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Published: March 25th 2006
It's been a while since I updated this site. Frankly I have no idea where to begin. I've been travelling around the southern part of Ghana. I've been pretty sick pretty often: first there was malaria, which was a very new and interesting experience, and myriad stomach issues, and possibly some psychological side effects from the anti-malarial meds I'm taking. It serves as a great education about all the things the human body can do.
So I'm going to do this posting in two parts. The second part is the "travel blog" part, the part concerning things that have happened, the part concerning illness and longing and belonging and travel. Skip ahead to it if you like. The first part is a rant. It starts here:
Almost as long as I've been in Ghana I've had that anthemic William Carlos Williams verse about poetry in my head. I mean this one:
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. The news we get from poems, to my thinking, is that life is strange and terrible and beautiful but that it is
sayable, that
it is worth the effort of struggling towards understanding; and that what is
unsayable we can at least know the residence of, where it lives, how it's shaped, like how you can know the forest at night by its silhouette, by where it is not. The news is about irony, whose powers of civilization are astonishing, without which all passion turns destructive. The news is context. The news is doubt. The news is that it is possible and decent to consciously strive towards beauty.
Now I'm aware that that's all pretty vague and obtuse, but I feel it here in a way and with an intensity that I've never felt before. Without a moderate level of literacy, there is no poetry, without poetry there is none of the vague and obtuse stuff above - or no, that's not fair; but at least it must come from another source, and cannot be named. Here in the south of Ghana that other source is the Good News: Christianity. But personally I find it difficult to trust anything somebody labels categorically "Good" - because the news is hardly always good - and still less do I believe that genuine introspection and doubt
Me and Bernard on the beach
This is at Labadi Beach in Accra.can come from the
dogmatic practice of religion. (Though I'm not opposed to religion - see below.)
Literacy. This is me writing about literacy, and shouting and wringing my hands about it. Absolutismhas a public and frightening face in politics but it's also manifest in any personal encounter where right and wrong, good and evil, are talked about as though they were fixed, rigid. Literacy. Without words there can be no degrees of experience, no way of limiting and delimiting ideas, so all is absolute. In English, for example, there are scores of words for love and its degrees: affection, infatuation, desire, lust, passion, communion; love. Twi has far fewer words than English. So what happens when someone who speaks only Twi, or Sefwi, or Ga, and a limited amount at that, can't read or write, falls in love? Surely the feeling is the same: it's ineffable, unsayable anyway. But is the understanding of it different? What if there's no word for love? What if the word for love is the same as the word for sex? Is it the same? Does the subtlety exist if you can't name it? Now what about hate? What if there's a word
for hate but none for dislike? What if we are brought up to believe that
we are good and
they are bad but lack the words to question that?
That's the end of the rant. I should say that since I wrote this I've met one individual who discredits everything I've said, a man who is technically illiterate and also tolerant, sensitive, and thoughtful.
And here begins the travel journal part of this posting! This may be very long - I'm sorry. Stop reading the moment you fall asleep, please.
So, it was barely a week into my travelling around the Ashanti region of Ghana when I set out in search of the Jews of Ghana. I'm Jewish myself, as is my travel doctor, who tipped me off to a community of Jews, believed to possibly be one of the lost tribes of the Israelites, in the western part of the country. Dr. Wise responded to an e-mail I sent him on the subject from Kumasi, telling me that the town is called Sefwi Wiawso and sending me to a website with some background on the town and a name: Kofi Kwarteng. I spent a long day
On the street with Bernard, family, friends
I love this picture and have no idea how it turned out this way. Something to do with the nighttime capture on my camera. travelling by trotro - a charmingly overcrowded minibus in less than pristine mechanical health - to Sefwi. It was a lonesome journey: my many attempts at starting conversations with my neighbors got brushed off, perhaps for lack of English. I also had a drip at the back of my throat and a mild, general feeling that I wasn't quite well.
Far from the tiny village I'd expected, Sefwi Wiawso is a fairly large town tucked into a stretch of rolling hills apparently not far from the border with Cote D'Ivoire. It felt very different from the other places in Ghana I'd been. For one thing, on arrival I got a faceful of more brash unpleasantness than I'd yet experienced here, from the cabbies at the station and from the hotel folk whose establishments I was taken to by my cabbie, a young guy who conveniently (for him) translated "Kofi Kwarteng" into "Kofice's hotel". Also the economics seemed different: I got the impression that there was more money there, not jarringly like the mansions outside Accra but more quietly: the mean standard of life there seemed higher.
I went into town, knowing Kofi's name and that he ran a
store called Shalom Enterprises. I asked people in the street about both Kofi and his store. Nobody knew what I was talking about. I was despairing, quite literally, feeling lost and alone and hungry in a strange place where the people didn't smile at me and where chances were good I was wasting my time. And then one of the unsmiling hawkers I accosted in the street brought a man with her out of a building. I said I was looking for Kofi Kwarteng. He stared at me, this unsmiling, middle-aged Ghanaian man (which looks, for men, much younger than your average middle-aged Westerner). I said I was looking for the Jewish community in Sefwi Wiawso, that I was a student of religion - a precaution: who knew how the rest of the community in super-Christian southern Ghana felt about their Semetic pocket. "I was told to ask for Kofi Kwarteng," I said. "I am Kofi Kwarteng," the man said. "Oh," I said. "I've found you."
By this point I had lost my voice almost entirely, was exhausted, and so when Kofi said I could stay at his house - i.e. with other people, instead of holed up by
Dofini and Goni
This is my Burkinabe musician friend. Here he is hard at work. His name is Dofini, the instrument's name is goni. myself feeling sick at a budget hotel - I was glad and grateful to accept the offer.
I arrived at Kofi's house. His kids greeted me warmly. His living room - his house had a
living room - was beautiful. I felt comfortable. I felt safe. I was told to go with Rubin, the younger boy, to someone's house. Rubin didn't explain whose house, partly because he barely spoke any English. I followed. And here's where it gets weird. Let me preface this by saying that I'm not at all religious, am even less interested in that trendy "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual" thing that sounds pretty and means absolutely nothing other than that you are alive and you feel and you can't name all that you feel, and that I find it extremely difficult to believe in the existence of a benevolent God, though part of me wants to. All that said, it was difficult for me to understand how overwhelmed with emotion I was on arriving in this community. The first thing: I thought I heard Rubin (note the name) call his mother "Ema", Hebrew for "mother". I don't know if he actually did or not and I don't think it matters. There was a recognition of something. In the street - rural Ghanaian streets, so mud and litter and simple African housing, some chickens, a goat, a few lights - two men passing said "Shabbat Shalom" - good Sabbath. And the names, on African kids, young men, in the last place in the world I would expect to hear them: Rachel, Rubin, Simon, Shemuel, Joseph. Context. Lots of other places these names would've been meaningless to me, I would've taken no notice, but here I was glad it was dark because by the time we got where we were headed I was weeping and having trouble concealing it. Not common for me. We had been going to David's house, David being a leader in the community, and David probably thought I was an absolute freak (later he knew this to be true), this Canadian without a voice, who wouldn't look him in the eye. He asked me about myself and I answered with banalities. I couldn't speak much. "I find this very strange," I said, and other things that expressed only that I could express nothing.
When I got back to Kofi's house, sitting in his living room and looking at pictures of his family it struck me that I had no idea what I'm doing in Africa. Why Ghana? why do I want to travel across West Africa? what's the point, to check countries and experiences off a list? And everything felt arbitrary and pointless. I wanted to be with my family, my friends. Recognition breeds homesickness, I guess. But I digress, again, because the point is that sitting there in Kofi Kwarteng's living room I realized that I badly want to go to Israel. Wonky as it may sound, I have never felt so drawn to a place; Israel itself was of limited interest to me before. It's not an entirely inexplicable magnetism: I'm drawn there by a sense of home, of belonging. What is slighly less explicable is that that sense of home pulls me more strongly towards Israel than towards my real home, Canada, which I do also miss. It's a strange feeling, a strange idea, this constant search for a sense of family and of home, considering that I deliberately and resolutely left the place where I'm fortunate enough to have that in abundance.
After that initial rush of recognition, my experience at Kofi's house in Sefwi Wiawso ended up having more to do with Ghana, with Ghanaian faith and hospitality, than with Judaism. One of the things that has always appealed to me about Judaism, in spite of the problems I've sometimes had with it, is the emphasis on questioning, on doubt, on introspection. The largest important piece of Judaic writing isn't the Old Testament - scripture, law - but the Talmud: interpretation. A substantial majority of Judaic writing, theological writing, has to do with
figuring out what it means. This appeals. In Sefwi Wiawso, though, the synagogue service sounded much like evangelical Christianity, minus Christ - though I should say I was listening from the other room, being thoroughly malarial and bedridden by this point on Saturday morning. Religious and moral certitude translate in any language, though, are intelligible through many walls, and are always unsettling. I found the same thing in conversation: "Muslims are bad, look at the things they do," etc. Pretty scary stuff. As far as hospitality goes, I don't know if I was welcome in that house, after I got sick. I might've been. There were moments of true kindness and generosity and then there were awkward insinuations of how much a hotel would cost. I was a cheap guest, eating almost nothing, staying in bed. Unsmelly too, I think. I felt I was ushered out the front door as soon as I stopped vomitting, a few days after I arrived. But there was also a request that I call my host once I arrived in Kumasi and let him know how I was doing, which was nice. So I don't know. I offered money for my stay, it was accepted, I left a substantial amount. I'll leave it at that. Being sick and unwelcome is a pretty awful thing, though.
I spent the rest of that week convalescing and being a bedbum at a beautiful hotel in Kumasi where a lovely, clean, single room with A/C and bathroom and TV and phone cost me $18 US per night - a splurge, a comfort, and a great bargain. After about a week of malaria, which is like a week at a beach party without the hats, I travelled to Accra, which I found a rather hard and daunting city that inspired some post-illness blues. Fortunately on my second evening in Accra I met Bernard, a genuine and decent Ghanaian man who made me feel that I could relate to human beings again, that I could trust someone. I met him as I ate dinner by myself on the street, seated at a "spot" - an outdoor bar - where he was having a drink. We met, we connected, he showed me his house and introduced me to his family. He's almost my father's age. It didn't matter. The following day we went to the beach, spent a lovely Saturday afternoon there. He's become a good friend.
The following afternoon, after a long and tedious morning at the post office (the package will probably arrive in less time than it took to send it), I was cheated by corrupt officials at the immigration office and made another false friend, someone I thought was genuine and who really just wanted money. I should say an extra word about false friends. I use that term after a French friend travelling here, who coined "les faux amis": a plague, a plague, a plague here, I tell you. They are so common it can be sickening. By a false friend I mean someone, not necessarily an outright hustler, who convinces you that you have a legitimate connection or at least a liking for each other, and then ultimately wants only money, a Canadian (or whatever) visa, or something else of material value. A false friend may bargain for you at a store or market and deliberately get you an awful rate. For no reason! Or for the distinct reason that you a tourist, of which Ghana has many (too many?), and that you are relatively ignorant. You may meet, or I have met, several of these a day. They may be the majority of the "friends" you make. The ubiquity of these false friends, these faux amis, these profoundly corrupt people, is one of the greatest affronts to human dignity I've seen here, as much as the poverty, as much as the rickety infrastructure and rickety roofs.
I've spent the last week or two along the coast, spending some time on and near the beach at a small town called Kokrobite, spending some time in Cape Coast, Ghana's biggest tourist destination and where is located one of the major slaving forts. (The slaving forts are as shocking for their current slickness and sanitized-ness as for their history. There was once human vomit and feces here and now there's a plaque talking about dates of conquest. Disorienting.) Cape Coast is a really charming town. I spent a few days there with Bernard.
Thursday, if the rendezvous goes okay, I will be travelling up to Burkina Faso, the francophone country to the north, with a Burkinabe couple (she's a French expat, he's Burkinabe born and bred) I met on the beach in Kokrobite. They're really interesting, genuine people, he's a musician, plays the goni, a wonderfully evocative instrument, from Burkina, I think. They were vacationing on the coast and they too were profoundly disturbed by the constant solicitations for money they got from non-beggars, from working people who would nonchallantly but seriously say "buy me lunch". Apparently it's different in Burkina. I'll soon see. Those two certainly seemed more straightforward then many others I've met here, and immediately. We're supposed to meet tomorrow evening in Cape Coast, me having picked up my visa and passport here in Accra. So essentially I've been back and forth between bureaucracy and the beach. A strange combination, but so it goes.
Bird flu is in Africa. I ate chicken the other night. I'll probably continue to eat chicken. They're not calling it "chicken flu", after all. Geez. I mean really.
Please forgive the length and somewhat non-sunny content of this posting. Complaints are welcome, will be obsessed about for a few days, then probably forgotten, or else remembered forever.
Family and friends: much love to you.
Daniel
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Keren
non-member comment
At that bar on Ran's birthday I asked you why you were going to Africa, and you said you weren't sure. By my recollection you were pretty content with that answer then (as was I). What made you change your opinion re: not having a set purpose for your trip? p.s. I'm sorry to hear that this 'plague' is challenging your faith in humankind - how scary. p.p.s. Warm greetings from Canada. :)