TRAVELING BROKEN AND ALONE…

Sharing the happiness and optimism of the day from the Alley Bar, I knew things were going to be alright even if the silent wariness in my eyes said something markedly different. The misty air was full of optimism despite my mind’s strenuous attempt to recall the tragedies of my earlier days.

Haggard from my ten-day trip around the central region, where I had visited Assin Foso, Twifo Praso, and my hometown of Ajumako Bisease, I spent the weekend having overzealous fun at the annual Abangye festival and ended up sleeping every morning at five. It was perfectly normal then for me to constantly doze off while sitting in the cab in a city noted for its notoriously high noise levels.

I had been growing sleepy in the last few days, and in that state of drowsiness, I had been telling anyone who cared to listen about the tribulations of my life in the past few months. I had no idea if that was helpful. It was surprising, though, how my memory of her acquired the status of a transitory visualization—almost surreal but not experienced in reality. This made me look tense and withdrawn most days, and I knew people noticed, but I clumsily masked it because I knew they would not know the story behind it, even if they figured something was wrong.

With each passing day, I started to wonder if my life as I knew it was ending, and if what had happened had broken something delicate and irreversible. These thoughts nagged at me. This was not the way I envisioned my contented future as a man simply in pursuit of happiness—happiness in both its artistic and philosophical forms. That desperate desire for a blissful future, which I had carried since my days as a secondary school boarding student, was at the brink of fizzling out.

I had not even had the chance to give my kids the gift of being truly seen, something I never had. I was not choosing her because she was special, but because she made me laugh. My laid-back, reserved, collected nature was perfectly enough in the shadow of her boisterous adventurism and inventiveness. How could I have been so clear in my mind and yet such a divided person? Was it that unassuming, innocent wisdom which had deceived me into thinking I could bend the universe to my will without compromising my happiness? I remained an enigma even to myself, but my troubles had forced me into a person of composure I couldn’t recognize.

I had lasted a year but my mind was no longer at ease when I thought of that one year against a lifetime of such misery. I could no longer live the life of empty fulfillment and unfulfilled potential.

 Everyday was unpredictable yet the last year had settled into such monotonous predictability that I could not simply find joy in it. This desperate desire for friendship, the kind of bond you could find joy in was overwhelming. The thoughts were intermittently flashes of searching questions. And despite the words of the sages pointing it down to loneliness, I knew it  was nearing the end of a long struggle.

Even the air between us knew this. We were still together but had become unbearably dry, perched like birds on a wobbly tree branch, ready to fly off in freedom. Few things had already significantly changed between us but they were not yet profound enough to matter.

The cab driver slowly eased the car onto the back road which was to lead us to the national museum. We drove in silence. I looked as if I was in another world, not observing my surroundings or paying attention to the sound of the other cars on the narrow road, squeezing and meandering their way through a road that might have been built in the early fifties for a capacity one-tenth of what it is currently saddled with. This too was a feature of the state of our public infrastructure system; stretched, overused and hardly maintained.

I have always wondered the protocol behind the concept of lane switching in Ghana. It is really strange how almost every driver on the double dual-carriageways in the city understand the ‘madness’ of each other. When driving, just be prepared for the possibility of the car in the adjacent lane to suddenly switch to your lane without a care in the world of what the expert call indicator lights, perhaps if you are lucky, the driver may signal his or her indicator light but nevertheless cut in front of you acutely such that you won’t have any other option than slamming on the brakes, if even briefly.

The drivers of commercial buses, popularly known as trotros, understand each other when it comes to this practice. They accept it from each other with a recognised camaraderie. However, any such attempt by a driver of a private vehicle with be met with the choicest abusive and insulting phrases from the language of choice of the driver. The Ga ones are the most acerbic I have come across in this city.

 I am sitting silently at the back seat of the cab, fiddling with my phones, switching between TikTok and Instagram, in search of curious videos to watch. There was nothing else to do. One curious video piqued my interest considerably. Apparently it was a video of a Ghanaian millennial socialite by name Ama Dope. In her rather curious video, she is responding to another TikToker by name Pearl (not so sure if I am getting the names right). I didn’t know the background of the story but I found Ama Dope compelling enough to watch the entire spectacle. I found sections of it extremely hilarious and other parts extremely troubling. I have never understood the obsession of skin belching so that perhaps explains my inability to really understand that part of Ama’s argument. For the obsession with wigs and the hair of women, I recently became a student of the phenomenon and still learning.

Traffic plagues this city. It is fifteen minutes after two in the afternoon and yet so many cars are still tightly packed on the road, moving at a snail’s pace. I find myself observing the movement of the foot of my cab driver on the brake. There was something rhythmic about it. But the real stunner to me was the discovery of my cab driver’s habit of stepping on the brake and  the accelerator barefooted. I could not for the life of me imagine why anyone would do that. Why would you take off your sandals and be stepping on them barefooted? Is that meant to make it more comfortable or is there a secret I am yet to be privy to?

This afternoon is quieter than usual. It is amazing how bicycle-unfriendly Accra is. Almost every conceivable space in the city is commercialised.

We just drove by the offices of the Sam Okudzeto and Associates law chambers a while ago from the Alley bar. What struck me as we moved from the Nyaniba estate to downtown Osu, to the parliament house area, then to Ridge; was the affluence ease and complete detachment the bourgeoisie class in Ghana lives compared to the proletarian class – I guess I’m almost sounding Marxist now.

A mere five hundred metres from the ginormous office of the Sam Okudzeto chambers is downtown Osu. How many of the young boys and girls living in the community just adjacent the offices could in present Ghana have hopes of rising through a meritocratic society to reach the level of the venerable Sam Okudzeto? What is our Gini coeeficient again? It is amazing the sort of inequality that exists between two groups of citizens living in the same city and most likely having attended the same public school decades earlier.

The music I have been listening to on the road has been my usual melancholic songs but I have been gravitating to more solemn themes, songs you can recognise the sense of yearning within – a certain yearning for freedom. At this moment I am listening to Brymo’s Illusions.

Being the ever evocative searcher, Brymo makes no mistake in conveying his deeply philosophical message across with the urgency it demands. The position Brymo takes in Illusionsis quite simplistic and doesn’t look at the historicity of the transatlantic slave trade with the nuanced view I have come to associate with Brymo. Nevertheless, the emotive, poetic force of the record makes for such soulful listening. The intellectual conflict Brymo threatens to unleash in my mind is gracefully rescued by the insightful sound of Sasha Alex Sloan’s Dancing With Your Ghost.

Sasha Sloan’s ability to write very good songs that speak to the innermost parts of the soul is grossly underrated. Sasha has a way of melting your heart no matter how broken it may be and then pulling at its strings, rendering you incapable of avoiding the confrontation with the nostalgia you are running away from. Yet it is the hope and insight that this record offers that drew me to it at this time. Beneath the brokenness, there was still optimism. It is a record from a place of deep introspection.

Sasha is not one given to frivolities so you can recognise the shared experience of pain through her immaculate voice. This is a record about a loss – not entirely certain of the type of loss this is – Is the partner dead? Did he move on with another woman? Did he just leave? I’m left wondering .

I am staring at the painting on the wall. I am pensive. Apparently I’ve been staring at the painting for a while, lost in my thought. Long enough to elicit this question from the young impressionable American couple who had been looking at my pensive study of the painting of the mosque quizzically. “Is the mosque still intact? In which region of the country can we find it?”, they asked. The Wuriyanga Mosque built in the traditional Djenné architectural style is as impressive as its age. The mosque is believed to be at least two centuries old.

My mind races back to my sessions with the various therapists in the past couple of months. I do not know why I had finally given in to speaking to a stranger about my issues. Perhaps I needed to speak to a stranger. I needed to talk to someone, anyone; someone beside close family, friends and acquaintances. I needed to talk to a stranger completely detached from the issues.I have never considered therapy in my life but here I was turning to it for redemption. But what was I to say even to this stranger? Was there anyone out there who could possibly understand without judging me as petulant?

On that first day when I had taken the decision to speak to a therapist, it had rained heavily. The drive from Tema to Korle-Bu was too much of a stretch but I was determined to give it a try. In retrospect, I think I went out of deference to my high school friend who I had asked to find a colleague to speak to me. I had sent her the message at two in the morning. I couldn’t therefore miss the appointment after she had gone through the trouble to secure it on the flimsy excuse of ‘heavy rains’.

I knew I needed to be there but I was still not prepared on what I was going to say. The drive to the hospital was unremarkable. I had turned the radio off and drove in silence. I kept staring at the washed-out streets and the heaps of rubbish by the sides of the road and in the gutters but my mind was not there at that moment. My mind was blank.

I found myself surprisingly crying in the car whilst driving. I wanted to take in the fresh air that the rains has brought but I could not have folks in traffic wondering why a grown man driving alone in his car would be crying at that time of the morning. And that was my first question to my therapist when I was ushered to her office two hours later – what will make a man cry suddenly in traffic? She smiled at me and said, ‘crying is actually very therapeutic. It helps you heal.’

I knew at that moment that I was going to play Sharon Van Etten’s Every Time the Sun Comes Upon my way back to Tema. For every time the sun comes up, I’m in trouble. That is how I feel these days.

I felt afraid, uncertain of the future. I’m reading Oyinkan Braithwaite’s novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer.In one of the chapters, there is a dialogue between Muhtar and Korede. It was after Muhtar had just recovered from the coma and had sent for Korede when he started recalling the things Korede had been saying to him whilst he was in coma. Muhtar tells Korede about his granddaughter and add rather sadly the father’s refusal to accept the baby as his. Muhtar ask Korede if she was married and when she answered in the negative, he declared truimphantly; “Good. Marriage isn’t what they say it is.” I kept wondering what point Muhtar was really driving at.

I’m reading this novel to a background sound of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games.

In the next scene where the two engage in a conversation, Muhtar utters something more profound; “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”

I found myself talking to my therapist about religion – its essence and grip on the rationality of people. I kept going on about how I found the whole spectacle of religion too alien and complex to understand. I knew I wasn’t paying that significant amount of money I had paid to see this obviously learned professional to talk about my difficulty with the religious sentimentality of our society. If she was bored, then she did not show it but smiled throughout my monologue.

Then came her question; “Nathan, why did you marry?” I was startled but my mind immediately went to Muhtar. But it did not go to Muhtar’s view on marriage but instead Muhtar’s dialogue with his son, Sani. When Sani introduced Mariam to his dad as the girl he wanted to marry, Muhtar had been quick to remind Sani of the significant financial resources that had already been spent on an earlier lady Sani had expressed interest in marrying. Sani simply countered that that relationship had not worked out and he wanted to marry Mariam now.  Sani didn’t care about the money that had been spent because as he put it; “It’s just money. Isn’t my happiness more important?”

I wish I could channel Sani at that moment and tell my therapist that no matter the reason for my marriage – “I have changed my mind about the whole marriage thingy” – but I had neither the courage or the conviction to say anything of the sort so I heard myself, completely detached from the voice that spoke at that instant, giving three reasons why I thought I married. I knew they were all lies and as I was to learn later my therapist also knew that.

In the past, the best way for me to deal with any kind of pain was binge-reading novels I had planned reading for months or years. This practice also calmed me and helped steer my mind off the pain to something else. But not this time. I am reading all right but the pain isn’t gone. It is getting worse. I can’t run away from it. I’m reading Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizensnow. The days drift by. The days are empty and I am empty and broken.

It’s 2 a.m., the traffic is gone but there are still pockets of police officers at few intersections as I drove through the city. I was going back to Osu’s Oxford Street. I was driving unusually slow playing Kojo Cue’s Shii the Song. Grief seems to be contagious. I am used to crying silently alone in my car now. So I wasn’t surprised when the tears started flowing. .

What I was surprised about was the ability to mask it all – mask away all the pain and regrets – and then oblivious of my struggles – my acquaintances will just welcome me at the pub where we would have fun all dawn till morning. What was I crying for though – my complicated options, the people I was going to disappoint or my cowardice? I was no longer certain but I was certain I had made a grave error of judgment in my decision-making and there was only one way to resolve it no matter how painful it was going to be.

The Oxford street is empty. It is 2 a.m. on a week day so that is no surprising. I was nevertheless going to meet my folks at our usual pub that was opened 24/7… I saw the neon lights advertising the opening hours of the pub from the distance.

My mind drift to Oyinkan’s novel and O Henry’s short story, After Twenty Years.What do we really mean by loyalty? How could Korede remain loyal to her sister even in the face of three murders? How could she deny her love for Tade when her sister tried to murder him and watch on for Tade’s life to be upended due to her sister’s lie? Was that the meaning of family? .

What about O Henry’s evocation of friendship and loyalty in After Twenty Years?Could the police officer have alerted his friend to flee instead of reporting him to another officer for him to be arrested? Was the police officer’s refusal to arrest his friend absolving him of his betrayal of friendship? Do we owe a duty of care and responsibility to others when our loyalties are strained, questioned and demands made of it?

I drive away, heading to Akosombo to my favourite spot for bird watching. I’m listening to Sara Bareilles’s She Used to Be Mine.I had just finished listening to James Baldwin’s 1963 speech; The Free and the Brave… I knew I was neither free nor brave!