flash memoir

by Audrey Shipp

Rain in Accra (or Closing the Door Like a Coup)

During the night, the downpour nudged me from my sleep in the comfort of the borrowed space of my hotel room—the room larger than I needed for myself and my one weighted baggage. Via messages, the plan had been that my first love—from decades back, failed unions past, separate sets of children now grown—would travel from Gabon to join me in Ghana. Or I, to his country.

The evening rain hammered the hotel roof like hail but not quite because gliding off during intervals and not bouncing and leaping. Despite the recent rains, the heat in Accra remained, and the humidity was continuous in the city where during my brief sojourn, it rained only once during the day but almost every night.

And the day it rained, I carried a dripping umbrella through the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial and stood awkwardly for a picture near the photo of Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, realizing that this was a memorial for more than one person and more than one idea.

The rain didn’t cool the city or perhaps my body Westernized in the U.S. didn’t perceive the change of weather because during my stay, hot had just became hot. But in truth, I felt the difference. Sometimes the weather changed in ten minutes from humidity to cool breeze, so my initial statement is a partial truth and definitely not a thesis. But what is true is that the rain didn’t bring clarity and for several days I kept looking at the faces of the men in Accra, young and old, searching for a love from decades back in black skin, not cinnamon, not copper, not chestnut, not walnut, black skin like ebony, and fine features, chiseled mouth, narrow eyes, thin nose, not at all voluptuous, and I discerned that face in men in their twenties, thirties, forties, maybe even fifties, and sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn’t. And I contemplated faces with fine chiseled features as if I were looking through window panes with rain washing down, as if looking through wipers sweeping across a wet windshield, as if looking through prescription glasses splattered with drops of moisture, as if peering out the window of an airplane awash in specks of water as the plane rises and rises above the clouds until above precipitation, one is simply floating in space.

I scrutinized the faces of Black men in Accra in search of memory, in search of history, in search of traces of love from years before, decades before, in search of possibility, hoping that the story wouldn’t end, that time, this narrative, words could stretch life and feasibility out to some place where time and possibility, words, syllables, and letters had never carried the two of us.

And maybe the rain required nothing but the closing of doors. Close the small back door of the ride share car while holding my folded umbrella as it drips on the floor. Close the front door to the SUV of the guide who is showing me around the city. His umbrella dripping wet next to my leg. Close the glass door with a wooden frame that is the entrance to my hotel so that the rain remains outside.

Slam the door like the coup of the new military government that switched off the internet and suspended air travel ensuring that no, after leaving Ghana, I wouldn’t visit Gabon. I wouldn’t see the fine chiseled face of yesteryear.

And the rain will fall as it wants whether I am on African soil or not. The rain will have its way and will disregard me as it has for years, decades, lifetimes. And on this continent life will go on without me. Whether wet. Dry. Or in between.

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Audrey Shipp is a PEN America Emerging Voices Workshop LA honoree whose writing has been published in various literary journals including Panorama Magazine, Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, A Long House, Another Chicago Magazine, LitroNY, and A Gathering Together. Her bilingual and trilingual poetry appeared in Americas Review (Arte-Publico Press) which was formerly published by the University of Houston. She is currently writing a memoir focusing on writing and (un)writing in Los Angeles. Her professional life has been dedicated to teaching English and ESL in public high schools in Los Angeles.