I Am Vague
Before I had ever been anything else, I had always been thin. Within the masses of plump, snotty-nosed children running amok in my grandma’s compound, I always stuck out as the sickly-looking cousin. I didn’t mind though. Being thin meant I was always given extra portions of meat during mealtime and it also meant being beaten twice as less as everyone else when I misbehaved. The advantages of looking like the wind could truss me at any moment outweighed the disadvantages. Thus, it was with a feeling of schadenfreude that I embraced my ‘sickly’ status with open arms. I was only nine then.
Shortly after, the harmattan season arrived with its characteristic trait: dry, cold air. The harmattan season meant screaming in the bathroom at 6 am because the tap water was inhumanely cold, and moisturizing cracked lips and feet every hour. That harmattan, my mother had traveled, leaving my brother in charge of making sure I looked proper for school, which indirectly implied that I was doomed to look as unpresentable for school as possible for the two weeks she was away. That day, I’d gone to school with very dry, cracked skin (obviously) and uncombed hair, which would have been fine if that day had been as uneventful as any other day in 2008. But it wasn’t. Around noon, the headmaster called for a general assembly to introduce the new foreign personnel who were to volunteer in the region for the coming year. They were a cluster of overly energetic 20ish-year-old obronis with an inflated sense of righteousness. Students in the upper primary classes were instructed to line up in turns to ‘greet’ the dignitaries. Since I was in primary 4, it meant my class was to be the first to do the honors of welcoming the foreigners. Excited to see white people up close, I forced my way to the front of the greeting line in hopes of getting to touch ‘white-skin’ first. While I was sizing up the dignitaries in eager anticipation, I am sure they must have been sizing me up too, because my appearance caused the blonde lady volunteer at the front of the cluster to let out a gasp and reach for her chest. It was only later when I had been hugged excessively by said lady and comforted numerous times with the fact that “AIDS is not the end of the world,” that I realized I had indirectly come to fit the stereotype of the perfect AIDS poster child. Being thin was never pleasant after that.
My struggle with my identity is not only a defiance of society's fixation on my weight, it is also a daily quandary of what I consider my nationality, and where I claim as home. I always understood myself to be too Nigerian for my Ghanaian background, and not Nigerian enough for my grandmother. Still, I deeply held on to the wish of being something apart from the mess of vague nationalities that were my roots. Two years after the incident with the foreign volunteer, South Africa hosted the World Cup. That year and that period became one of the toughest I’d ever faced identity-wise. I couldn’t support Ghana in the World Cup matches because as my best friend - Henry - put it, “You’re Nigerian. Are you trying to make fun of us?” It was sad to realize then that I wasn’t part of his us, even if I was a quarter Ghanaian. I couldn’t support Nigeria either. I vividly remember my mum saying with strictness, “If you want to get beaten up, go around with that [Nigerian] flag and rub it in your friend’s faces.” If I wasn’t Ghanaian, and if I couldn’t be Nigerian, what was I? Comforting myself with the fact that I just had to remain nationality-less till the World Cup was over, I waited with mock seriousness till Spain took home the cup. A month after the soccer fever had died down, I realized I still had to remain without a nationality. Henry said I was never Ghanaian enough.
To prove that I was, I began practicing my oral English in hopes of losing my Nigerian accent. Maybe if I could say “doctor” and “favorite” as Ghanaian-ly as possible, I told myself, people wouldn’t realize that I wasn’t. I lost the accent, but I still wasn’t Ghanaian enough. How could I be Ghanaian with a name like Oluwa Tosin Ayoka?
If I couldn’t be Ghanaian no matter how hard I tried, I would just be Nigerian. This was my last resort, but one that proved to be futile, nonetheless. Owing to the fact that I had never received Nigerian identification, I had no basis on which to claim to be Nigerian. Sure I could speak Yoruba, but speaking a language didn’t mean I automatically qualified as a citizen. It didn’t help that I carried a Ghanaian health insurance card, so technically I was Ghanaian. To reach a compromise about my nationality, I omitted “Oluwa” and “Ayoka” from all official documents bearing my name. “Tosin” sounded Ghanaian enough so I kept it. “Maccarthy Price Tosin” had a nice ring to it: it wasn’t too Ghanaian, but neither was it too Nigerian. That became my new name. My name had evolved to become as vague as my identity. I liked it that way because vagueness implied I could be anything I wanted to new people. I still do like it, as bad as it may seem.
Even though I still struggle with what I am, I've come to understand that even if I don't want to admit it, 'skinny Price' is as much of Price as 'nationality-less' Price. Or even all the other 'Prices' I discover on the regular. I might not love all these 'Prices' as much as I should, but I'm trying to. And I'll get there one day.
