Chapter 2 A Failed Abortion

I was one of the most popular pupils in one of the most prestigious private basic schools in Ghana at the time, St. Martin de Porres School in Dansoman in Accra. Before a number of more prestigious private schools sprouted everywhere in Ghana, charging fees in American dollars and offering British curricula, St. Martin de Porres School was one of the most exalted schools in the country in the 1990s. That was when private schools were still a preserve of society's privileged, and not the necessity of every parent in today's extremely deteriorated public basic school system.

It was the second private school I attended after a brief spell at a kindergarten that was named after the most popular Catholic figure of my generation-Pope John Paul II, known in private life as Karol Wojtyla. The Pope John Paul Preparatory School collapsed long before Pope John Paul II died in 2005. (That school was situated where the Dansoman Children's Park is today). I cannot say much about its prestige in its heydays, but private schools were not as common then as they are today, and only a few parents could afford to take their children there. So, I assume I started at a good school. From Pope John Paul Preparatory School, my mother enrolled me in St. Martin de Porres School. The school started in 1973, a dozen years before I was born. With 17 pupils at the beginning, the school now has over 1,200 students and is still regarded as one of the top private schools in Ghana's capital. According to the official history of the school, its founder, Mrs. Florence Laast, named the school after her "favourite saint, Martin de Porres, one of the few black saints in the Catholic faith. He was known for his hard work, humility, and, most of all, his compassion towards his fellowmen." As I would grow to learn, St. Martin de Porres and what he stood for, perhaps, was more significant to me than it was to the founder of my school. According to Catholic.com, Martin de Porres is a patron saint of Mixed Race, Barbers, Public Health Workers, and Innkeepers. He was beatified in 1837 by Pope Gregory XVI and canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. According to his official biography, "St. Martin de Porres was born in Lima, Peru on December 9, 1579. Martin was the illegitimate son of a Spanish gentleman and a freed slave from Panama, of African or possibly Native American descent. At a young age, Martin's father abandoned him, his mother and his younger sister, leaving Martin to grow up in deep poverty." I grew up to learn that I am of a mixed race. I grew up to realise that I was an illegitimate daughter. And until proven otherwise, everything points to the fact that my father abandoned me. Like St. Martin de Porres, I have had my share of ridicule about my parentage. Unlike him, however, I did not grow up in poverty. The fact that I attended St. Martin de Porres School was enough testament to that. It was in this school that I spent at least nine of my formative years, acquiring all that primary and junior high school education had to offer. It was and still is a good school, and I give credit to my mother for giving me a good start in life. I am still unable to say whether my mother was a rich woman, for my idea of wealth was informed by the affluent families in my neighbourhood, those who lived in bigger houses and drove better cars and went on vacations abroad and did all the things I fantasised about as a child. Looking back, however, I think my mother was not doing badly at all. We lived in a two-bedroom semi-detached house that had its own spacious compound. It was part of the properly planned and developed Dansoman Estates, which, at one time, boasted of being the largest urban-planned residential area in West Africa. We had two bathrooms with WCs and a kitchen. My mother's business was flourishing, or so I thought, and we did not run out of cash. My mother's shop, Manovia, was the most popular landmark in that part of Dansoman called Sahara. Commuter vehicles used Manovia junction as a bus stop and the nature of the business was such that all manner of persons patronised it. It was a pub and a convenience store. My mother was a distributor of both alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks. I recall going to the Accra Brewery Limited with my mother, sitting in the car and seeing her supervise the loading of her consignment into delivery vans. I recall seeing her at night counting money with the little bedside lamp she kept by the mirror. She drove her own car and travelled often on business trips. Her busyness with her flourishing business meant that she could not be there for us as she should be. To make up for this, she hired a house-help who took care of us and handled the chores that were above the strength of our feeble hands. In school, I was popular for a reason most parents at the time would not want their children, especially girls, to be known for-entertainment. I was one of four students who were inspired and influenced by the American hip-hop group, Fugees. Formed in the early 1990s, the group was said to have derived its name from the word "refugees." It is unclear why refugees were of interest to a singing group, but the group's founder, Lauryn Hill, later ventured into a non-profit aimed at helping refugees. The original Fugees trio had Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel and Lauryn Hill, while the St. Martin de Porres version had Enoch Nana Yaw Oduro- Agyei, Nii Tettey, one Aziz, and me. Being the only female, I was obviously the Lauryn Hill of the group. Nii Tettey had returned from the United States to join us in junior secondary school as it was then called. With his American accent, he was the closest we came to mimicking Fugees. We memorized and sang their songs at school functions. There were times we composed our own songs and performed them at school functions. As a group, our favourite was Fugees, but my personal favourite was the Ghanaian rapper Obrafour. There was something about his music that blew my mind-the unparalleled depth and the dexterity with which he owned the Twi language in his raps. Obrafour's music was so rich that members of the older generation who were not accustomed to hiplife and rap music got drafted into the genre because of his irresistible appeal. I did not have his photos in my room, but he was permanently engraved in my heart. I was influenced by foreign musicians, but Obrafour has been my all-time greatest singer. I remember how I saved money from my feeding allowance to buy his "Pae Mu Ka" album and learnt every line of each song in that album. He used to come to a studio in Dansoman SSNIT flats-I think it's called DKB Studio or so-and that was the closest I got to seeing him in person. Whenever I spotted him in his short dreadlocks at the time, I would shout his name from my school compound. Many years later, while helping him promote his 20th-anniversary concert, I told Obrafour how I used to shout his name. I didn't know whether he believed it, but he remains my finest artist of all time. Besides Fugees, my group performed Obrafour's songs in school. He was big in the day and still commands enormous respect in the industry. We dreamt about growing up and sticking together to do great things as a musical group. Life, however, had different plans for us. Our ultimate goal started to dissipate even before we completed basic school. Our circumstances separated us even before we had time to plan how to stick together and pursue that dream. Aziz is now married with children. Nii Tettey returned to the United States after junior high school and not much is heard about him now. Enoch Yaw Oduro-Agyei is, perhaps, the direct beneficiary of our childhood attempt at music. He is a Ghanaian singer and composer under the stage name Trigmatic. I also ended up in the entertainment industry outside of music, but the influence of American music almost defined my life even before I figured out the course of my young and not-so-ambitious trajectory. I used to have photos of Fugees in my room, and my family thought I was useless. The whole American music culture influenced me a great deal. I dressed like a boy, and I still have traces of that tomboyish lifestyle in me to date. The influence was huge, and I loved it. But what appeared like a craze for music and the arts was a good escape for me, an escape from loneliness, especially as I began to discover that I didn't fully belong in my family. Music was, therefore, a welcome escape from a possible depression that could have come with that childhood loneliness. My other therapeutic moments were the times I spent with my best friend, Miranda Mould. Miranda had her own share of the weight which life had placed on our young and fragile shoulders. She lived about three blocks from my house and we spent a lot of quality time together. We often sat near the Ghana Telecom telephone booth that was close to my mother's shop, and whenever it malfunctioned, we served as the prompters to those coming to patronise it. We would tell them it was not functioning and continue with our discussion as they turned away. Sometimes we just sat there, with nothing to talk about but enjoying each other's company while thinking about what preoccupied us at the time. And I had a lot to occupy my mind. My teacher's question had led me to discover a lot more about myself, most of which were not pleasant. The immediate discovery was about a father who didn't like me, a father who behaved like I did not exist. The story from my mother was not something that could make up for the absence of a father. It was the unflattering story of my birth, which came up a number of times in situations of anger. When my mother was angry with me and really wanted to hurt me, she would tell me she had given birth to me by mistake. Whenever she said it, she knew how I felt. She knew she was driving a sharp nail into my heart. I could feel she really wanted to hurt me. Maybe, she was just being truthful. By so doing, however, she wounded my spirit, and that unhealable wound served as a constant reminder that all was not well with me. She made me feel terrible about my existence. I cannot imagine ever getting angry with my daughter and telling her that. And I do not think any child, for whatever reason, deserves such psychological torture. But those words and the story that gave credence to their power constantly reminded me that I was neither wanted nor appreciated. My mother told me that when she got pregnant, she did not want to have me so she went to see a medical doctor to terminate the pregnancy. (My mother has told me that the doctor who saved my life is still alive, but she has not told me who he is or which hospital he worked in.) She took that decision in her sixth month. The doctor agreed, and on the said day, she paid the fees and all was set for the abortion. She lay on the surgical bed, raised her legs, but just when the doctor was about to begin the procedure, he shook his head. "I can't do this," the doctor told her. "If you really want to do it, go somewhere else. I'm sorry I can't do it." Gripped by fear and the shock of the doctor's sudden change of mind, she abandoned the idea. But she did not forget how I survived. And she made sure to remind me whenever she felt the need to. It is true that she conceived me by mistake. The details of that story are still too sketchy to be woven into something meaningful. But what is obvious is the fact that I could have ended up as a piece of medical waste if she had made up her mind early enough on whether she wanted to keep me or get rid of me. I was born on Tuesday, November 12, 1985, at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra. From what I later learnt, there was no complication. I was born via spontaneous vaginal delivery (SUD). Interestingly, Eugene was also born in November, but he is a year older than I. When I was old enough to understand the human reproductive system, I assumed that when Eugene was three months old, his dad-our dad-met my mum and they conceived me. If I was born in November, then I was probably conceived in February, so I wondered what kind of man would leave a baby and its mother at home and go to father another child within the same period. From the dossier of negative information I gathered from my mother and the other deductions I made on my own, my perception of Mr. Nelson worsened. My worst recollection of his behaviour was his absence from my naming ceremony. When I asked my mother why she named me Yvonne, she didn't have any reason. Names have meanings, and parents often choose names to reflect the circumstances surrounding the birth of the child or names that speak to what they expect of their children. Some believe that names have a way of influencing the lives of their bearers so care is often taken to choose names that would not portend doom for the holder. In my case, however, my mother had no reason. I thought Yvonne was an outdated name or what we called "colo" (a Ghanaian colloquialism for "colonial", often used to refer to things that are old-fashioned). But my mother said it was a name that was in vogue in those days. My own search later revealed that Yvonne has a French origin and is derived from French names such as Yvon, Yves, and Ivo. Yvonne means "yew", a tall and enchanting tree species well-known for its resilience and long life. An entry on thebump.com says the following about that name: "Decorated by delicate green leaves and blood-red wildflowers, yews are one-of-a-kind in every shape and form. With the name Yvonne, a baby can be inspired by nature's beauty each and every day." Just as I was conceived, my mother may not have been deliberate about my name, but I believe it was the right name for me. I am a yew. I say so not only because I am tall. I believe I still have an awful long way to go, but what has brought me far in life is resilience. It is resilience that kept me in one whole piece after I learnt that I was born by mistake, that I was a product of an aborted plan to abort a pregnancy. It is the resilience of a yew that kept me going when I failed and felt useless to my family and to some friends who did not hide their disdain for the failure I had become. I believe I am as unique as the yew. And as someone who paints for pleasure, I am often inspired by nature's beauty.