The Settling

I haven’t shaved in six weeks. My cheeks are pink, my nose a medium rare, my arms a pair of boles freckled brown. To exercise, I employ the boughs of two flowerless trees staked beside a white house and a curl-able metal bench parked beneath a thorny canopy just next to the trees. As of late, I frequent a “local gym” two blocks down, my friend Albert takes me there on a motorbike. They lift factory gears, stump teethed and rusted orange, hooped on axel rods and yank on a single overhead pulley, fashioned from long, splintery beams erected in the ideal of Robespierre and anvilled with bulky plates leashed by chain. It’s outside, the gym, and yarded by sixty feet of undulated roofing turned on its side. Enormous are its patrons, arms locked laterally and repelled from the waist, irrigated surgical-looking lines separating the packs of fascia along their backs and stomachs, a deliberate lumber woven into their strut. Everyone is a personal trainer, everyone is a client. I eat well, hardly the petrifying slumgullion portended by my parents; I’ve developed a predilection, in fact, for Ghanaian cuisine. Cold showers are no longer cold—the breathlessness accompanying the initial spray is now terrifically sensational, awash with pleasure and shock enough to warrant daily use. Many times over I recycle pants, and most of my socks are baked red in the toe with hot dust. Some days I wear underwear, and I seldom smooth sun block into my skin. Missing my girlfriend has become an institution more than a romantic bane and I hardly visit the internet café, hence the long stretches of postlessness on this blog.

            It’s a strange feeling to be settling in such an unsettled place. Simultaneously, I feel both an urge to pick up and jump a flight to the States and the Siren lure of worriless life reeling me in, tangling me in the unending topiary of disposable Ghanaian time. The way people are here, enveloped willingly in an omnipresent womb of laughter and language and human touch, one would think they harbored lucrative treasure maps in the brilliant upchuck of multihued headscarves, dresses and shawls. What richness they possess is palpable, flaunted well through the universally relatable phenomena of laughter, language, and touch as they exist here. They are, collectively, the pitch fork prodding my thoughts of staying and going, of remaining and changing, of malingering and straining.

They laugh when I speak their language. They laugh when I can’t speak their language. They laugh when we greet, they laugh when we depart, and they coolly sluice the soft flow of in-between dealings and reminiscence in laughter, as though we are all unabashedly naked and bubbling up in the equatorial convection. It’s nice, to put it tritely, being blithe all the time. So ensconcing is the lightness that I even tell jokes in Dagbani—one joke, to be precise. When taking patient information from the elders of a village, donning their finest Rip Van Winkle smocks and flowing dresses that accuse O’Keefe’s oeuvre of being fallow, I ask them how old they are, “ayumallah” in Dagbani, and following the “66” or “72” or “76” they serve up, I retort, “un pischy?”— 20 in Dagbani. They laugh every time. A bodily laugh that hobbles them and turns my wrist into a banister gripped impulsively so that they may climb back to an upright and smiling position. Interactions here are processional, the pedestrian kin of royal greetings flooded with camera flash and white teeth, except there are usually no cameras here and the dental situation remains thoroughly unimpressive. Greetings go on for minutes among a group, each member offering a genial “desibah” (Good Morning) to be emphatically recompensed with “Nah,” a placeholder of a response whose meaning is tacitly understood, but hardly explicit. How are you?,  how did you sleep?, what cool weather we’re having, how is work?—the salutatory drumroll patters on until all parties are thoroughly satisfied or, to be more exact, Nah-ed out. It’s like small talk at a summer gala, except no one has a loft in the Hampton’s or heaps of low-fidelity gossip about so-and-so’s divorce. Rehearsed, clean, uncorrupted—a locutional sterilizer priming the conversational palate for dialogue.

And another thing: touch is not strained, stigmatized, or taken for granted in Tamale. Handshakes draw out slow like long blades and end with an emphatic snap that requires the cooperation of both parties. I am particularly fond of the Ghanaian perception of hand holding. Amidst a thick, lascivious cloud of anti-homosexual sentiment billowing over the African continent, men can be found quite regularly holding hands with other men, and women the same. “Holding hands,” our coordinator Ali tells me as he hooks a few of my fingers with his, “it’s like I am saying we are friends, brothers, it’s like that, not like...homosexuals or we are in love.” Same goes for hugging, but for reasons I do not yet understand (probably British influence) Ghanaian’s refrain from kissing in public. Candidly, I’ve never felt so physically comfortable in my life in the presence of complete strangers, shaking and holding hands between sentences and laughing and volleying greetings like green tennis balls. It’s what I’ll miss most when I fulfill my obligations here and journey back to Chicago for the rest of August.

So, I have two weeks left in the russet loamed lands of north Ghana. That means I should be able to put out a few more blog posts about my experience. The next one will likely be an homage to my current comrades (Safari Sam, Ni-Nahhh, We Jamen’, Snake, Lily Flower, Nicky C, and my roommate Dolpho). Until then, live lively everyone.