me di something small bɛ ma wo, wai?” Harmless flirtation, Rosemary translated for her daughter.

  “Complacency is the engine of corruption,” Mawunyo would respond.

  But that was B.E.

  Immediately After Edwin, adrenaline numbing what she later realized was her broken nose, Mawunyo mentally counted the notes in her bag. She would give the checkpoint officer something big, if it came to that. She had not made the rules, she told her protesting integrity, and the rules would not be overturned because of her. No sense in allowing the levers of a warped system to churn her up when she had the option of exemption.

  This was the pernicious privilege Mawunyo had picketed in college and sermonized her parents about, and she—young, Black, female, born in America, borne of Ghana—had the shadowy powers that be on her side. She was the euphemized “man.”

  Her status in Ghana had initially confused her. In the United States, Mawunyo had grown up certain of her place: inferior to whomever was White or rich; and she had spent the better part of her adolescence doing everything she could to achieve proximity to both. Among her first-generation American classmates from Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Ecuador, she aggressively befriended the ones with the loosest curls and the straightest waves, the ones light enough to have freckles on their skin. She modeled her vocabulary, mannerisms, and tastes after White book and screen characters. She styled her freshly relaxed hair in cascading waves she regularly tucked behind her ears or tossed over her shoulders. She developed an obsession with golf, tennis, and surfing.

  She wrote the hell out of her college application personal essay, conspiring with every exoticized notion of Africa she had seen or read, separating herself from all but the Talented Tenth of Blackness, campaigning as the ideal THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY & FINANCIAL AID candidate to secure a spot in one of the Best of the Whitest of schools, and she made it. She was accepted by Smith College, that old bastion of wealthy White femininity, where the daughters of slaveholders and suffragists converged in the intellectual mother of all finishing schools. It was the largest Sister of the Seven: Radcliffe, Vassar, Barnard, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr completing the number reserved for the richest, Whitest, historically women’s colleges in America.

  But at Smith she discovered more than how to be better at becoming an eternally inebriated, Feminine Mystique-quoting, White man’s wife (should she be so lucky). Over four years of nailing her role as the STYLISH INTELLECTUAL WORLDLY GRATEFUL HARD WORKING NEGRO, she found she wasn’t the only one playing a part.

  When the lights lowered, or drinks were served, when the music came on, she realized her White friends had been doing their own studying. Rapaciously singing along to whatever hip-hop track was the banger du jour, they always knew exactly when to go silent when the notorious “n” word appeared. In photos, they threw up gang signs they had seen in films or pictures, smiling at the irony, and captioned them with shru
gging or marijuana leaf emojis.

  Watching them perform what had been presented to them, and the world, as contemporary Blackness, it dawned on Mawunyo that her performances were minstrelsy too. There was no White or Black way of doing or being. Whiteness and Blackness were fabricated labels for invented identities, pernicious distortions of peoples and cultures to fossilize power and make money. Race was make-believe, and it was crushing every actor.

  “Whites” were existentially undone by the masquerade of superiority, even (and especially) when they didn’t know it to be a sham. They were nagged by the anxiety that comes with unmerited privilege: the fear that at any moment the ruse would be discovered, and everyone would stop playing along. They were bland with the ignorance borne of segregation and separatism; pickled by a legacy of myths their forebears had created to uphold their dominance; a fairytale that preserved them as uniformly powerful and rich, when most were actually struggling. But still, it was better brine than the one everyone else marinated in, and therein the privilege lay, and lied.

  Meanwhile, “people of color”—“Blacks,” “Asians,” “Latinos,” “Mixed Races” — were caged by the systematic invalidation of their identity and dignity; the severity of it moderated by their perceived proximity to Whiteness. To survive (and also to thrive), they were consigned to the schizophrenia of simultaneously inhabiting themselves and having to refute or play up some aspect of the many facsimiles of themselves permitted or peddled by White culture. And they were reminded again and again that neither wealth, nor extreme talent, intelligence, beauty, interracial coupling, acutely articulate diction, not even self-hate, offered total immunity—whether shopping under the surveillance of a following White eye, house hunting in a White neighborhood, or looking for a date online.

  Every hand, every color, was cuffed by this concept that had flowered from a conspiracy of evil imaginations and financial interests into an evergreen global institution. Everyone was a victim of it, and victims cared first about turning their own fortunes around, even if doing so victimized others.

  How ironic, yet apt, the term “race,” Mawunyo often mused, set up so no one would ever be able to outrun it.

  Then, Mawunyo went to Ghana for a visit; her first as an adult after her parents moved into the house they had built with their 401Ks to spend the rest of their lives in.

  Speaking and thinking like the Ghanaian-American she was born and raised to be, half of her identity was dismissed and Mawunyo was summarily painted an “obroni”—White. With the almighty dollar in her pocket, and a blue passport in her name, she had the power to make grown men beg to carry her things, and she had the freedom—no humiliating visa interview to endure—to escape the survival mode setting life in Accra was permanently on, any time she chose.

  It was intoxicating. Suddenly, Mawunyo inhabited a position America had made clear would eternally elude her: RICH “WHITE” GIRL. Inspired by the wealthy, White friends she had made at Smith, she played THE GOOD ONE to perfection, born for the role of CONSCIOUS RIGHTEOUS ENDEARINGLY TONE DEAF ADVOCATE.

  Before Edwin, she had begun to drop parts of her act. After increasingly regular jaunts in Ghana, Mawunyo began experiencing emotional jet lag when she returned to the States. In Ghana she was the head. In America, she had to keep her head down and tuck her proverbial tail.

  Formerly, code switching titillated her. She was a natural actress, and she took pride in her mastery of the subtle performance. But her onetime amusement at playing to the room—adapting into versions of herself palatable to the myth of Whiteness depending on the crowd—fermented into an acrid resentment. Deep anger slowly began replacing her need to be validated and affirmed by White people.

  After Edwin, there could be no more pretense. Just as there was nothing inherently better about the White people or rich people she had been raised to worship, and nothing inherently worse, there was nothing good about the passive righteousness she practiced when she was in Ghana. There was just hypocrisy, and her conscious decision to love herself more than her neighbor.

  Gabrielle Civil

  A black feminist performance artist, writer and poet, originally from Detroit, Michigan, she has created 50 original performance art works around the world, including as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico. Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Art21, Something on Paper, Kitchen Table Translation, Obsidian, and other outlets. She collaborated with artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier on “Tourist Art,” an image + text work on Haitian cultural circulation and is the author of two memoirs in performance art: Swallow the Fish and Experiments in Joy. A graduate from the University of Michigan with Highest Distinction, she earned her MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. She currently serves as faculty in the MFA program in Creative Writing and the BFA program in Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

  From Swallow the Fish

  “So, I’m doing a thing at Patrick’s,” Miré was saying. “I know there are hooks and water, but I’m trying to figure out the part with the fish.”

  “Fish?” Flávia asked, “Your piece is about fish?”

  “No, it’s about other things. But I was thinking about having a goldfish swimming in a bowl while I did the first part, then maybe do a thing with a rope and hooks or a knife. And then do something that transforms the fish, changes it.”

  “Oooh. A goldfish,” I said. Lines from Rita Dove’s “Dusting” popped into my head: “the clear bowl with one bright / fish, rippling / wound!” or “wound” to rhyme with around. I like it. Could you pour the fish from the bowl into a pitcher or something?”

  “Or you could start with the pitcher,” Flávia suggested.

  “Then you could drink from the water.”

  “I think I need to do more than just sip the water. It needs to be a more powerful gesture.”

  “Swallow the fish,” Colin said. “You know that’s what you want to do. It’s small and biodegradable.”

  “Eat a goldfish?” Evie interjected, eyebrows raised.

  “You don’t need to eat it,” Colin continued. Or chew it or anything. Just swallow it.”

  “Colin,” Flávia fussed. “Miré can’t hurt animals for her art. That’s not right.”

  Flávia’s crickets had chirped blithely unharmed and she’d released them all at the end of her show.

  “She doesn’t need to hurt it. Just swallow it. And if it’s necessary for the piece, then she needs to do it.”

  “Is it necessary?” I asked, repulsed yet titillated by the idea.

  Swallow the fish? The whole thing had a new jack, lyrical black radical appeal, but was also old school performance art. Dramatic and crazy and slightly dangerous. Art at the level of life and death. Embodying the natural kingdom. Something indulgent and a little mean but tapping into another kind of power. Breaking taboos. Dancing the fine line between crazy and brilliant. Feeling something alien and alive move from transparency into your body, fish, rippling wound or wound.

  But who would really do this?

  “Hmm,” Miré responded.

  Swallow the Fish

  I had never thought of myself as a fearful person, but performance art made me confront my fears. And also my desires. At the start, not the question, what would a performance artist do, because the answer was everything, anything. At the start, this question: who got to do those things? Who got to be a performance artist? Which people in which bodies?

  I remember seeing Karen Finley in New York City. She hadn’t swallowed any live animals (although it wouldn’t necessarily be beyond her), but she had stripped down to just panties and put her feet in a basin of water which (as anyone who has ever stepped naked in water knows) gives you the overwhelming desire to pee. Karen Finley calmly told us that was what had happened to her, grabbed a bucket, and peed right there into it on stage. It was shocking, but also liberating. It was the brazen nastiness of white girls that had always intimidated me in my youth. (White girls, you know
how they are . . . They’ll do anything. Pee in the woods, walk around butt naked in the showers. They’re loose, they’re easy, they’re crazy.) As a black girl, as a strong black woman, I was supposed to be appalled and superior to that kind of behavior. But at times, I was covetous. How come they got to do that? Where did they get that allowance? I had never seen a black woman do such things and wondered if it were even possible

  Years ago, I had an artist show and tell at my house. I’d started moving from poetry into performance and had just gotten a big grant to turn my experience translating a long Haitian poem into a new performance art piece. When Colin suggested swallowing the fish, something rippled within in me. I wanted Miré to swallow the fish. I wanted her, a black woman to stare down craziness, to allow herself to be crazy, do something crazy on stage. Hell, I wanted to swallow the fish myself. To be as loose and crazy and unstoppable as those white lady performance artists like Karen Finley and Holly Hughes and Marina Abramovic. I wondered if I could do it.

  “If it’s necessary for the piece, then she needs to do it,” Colin had said. The realization of need. Going deeper, taking it all a step further. I thought of the time I showed my landlords, my two great, gay godfathers whom I adore, some segments from Divine Horsemen, Maya Deren’s documentary on Haitian vaudoun. One moment in the dance, the houngan, the priest, slits the throat of a chicken. You see its blood pour down to the earth below. That death is a necessary ritual that connects the worshippers to the spirit world beyond. My landlords were outraged at the violence; but, I felt honored, stirred. We were witness to the transfer of one life to another, one energy to another—not for entertainment or shock value but for transformation.

  Swallowing the fish would have to be like that.

  Making performance art as well.

  To swallow the fish, you had to have something more than a reason. In a way, you had to reject reason itself. You had to have spirit (and perhaps spirits and the spirits too). Especially as a nice black girl, as a strong black woman. You couldn’t just get away with whatever. Hell no. You could be crucified for that, or worse gain a bad reputation. Animal murderer. Race traitor. Nasty girl. Acting crazy. Acting up. Performing. Anything could happen to you. Anything could happen. It couldn’t be pretense or something to do for kicks. It had to be real. There had to be some black art, some power, some need and conviction that warranted that kind of transformation. A particular kind of magic . . .