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In Double Exile: a Memoir

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In Double Exile: a Memoir University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2014 In Double Exile: A Memoir Deborah Beckwin University of Central Florida Part of the Creative Writing Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARS Citation Beckwin, Deborah, "In Double Exile: A Memoir" (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 4661. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/4661 IN DOUBLE EXILE: A MEMOIR by DEBORAH BECKWIN B.A. University of Chicago, 2004 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Summer Term 2014 Major Professor: Obi Nwakanma © 2014 Deborah Beckwin ii ABSTRACT In Double Exile: A Memoir examines the life of a family of Ghanaian immigrants and their journeys of acculturation, and the impact of the father’s spiraling mental health issues on his family. Through the eyes of their daughter, this thesis briefly explores their lives on the right side of the Atlantic, as medical professionals, and then focuses on the life of their daughter born in America on the left side of the Atlantic. As novelist Georges Simenon has said, “I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.” This memoir explores this tension between alienation and connection, as a second-generation immigrant grows up navigating between various cultures: to dominant American culture, evangelical Christian/Southern culture, African-American culture, and Ghanaian culture. In an attempt to understand the present, this thesis is a sankofa journey back into the author’s history. Spanning over four decades, the memoir uncovers various exilic configurations: exiled from family, from ethnic heritage, from home, and from one’s self. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express special appreciation and thanks to my thesis director, Dr. Obi Nwakanma. Thank you for your guidance, expertise, and support as I wrote my story through thesis hours and workshop. I would also like to deeply thank my committee members, Dr. Lisa Roney and Professor Terry Thaxton. You both brought many insights to my work that have helped give it structure, shape, and meaning. Thanks also to all my classmates and colleagues who were in and out workshop with me during my time here. You helped to shape this thesis with your insights and comments. I want to extend much gratitude and thanks to one of my oldest and dearest friends, Melissa. You were a great cheerleader, sanity keeper and checker, and a careful and helpful reader of my thesis. Heartfelt thanks also go to the friends who helped keep me afloat when I wasn’t funded: Alison, Angi, Ann, Annie (x2), Celeste, Dorothy (my mom, too many times to count), Grace, Hershell, Jamie, Jason, Jennifer, Jeremiah, Joey, Justin, Kristen, Laura F., Laura M., Libby, Liza, Marian (x2), Melissa, Minna (x2), Stephanie N., Stephanie P., Susan, Tope, and Trish. <3 <3 <3 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PROLOGUE ...............................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: THIS LAND WAS YOUR LAND ................................................................ 14 CHAPTER TWO: OKLAHOMA CITY BLUES ....................................................................... 24 CHAPTER THREE: NASHVILLE—MY WONDER YEARS.................................................. 28 CHAPTER FOUR: A NEW “INSIDE” LIFE ............................................................................ 40 CHAPTER FIVE: HALLELUJAH NIGHTS............................................................................. 49 CHAPTER SIX: FINALLY HOME? ........................................................................................ 54 CHAPTER SEVEN: OF BEING AND BLACKNESS .............................................................. 70 CHAPTER EIGHT: ESCAPE INTO BEAUTY ........................................................................ 91 CHAPTER NINE: TRUE LOVE WAITING ............................................................................. 96 CHAPTER TEN: FAMILY & FAITH .................................................................................... 117 CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE INTERSTITIAL SPACES ........................................................... 133 CHAPTER TWELVE: SWEET HOME NOT YET ................................................................. 141 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: S.O.S. TO HOTEL SIERRA ............................................................ 153 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WALKING ALONG THE EDGES ................................................ 170 EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................................. 206 v PROLOGUE We have gotten used to you being gone. Some friend of a friend of yours saw you at a holiday party in Atlanta, so it seems you still live there. Mom says she doesn’t think you want to be found. You burned your last bridge with Dr. K, your medical school classmate, and his wife. Dr. K cared about you. He bailed you out of jail many times, for offenses like riding you r bike on the sidewalk, the repeated offenses that seem to follow those who are suffering from mental illness. Dr. K’s wife was tired of the back and forth—so they cut you loose. I wonder how being in and out of jail has been for you. Do the police know you by name and face now? Are you still getting arrested? Or are you in more dire straits? I worked with people just like you in Chicago, when I did social work. It’s been a long, tortured fall from where you were when you first came to America from Ghana, over thirty years ago. You can call this a sankofa, Dad, a word you didn’t teach me, but is from your people, the Akan. I learned this word from the Covenant Church, a small Protestant denomination from Sweden. When I was in my 20s, I went on a trip through the South, paired with a white woman. The trip was organized through my church in Chicago. Its mission was for us to go back and understand the turbulent 1960s so that we could make sense of institutional racism forty years later. We rode through Birmingham and Mom offered to make me cookies. I declined. I didn’t think it was time for cookies. This was a serious trip, and ginger crinkles from Mom would make it less serious, less severe. I wanted to experience that elusive racial reconciliation that I heard while sitting in many a church both in Birmingham and Chicago. I wanted to do my part to usher that in, to help some white people get it about what went down here, and how it impacts us in the present. As we sat in a circle in a low-lit room somewhere in Southern Georgia, my 1 overwhelmed white companion cried over the atrocities of racism and I wondered who this trip was really for. I wondered if I had become some human hanky for my friend to cry into. I thought about that one story of racism you told me in our living room, about living in Oklahoma, about how you had to use the restroom, but they didn’t let you. I never asked what happened afterwards. I was too horrified that someone would do that to you in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Sankofa. There are two adinkra symbols for sankofa. One is of a bird with an egg on its back, with its neck craning back. The egg symbolizes not only the treasure that the past can bring, but the gift of the future. The other symbol is of a heart with the top ends curled in on itself, its bottom ends curled out with three lines pointing out, as if sitting on a tripod. It means, “Go back and get it.” For one to understand one’s present and future, one must go back to the past and learn from it. There were so many other adinkra symbols that you didn’t tell me about. I only had the tiny gold earrings that Mom gave me and I lost them. The earrings were fashioned in the squiggly symbol for gye nyame “except for God.” We should fear no one except God, who is omnipotent and omnipresent. I grew up seeing this more than any other for a reason—it is the most popular one in Ghana. I wonder why you, or anyone else, didn’t teach me these symbols like how you sat down with me in the den and taught me the Bible. They are all over Ghana—on storefronts, on clothes, on pottery, on baskets. The ubiquity of Akan culture in Ghana makes me wonder why I had to learn about sankofa from elsewhere. As Americans, though, sankofa is from elsewhere. Maybe this was all due to our lack of connection to the land of Ghana. It could have been that you thought that those mores weren’t important here in America. Or, it could have been that I was showing a deep lack of interest in our culture. 2 You may be right about that, my non-interest. When I was a kid, we sat in the den many times, with a lime green album of your childhood and young adulthood between us. I never asked you to do that—it was compulsory, a required family history class. And maybe that’s how sankofa was operating in you. Or at least to remember that you may live here but you come from another place. I saw a picture of you as a little boy, with a navy blue blazer, white button-up shirt, shorts, and sandals, dressed for school, shiny-eyed and smiling. You showed me pictures of your parents. You showed me pictures of your siblings and cousins. You showed me pictures of your friends. All the pictures are a blur now. I wish I had been paying more attention. I sat there, sometimes with a sulk, sometimes with eyes glazed over by boredom, as you repeated to me your stories of hardship. “My cousins would steal from me a lot.” I couldn’t respond—how does one respond to that? I don’t have cousins here, blood cousins. I couldn’t relate to children my age, related to me, stealing from me.
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