By Ama Asantewa Diaka

Mamaa has always been more of a mother than a grandmother to me. She gave birth to my father when she was only seventeen, and my father had me when he was just a year away from turning twenty. So when I was born Mamaa was still a young and beautiful woman. A mother who had a list of disappointments taller than her five-foot-four self, so in order to occupy her loss of faith in men, she poured all her affection into her son. And the problem with making your son the only man in your life is that your love becomes oversized, it covers too much skin, it doesn’t draw his personhood out well, and it hides his true form from you. Perhaps, if my father had borne the responsibility of raising me, he wouldn’t have had kids like a child squirting pee.

Having to maintain the family’s cocoa farm since my father passed away is aging me. I’m only thirty-nine, I should be dating three girls from different neighborhoods and plotting 101 ways of not getting caught. I should be taking long drives with a busty girl the boys in the town call “wild and carefree” because she likes giving blow jobs from the front seat of spacious cars, and shrugging off rumors of littering the whole of Mampong with broken hearts. Instead I spend my dawns calculating the difference between sales made and salaries to be paid. This morning when I saw my reflection in the mirror, my skin looked like someone had run a marathon in rubber boots on it. You would think with all the work I’m being forced to do, I would gain some muscles, yet here I am—two steps away from looking like a bag of bones. The price of everything has gone up: transport costs are ridiculously high, the price of food has increased twice already this month and July hasn’t even ended! I used to buy one small bucket of fish with 1,000 cedis for Alice to cook three different stews, but now that can barely pay for a small bowl of fresh redfish. My father should come and see what has become of Ghana; even to his dying day he was so far up the ass of nostalgia that he believed all Ghana needed was another Nkrumah to thrive. Now we have an Nkrumahist for a president, but with all of Hilla Limann’s bravado and intellect, what has he been able to do for the cocoa industry? It’s 1981 already; yes, he’s ended the shortage of food and basic social amenities, but an industry that carried the entire weight of the country is still failing. I can’t even pay the wages of all the farmhands, much less save some to finish building a new kitchen for Mamaa.

I have forgiven my father for a lot of things. I have forgiven him for leaving his older children to parent his younger children. I have forgiven the unhinged women he often brought home, especially the one who left a boomerang-shaped scar above my left eyebrow. I have forgiven him for making me carry the weight of a firstborn son when I should have been enjoying the benefit of a middle child. I have even forgiven him the stupidity of fathering nine children, when he never wanted to have even one in the first place, but I absolutely cannot forgive him for dying.

Excerpt from “someone birthed them broken” copyright © 2024 by Ama Asantewa Diaka. Published by Amistad Books.

About the book: A visceral and candid portrait of today’s Ghanaian youth, told in interconnected short stories by acclaimed spoken-word artist and author of the poetry collection Woman, Eat Me Whole Ama Asantewa Diaka.

In this startling collection of short fiction, Ama Asantewa Diaka creates a vibrant portrait of young Ghanaians’ today, captured in the experiences of characters whose lives bump against one other in friendship, passion, hope, and heartache.

Diaka charts this constellation of interconnected lives in thirteen stories, exploring themes which run through the collection like a current: corruption and economic hardship, trauma and infidelity, shame, neglect, and the tribulations of the female body. In telling their stories, Diaka illuminates hope, freedom, and triumph that can be found in the everyday—the bonds between women, the joys of love and sex and art and dancing, the possibility of repair and redemption.

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Ama Asantewa Diaka is a Ghanaian poet, storyteller, and spoken word artist who performs as Poetra Asantewa. She is the author of the chapbook, You Too Will Know Me, and the debut poetry collection, Woman, Eat Me Whole, and her poems and fiction have appeared in print and online. She recently completed an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Ghana.