Point of Entry

REPUBLIC OF GHANA / REPUBLIQUE DU GHANA
Passport / Passeport      Type/ Type        Code/Code         Passport No. / Passeport No.

Surname/Nom
Amoah — my mother’s maternal surname means pit, hole, or trench. The pronunciation of the name is akin to mmoa — meaning animals. Which animal? An ant? An antelope? A buffoon? A bat? Mmoa also means to fold. What? A pair of legs? Linen? A will? A posture? A face? A herd? As a child, I cupped my palm to my gaping mouth repeatedly to holler. The contact sounded like a suction. Something sucking something else in. At school, the same palm, held upright and splayed outward became a mirror — whatever you say, returns back to you. This was one way of leaving anything and anyone on the appropriate terms — like sweeping behind yourself as you brazenly exit a room. 

Other name(s)/Prénoms
Depends who is asking — teacher’s pet or passport control? For passport control, I am pleasant and responsive. I splay out my fingerprints and keep the words minimal. For the teacher’s pet, I become everyone and no one. I become hyphens and nicknames, misspellings and typos. I boast and reinvent, then cut my eyes across the room to make sure no one tattles. I already know I am on the sheet of paper before the authority traipses out of the room. I am ready to tease — is the paper loose leaf, the ink pen perfumed? Scrawl my name in quick climbing letters across the board. Starts with a C and ends with an “Ah,” make up whatever you want in between. 

Nationality/ Nationalité
I keep searching “What happens if you are born on a plane over international waters?” My question is: Isn’t all water international? The answer Google spits out is “jus soli”— right of soil; other countries say “right of blood”. And if that doesn’t work, it boils down to the nationality of the plane itself. An object can determine the permanence of a person. I have toyed and played with numerous objects. Sat in the porcelain tub for hours, soaking in water someone else strung into my house. Salted my lips with cashews containing products from China, Vietnam, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Indonesia. These are all countries I knew to spell as a child in the game: person, place, or thing. Always, the lines on the page were just for play. We weren’t trying to keep anyone out or in. No one person should have that much power. Some parting must be done on neutral grounds, like the slab of corner-carpet we ran towards to take breaks from the game. I could build years of my life there. I could make that my whole country. 

Date of birth/ Date de naissance
An article says a female fetus is born with all the eggs they will ever carry. Did I talk to my younger sister in utero? In that embryonic place? The secrets I have asked her to hold for me abound. In Akan, there is a lore that newborns could speak until someone squeezed cassava sap onto their tongue. Since then, we enter the world muted or babbling. I must have said “BYE” or “SEE YOU SOON” leaving that place. I must have despaired over the loss of language that enacted our beginning. 

Residence
There was the one time my siblings and I went to the beach as children, dressed in oversized sneakers: my one-piece suit, a top I threw under the only denim skirt I owned. It felt good to show up all at once like that, at the mouth of the water—not alone but numbered. To bob and weave and sling for each other, away from the loom of our grandmother’s fears. Everything I believe begins from her disquieted gaze— her legs criss-crossed on her lone wooden bench, plastered to the wall. Sometimes you take up space like that and just remain, like a nuptial, like a woman transforming into a pillar of salt. At the beach, I fish for shells with my toes. I emerge from the water to find myself glistening.     

Sex/Sexe
Girls play down, down, baby! while women stand in the kitchen window, doe-eyed, antsy about the weather and who hasn’t made it home. Which one am I? Whatever looks back at me in the mirror cowers. I knead the bone in my right shoulder blade. Touch this same breast I have had all my teen life. These same knees. Every day there is a new mole that makes me wonder what my body does when I am asleep. I say, tersely, “Body, what do you do?” It refuses direct answers. It is hiding itself from me.

Place of issue
All of my stories about place are needless. I could begin with how my father worked in Boston for 10 years. How my mother birthed me in a hospital room, then moved to Tantra Hill, where her landlady bathed me while my mother healed. I could list Kumasi, Columbus, New York, which I watched dwindle from the middle seat of an airplane. I could list my first apartment and the flowering of light on the boring gray walls. Every person I know should be an access to some place else: I enter earth on account of my mother’s good faith and my aunt’s prayers. I enter a country on the merit of my father’s hard labor and immigrant sacrifice. Let me know when to stop. 

Date of issue 
Some things are nobody’s business. Which means, no one deserves the full story. What my mother doesn’t want to explain or get into, she makes up entirely. Birthdays, love songs, restaurant names. Why explain history when you can delude? Moving forward is a necessary habit. One of the many I utilize on occasion. Perhaps it was given to me at birth. Perhaps it came in with the first seedling of my baby teeth.  

Date of expiry
I will leave when I am ready—and not a moment too soon; I will announce it as presumptuously as a call to dinner: “The food is ready,” and then walk steadily out the door. It will sound like the clinking of glass or the landline on the receiver or the kissing of teeth or the swathing of grass. I mean you can only hear me when you really listen. I mean, I am only here when you really listen.

Claudia Owusu is a Ghanaian writer and filmmaker. Her work divulges the nuance of Black girlhood through a personal and collective lens. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Bellingham Review, Indianapolis Review, Vogue, Narrative Northwest, Akoroko, and Brittle Paper. Her films have screened internationally at Aesthetica, the New York African Film Festival, Urbanworld, and Blackstar Fest. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bernadine Evaristo Prize in African Poetry; and she is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at The Ohio State University.