THE MONGREL

Undress Me!

My lips are thick and full; although smaller than the alluring marshmallows that sit on Asabea’s and Ama’s faces.

My eyes are dough-y saucers and my skin emits banana-cherry-peachy beams that do something of what a hologram does in the sun’s eyes.

My hair is a mass of silky coils; not cake-ily kinky like afro hair is supposed to be.

My breasts stand-fall kissable and the skin of my butt, my hips and my thighs ripples when my foot meets the ground.

So they call me an obroni, a white woman; I am not African enough. I could not possibly be Ghanaian.

Undress me, I say!

I am not a big fan of fufu and light soup and goat meat and snails. My colleagues, at work, say that I’m showy and elitist, because I make meals of chicken noodles and cinnamon rolls.

They mock my accent, calling it foreign and bourgeois.

I am an educated, career woman. I work long hours and I embrace my sexuality. I flaunt my dewy cleavage and I join men in conversations about wild, casual sex and sensual foreplay, erotic role-play.

I voice my candid opinions on politics and the sweet and sour socioeconomic buffet that we (including me) find ourselves (including myself) eating from; I argue. I scream.

But they say women must talk less and listen more. We are meant to be admired (and by this they mean we are meant to be looked at with bulging eyes that cut us up to our privates and eat us, before we can be cooked). They say women mustn’t talk about sex and should cover their assets – better to imagine them, than to see them. They say that I am Westernised and must learn to be more of an Ama or an Asabea, because I am an Amina…

And if they undressed me, beyond the heavy, supple breasts, after kissing the fiery lips, when the hips, thighs and butt have ravished and have been ravished; they’d find that the flesh and blood are laden with various genotypes of various records, of various eras, of various spaces and of scattered love children…

And a mongrel cannot be a pure breed.