Alienated

I remember getting off the plane and realizing I wasn’t in Ghana. I was somewhere else. Somewhere incredibly foreign to me. My father had lied to us and told us we were moving from our quaint town of Albany, Georgia, to Ghana. But instead we had arrived to a country not full of black faces, but full of brown faces. A sea of female faces covered in black from head to toe, and men with curly hair and dark features. I thought to myself, this couldn’t possibly be worse than the small southern town we’d come from that was still very much segregated, where we were one of three black families in our affluent neighborhood; where the white teachers at my primary school, always picked the white girl’s side over the black kid’s side (whether they were wrong or right); where none of the white kids allowed me to stand with them to wait for the school bus; where the white teachers loved to gossip about my black ass; where my father dealt with white employees who were not happy that a nigger was the head of the hospital department; and where I was put in ESOL even though I was american born and raised with with perfect, articulate english to add to my young resume. I thought maybe here I wouldn’t be bullied here about my big ass forehead, wide nose, wide lips, and very black features. Maybe I wouldn’t have to prove to the black kids on the playground, I was not just some African Booty Scratcher. I was one of them- born and raised in American. A real Americanah. But boy was I wrong.

As soon as my family and I started to go to the mall, I would notice the stares, the laughing, and monkey sounds we would get. I felt like an alien in a planet where I was not wanted or liked. It was like I was Sarah Baartman in a cage in Europe, having spectators who found my black features amusing and blackness for their entertainment. Except this time, the spectators were not white- they were brown like me. Many Saudis have black ancestry due to the Arab Slave Trade as well as a host of asian nationalities within their bloodline due to immigrants coming from all over asia, east africa, and north africa.  Some of the people mocking my blackness, would be considered a nigger in America just like me, and they did not even know it. Or they did not want to accept it or identify with being black. 

    The international school in the small expat compound that we were living in, owned by the infamous Saudi Aramco company, was not much better. It was filled with kids from Venezuela, India, Colombia, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, America, and other countries sharing one thing in common- they all had anti-blackness and colorism rooted in their societies. And funny enough, most of them did not even realize it...or at least want to realize it.  I was an easy target in my grade and soon after, I became an easy target for all of my small middle school. I was socially awkward, easy to walk all over back then, and eager to please my peers. If it was not that I was stupid, it was that I was ugly. Or that my lips were too big, my skin too black, my nose too wide, my braids were not my real hair, or that the burgeoning curves on my body were just “fat”. At first I would not accept that I was being bullied- i just took it as jokes. My peers were “joking” I convinced myself, but deep down the words were jabbing at my heart and i did not even know it yet. It was probably in the middle of the seventh grade, when I broke down. I came home and just started crying out of nowhere. I cried and cried until I fell asleep. I fell asleep hoping I would wake up in a different world or in a different time, where I was actually pretty. Actually lighter. Not “too” black and not “too” curvy so I would not be considered fat. But instead I woke up still black as hell and in a country where immigrant workers from southern asian countries were earning practically peanuts as wages, after slaving away in the sun from dusk until when the moon appeared brightly in the sky. I woke up in a country where rapes were not talked about, where the royal family was doing everything they did not want their people doing, where women had to cover up whenever she was around anyone who was not her husband, where the religious police would harass or spit on if your hair was not covered, where nannies were being tortured, raped, and killed like it was the norm, and men could get away with beating their wives.

I started emotionally binge eating to cope with the pain. I had nothing else to turn to. My teachers at school were turning their cheek, they just said I did not have any social cues.  Even my school counselor, Mr. Asher, was useless and managed to be worse than the teachers with handling the situations. My father was always working and if he was not working, he was in his room watching the news. My mother would almost always bring him his dinner. We never ate together. The few times my father would talk to me, would be to berate me for my sinking grades. I managed to be not just stupid to my classmates, but stupid to my father as well or as he would put it, “dumb as a doornob” or “not as smart as my younger brother and sister”. My mother was still wrapping her own head around being in this empty wasteland, she had agreed to move there to support my father. Be a “good wife”. But she too had become miserable here and had lost herself.  She had dreams of going back to school and finishing off residency. Becoming the doctor she dreamed of becoming since she was a little girl. She said only wanted to be in this wasteland for a couple years then she was out, but a couple years soon turned to several long years. Sometimes she too would question if there was something wrong with me. If I was really screwing up. So I began to isolate myself. Make myself smaller. I figured if I made myself smaller, the less people would notice the ugly in me. The less taunts there would be. But I was wrong about that too.

I became depressed within that year, before I turned thirteen. Before I even knew or understood what depression was. I had never heard of depression until the new school counselor sat me down and told me I was in eighth grade told me. By that time, I had been depressed for a couple years. I just knew that I always felt really tired, that I always struggled to get out of bed, that I did not recognize the empty, hollow eyes I saw in the mirror each morning,  that I felt stuck in this oppressive, racist, and sexist society as a black woman, I could not tell my parents how I felt (they would just tell me what any African parents would tell their kids- to brush it off and be tough, focus on school), and that I felt so alone even in a room full of people. My school counselor talked with my mother. My father and her did not want to accept that I was depressed. They were in denial. They thought surely this young girl with the world before her , could not know anything about depression. She was too young to be depressed. Too blessed with nice clothes, food on the table, and a roof over her head. She knew nothing about the life her father or his forefathers knew of living in the village with no lights, a small scrape to eat during dinner, a grandmother who worked her ass off in the cocoa fields just to get a scrape. They could not understand how I felt, had nothing to do with that. I just felt like complete shit. A very, unexplainable burden that I wished I could roll off or scrape off. Or tear off.

    The end of eighth grade could not come fast enough- I was ready to leave this God forbidden country. My parents gave me an alternative- stay in Saudi or leave to go to Ghana. I chose to leave to Ghana of course, figured Ghana could not be as bad as Saudi. Once I got to Ghana, I felt like a whole different creature. I was considered beautiful. The same face that I hated, was now considered a lovely sight to see. Before I was only considered beautiful by my parents and some of my mother’s Nigerian friends. How could a whole society consider me pretty now? Was I not just considered ugly a month ago? At first, I admit I enjoyed the catcalls, the compliments, and even the endless harassment from grown men boosted my ego. But it did not take long for all of the perverted leers and remarks from grown ass men calling me to come over, to get too much. I noticed how nobody did anything about the severe sexual harassment in Ghana. Ghanaian women were just told to cover up, not “tempt” a man, and to never be alone with a man otherwise something will happen to you. I watched as girls who had been drugged and raped become the laughing stock of groups of boys and men. She would ostracized for not being a virgin but I wondered where was the ostracization for the boy or the boys who took advantage of her body without her permission. Where was the ostracization for the principles and professors sleeping with their students?

    I learned of life in Ghana where you had to fetch your own water (the only people who had running water were politicians, the elite, and the movie stars); where everybody was in your business whether they belonged there or not; where gossip was another hobby; where there were only two social classes- the rich and the poor; where women were looked down on as “loud” for having a strong opinion because they were supposed to be quiet afterall; where adults were always right no matter what (even if they were obviously wrong) ; and bumpy, paveless roads were the norm. Infrastructure was a foreign concept to the government, they would rather spend the nation’s income on materialistic things for themselves and their families. The government had long been corrupted and infiltrated by white colonizers, the FBI, and CIA since the era of The Point Of No Return, manipulating village leaders, and having Kwame Nkrumah overthrown because they were threatened by his pro-black, pro-african ideologies. That he wanted to lead Ghana away from the hands of their colonizers. Yet there was still some sort of beauty in this chaos- lovely castles in the central region that told the devastaing tales of slavery, emerald waves of sea, delicious meals, vast mountins, and safaris in the northern region.

    If I was not hanging out with my toxic neighbor and friend, I was either daydreaming in school or hanging out with her older cousin (and my boyfriend). My grandfather was almost never home- he was always either at the clinic he owned or at a prayer meeting, praying my depression away. My grandmother ...well lets just say she was not all the way there. She was mentally unstable- she would have random mood swings, senseless paranoia, and sometimes have senseless, random outbursts that were truly unnecessary. Sometimes she would fight with me so I found refuge outside of the house. Away from her chaos and craziness. Either with my friend or with her friends from Zongo, who soon became my friends. I would not come home until late, hoping I would not have to deal with my grandmother or our house help, Afea. I soon became even more depressed after cutting off my toxic relationship with my friend’s older cousin. I told my counselor I was suicidal. I did not want to be on this planet that I did not ask to be on anymore. After my grandfather was informed about my state, I was whisked away to one of only two psychiatric hospitals in the whole of Ghana. Inside the psychiatric hospital were women whose families had dumped them their and did not want to deal with their mental issues. Women who had lost their mind because they had reached a certain age with no ring on their middle finger and no children to claim as their own. Women who were called crazy but were really just asking to be seen and heard for once. Food that was awful, chipped walls that looked a thousand years old, clogged, filthy toilets, uncomfortable beds, and a hose outside that was used for showers by the patients because inside there were no shower stalls. It was a hellish place that was ironically filled with doves. Broken doves. 

    I lasted three days before being whisked back to my grandparents house where my mother soon came to pray the depression away. Because God could take the depression away she would say. The depression was just an allusion, an imagination in my mind, my grandfather would say. My mother said I was not about to “burden” the family with my mental health issues. So she dragged me along to her church revivals, where everybody would speak in tongues and clap their hands feverishly while walking around the room as I stayed sitting down. My mother would say that I am healed. The pastor’s crooked mouth would say that I am healed. But when I got back home to my grandparents’ place, I would just loathe for the anti-depressants my parents had taken away from me and the psychologist they made me stop seeing.