Friday Feature: Yolanda Kwadey

Yolanda Kwadey is a Ghanaian currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Florida. Her writing typically centers African women and race. She also enjoys genre-bending and has worked on Subtropics as an assistant editor. Prior to the MFA, Yolanda has been published twice in the Samira Bawumia Literary Prize Anthology by Ghana's former Second Lady for her creative nonfiction pieces: “Mama Doesn’t Know” and “Life Is a Baptism.” She is also a recipient of the Rebecca Elizabeth Porter Creative Writing Fellowship by the University of Florida.

The Museum of Fiction

“Do Ghanaians really eat eggs with everything?”

I look up from my notebook and into his round face. The stubble on his jaw is scant, not as if he has recently shaved, more like he is inducing beard growth with some miracle oil. I know too many men like this, seen too many ads from Instagram pages back in Ghana. The trolley is crawling slowly into midtown Tampa, that part with the redbrick shop that screams “Cigar City” with its signage. I’m in some kind of war with my mind because I want to write about the city’s beauty, situate a character in it, let them wander about the roosters pattering up and about the city center, but I’m short of words. I think of why I escaped Gainesville for the spring break, but I can’t think of where to begin. There are the rains, and the acne’d students that swarm every part of the city like the plague of locusts in the Old Testament. There are the overwhelming courses with the underwhelming lectures, and the overthinking how to make writing interesting for anti-Humanities and entitled Engineering students with the writing capacities of a second grader. Then I look at the stranger seated ahead of me. He has twisted his body like a wrung rag so that he can look at me, so that I cannot escape his sunburnt and peeling face. 

“What?” I ask.

“Ghanaians and eggs, is that true?” He angles his phone towards me, and the street interviewer is paused. A Ghana flag covers most of the screen. I’m trying not to roll my eyes. I wish they would come up with a new stereotype – like we shower too many times a day, or we are too docile, or something truly egregious. The egg one is no longer funny.

“I don’t know,” I say. Then the trolley stops, and I rush off to escape him. I wonder what makes him think I’m Ghanaian. I want to be angered that I may have been nationally profiled – if that even is a thing – but I remember the shirt I’m wearing, which says “Ghana, Ghana, Ghana”. I feel silly, but I convince myself that I am only distracted. Excited, too.

I am disappointed that the strange man from the trolley has deboarded behind me. I move out of the way so that he can pass, but he lingers, joins me from the side as if I was inviting him for a conversation. The sun is scorching, and Tampa is bright, like a mirror reflecting light on a surface, the kind that blinds you. I’m immediately sweating on my nose bridge and my philtrum, and my forehead and my chin. I’m already looking around for a shaded place to sit, to write and plan this crazy plot. It is hard to work out the nitty-gritties of any creative writing plot when a stranger is loitering around you, harassing you with worthless knowledge of your identity.

“Are you from around here? I came all the way from Macon,” he says. He expects me to know this place, but what is a Macon? I watch the hind of the yellow and white trolley disappear down the street wistfully. It is a callous joke to alight the same time as this man when the entire objective was to evade his nuisance. I recognize now that my instinct can be absolute garbage most of the time, and then I begin worrying about this ploy I’m considering. I hope I don’t have to depend on my instinct too much – the same one that encouraged me to move from Accra to a hot swamp in the middle of Florida for a degree in English. None of the other international students ever knew the point of that. 

“So, you learn and teach English?” they ask.

“No,” I say, “I read a lot of research and come up with theories.”

“Theories about what?”

“People,” I say, “Human behavior.”

“Like Biology?”

“No. Like social behaviors and the possible psychology behind it,” I correct.

“So like Sociology and Psychology?”

“No,” I sigh. “I can’t explain it.” 

I suspect they believe I’m not very good at English because I can’t explain what I do in English at the English Department. I wish I can say, “English isn’t my first language” and get on with it, but not when I have left my investment job back in Ghana to come read and write in the United States. I wish I can say I’m here for creativity, for the secret craving for human creativity. They have burned away all those books, and the ones they liked too much are trapped in glass cages in museums. I want to read those and smell them. I have heard they had a distinct smell, like a wet tree bark and the smell of something else – something uncanny that ought to be smelled to understand. Grandma told us of them before she passed a few years ago. She is the last person I know who recalled what it felt like to smell and touch the human books, to traverse libraries and feel consumed by human creativity.

“There is something sweet, fresh, delicious about them. And when we read, we could taste the words in our mind, and our minds stored parts we didn’t know until those parts stirred in us, and compelled us to write, write, write,” Grandma said. She caressed the air with a fist, as if she were grinding pepper with a wooden grinder in an earthenware bowl.

“Why were they burned then?” I asked. 

My sister was watching a cartoon movie very loudly in the living room, and it was overstimulating me from the verandah. The outside air was stale with heat, but we were safe from the scorching sun because of the awning.

“There is a witchcraft to writing like that. You mix things that you know with things the world knows, and you pour time and sweat and blood and tears into the mixture, slather it on a page. That’s a covenant right there, between reader and writer, an education so subtle you have to read the very last page to realize it. I guess the world leaders didn’t like that a lot, and the businessmen were obsessed with the computers and robots doing all of it. People are more expensive than machines. More than you can imagine,” Grandma said.

Grandma is the reason I read so much. I read old passages about books that no longer exist, licked to ash or shredded into pieces of incognizant letters and words. There was a museum in Accra, for the Ghanaian books that were written by human hands, but it burned down in a fire – mysteriously – and that was that. I never got to visit. There is an age limit, and it was gone by the time I was thirteen, so I have grown up with only the strange fictions written by the machines, wondering if human fiction was tamer or more mystifying.

The Macon man has given up on the conversation, but he has to let me know. “You know, I just wanted to chat,” he is saying, “there’s no need to be so rude.”

I want to ask him to define rude, to search its meaning on the internet and write a four-page analysis on why this interaction is rude. His face is still red and puffy, and some of the skin on his arm is peeling off. His nose is long, as if it is reaching out for me, hooked as if it is threatening to attack me.

“Females like you end up lonely and sad. I suppose you’re one of those who believe in the articles about women being happier single, but I know a lot of single women, and they’re very sad,” he tells me.

I can tell he is vexed, but I know it’s not out of empathy for the sad, single women he knows. “You would think exotic birds would be more willing, right? You know, in Ghana, cats are not very likable because they’re too witchy,” I say. He flinches, too surprised to hear me speak again to notice my humor. I’m disappointed. I want him to know that I like my neighbors’ cats, and that I pspsps my way down the streets when I’m not running late for a university lecture. He shakes his head and walks away, possibly thinking of old slurs for me, maybe something about eggs now that he knows that joke.

I stuff my notebook inside my long, brown bag, shove it against the sanitizer bottle, the many cards – state, student, insurance, Florida Education Association, library, credit, debit – and the pale pink handkerchief. My phone lights up with a text from my mother, a long message wishing me happy birthday. I suspect there’s a prayer in there, blessings in Jesus’ name, questions about dating at twenty-seven, and how is school? I ignore it and let my phone show me the way to the museum. Tampa’s Museum of Fiction is one of the few left in the United States, and my digital map says it’s a ten-minute walk away from me. I’m excited. And nervous. I walk down sidewalks, wind around tall glass buildings, breathe under the shade of the skyscrapers and the trees that interrupt the sidewalks. There are people everywhere and pet owners walking the creatures they have adopted to fulfill a deep mental and emotional need that they themselves cannot reach. A few bare-chested men in flimsy shorts jog past me. Two years of experiencing this phenomenon and I’m still left flustered – should this be legal when there are still complaints about women in crop tops at the gym? I think I shouldn’t really care; I’ve only been to the gym once and when my biceps burned from flexing them with weights, I never returned. I don’t intend to.

I’m sweating all over when I arrive at the museum. It is a strange building, pink bricks with many pointed roofs that gleam in the cruel sun. There’s a courtyard brimming with deliberately cultivated grass, and begonias and zinnias. The air here feels cooler. I inhale deeply with hope that I’ll smell the things people have described; stick my tongue out and close my eyes, hoping to taste what Grandma has promised. I don’t feel twenty-seven at all – maybe twenty-six and a half years old. Nothing inside me feels different. Nothing has changed. I’m still a Ghanaian immigrant, still as dark as the soot of a burned book, still of an average height, still wondering what I should be doing with my life. I have all these years ahead of me, but what for?

There is a short queue at the museum entrance, but I can see inside. The floors are tiled a dirty white, but they glisten under the bright white lights on the tall ceilings. When a person in the queue disappears farther inside, they seem to shrink in size, swallowed by the sudden change in the ceiling height. The walls of the reception area are pristine but yellow, and I notice that as I move with the queue. Golden letters – Museum of Fiction – are burned into the wall behind the receptionist, who is scanning tickets and selling them. “I’m so sorry, the AI system is down,” she says, scrunching her forehead so that patrons believe she’s sorry about the situation. She’s in her late forties. I don’t think she’s very sorry about the situation. I imagine she’s a bit happy to finally be used, to prove that she’s capable of steering patrons the right way without complex algorithms and codes.

The wall on the other side is scattered with unrecognizable names – single names only – like O’Connor, and Hawthorne, like Achebe, and Poe. I recognize the name Shakespeare because of all the academic literature concerning him in my department. I know excerpts from pieces he wrote that have been destroyed. I found them both thrilling and underwhelming, and I was strangely certain that there is more and better out there, to read, to enjoy, to stir up words within me to write. I tap on the notebook in my bag. I am determined to write – if only I could read something in there and have my mind fed with the witchcraft of human creative writing….

“Ticket, please,” the receptionist says. Now that I’m towering over her, I can see the copper mustache above her lip. The bright lighting exposes the hairs on her face, the splotches of hyperpigmentation on her forehead and cheeks.

“Now purchasing,” I say. I grab at the cards in my bag until the credit card comes out. The ticket is $45, but I pretend the number is meaningless, convince myself a fed mind is equal to a fed stomach. Then I walk into the giant hall and wait to feel myself shrink under the tall ceilings, but I stay the same. The ceiling and its chandeliers dangle far up over me, gloomier, unwilling to share the proximity with me. People, exiguous, linger in couples and small groups, trudging in and out of the five rooms. 

The glass cases begin in the long hallway, and the first of them has a QR code. It connects me to a self-guided tour that begins with a woeful adagio. The voice is nasal and pitchy in a way that sounds bored, and when the guiding voice breathes – which it does many times – I think I feel my auricles warm up. It welcomes me to the Museum, warns me to only look and not touch because “longing oft leads to a downfall.” I am not inclined to obey, but I wonder about security guards, probe for hidden cameras. I feel watched even without seeing any cameras, and maybe it is those yellow hanging chandeliers from far above. I try to shake it off, blame it on paranoia, convince the little thief in me that the only downfall that awaits me is unbridled creativity that pours from page to page and beguiles rebellious readers. I have read of revolutions, and aren’t the leaders listed in history books ordinary troublemakers that broke a rule or law? I think of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, think of him slumped in a prison, drowning in the stench of his own urine and feces. Any confidence I have – if there was any – wavers. I hate the smell of urine and feces.

The voice, flat and pinched, tells me about the long hallway first, about the stained glass on each end of the museum shaped like a leaflet, and how significant it is. I stare down one end, look at the orange-blue-pink glass, but it’s merely a rectangle – its symbolism is arbitrary. I wonder if this is a clever attempt to induce the patron’s imagination, maybe a wisdom that evades me, so I stare longer. Then I squint, tilt my head this way and that way. Eventually, I must accept that I have wasted my five minutes on this.

I let the voice drone on but refuse to align my tour with its instruction in order to embolden the rebel inside. “The case numbered four has – deep breath – some of the earliest and most memorable gothic – deep breath – horrors.” But I am looking at the bookcase tagged as 11. To Kill A Mockingbird. I wonder why anyone would kill a mockingbird or imagine one and think to themselves to write all about it. Crime and Punishment. My heart delays a beat, my fingertips tingle, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. The hairs on my neck are upright, but I bend, and my face is inches away from the glass case. The adagio is playing mournfully in my ears again, and I’m taking a deep breath, aggressive and expectant, hoping to catch a whiff of wet bark and a special something. The air smells like nothing. 

I keep walking, rubbing the side of my bag against which the notebook leans on the inside. I’m thinking what could happen if I could just see inside a book, any book. The self-guided tour noise is over. There are five large rooms – for Romances and Other Fantasy, for Crime, Horror & True, for Mystery, and two for Literary Fictions. The large Literary Fictions room is for westerners, and the smaller one – only eight feet wide – has three books from every other continent. The plaque above Things Fall Apart says, “For Diversity’s Sake”, and I understand that there’s no point in pretending when the media no longer exists. I take out my notebook and write words, something to remind me to search old papers and journals for diversity of creative thought – from when artificial intelligence didn’t have a monopoly over creative writing. 

Each room looks the same, books minted in glass with dark, hard covers that reveal nothing. I repeat the rooms over and over again, hoping something will change, willing the $45 to mean something. By my sixth loop, I’m crying, and my lips are quivering, but I’m not sad. There’s anger and hunger, and my stomach rumbles as if to amuse whoever’s watching. I repeat my lap a seventh time and strike my notebook for every time there’s a man’s name, and an eighth time for every non-western name – exercises to make the ticket price worth it. The people I started with are mostly gone, vanishing into the reception area, never to re-enter, wallowing in their own version of disappointment, I suppose. The glass casings are too thick to break, and when I loiter in the Romance & Other Fantasy room, I reach out a hand, touch a case. There is no one around, the watching chandeliers are only in the hallway, and my hand is on a case. I pretend there is a transfer of creative energy, like heat transfers between bodies of differing temperature, that this woman – Margaret Atwood – is making a special covenant with me. 

“Hey, no touching!”

It’s a grim-faced man drowning in a navy blue uniform. He swats away my hand, yells at me, calls me a grimy, rule-breaking hooligan – a thug. When I apologize, he notices my accent and mutters something crude about the immigrants. Then he walks me out, out of the room, out of the hallway, and out of the reception. I wonder if he’ll ask for my photo to staple to a board of criminals, but when I turn, he’s gone. 

I sigh and stare into the begonias, wipe my tears although they have dried into my skin. I glance back and consider returning tomorrow, this time, measure the thickness of the glass cages, this time, come prepared with knowledge of stealth glass demolition methods. I think of Margaret Atwood and her glass case, wonder who she was and what she wrote. I may never know. Then I look at my phone screen. My mother’s birthday text is still there. All this life ahead of me, but what for? I wonder, all the way back to Gainesville, me and my empty notebook.

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