My grandmother wrote every day. I did not know this until after she died, until my aunts opened the flat in Accra and found the notebooks — forty-three of them, in a cedar trunk she'd brought from somewhere further north before I was born. They were in Twi mostly, some English, occasionally something none of us could identify, which my uncle said was probably a language from her mother's village that had not survived her generation. The notebooks were not addressed to anyone. They were not, exactly, a diary. They were something between conversation and confession and argument, and I was the one, because I was the one who could read the English parts and the one willing to learn enough Twi to read the rest, who was asked to make sense of them.
The manuscript she left unfinished was in the last three notebooks. A novel, or the beginning of one — I could not always tell where her life ended and her invention began, which I have come to understand was intentional. It was about a woman who emigrated in 1971 with one suitcase and a list of names she had been asked to memorize: relatives in England who would need to know she had arrived safely, acquaintances who could be trusted, enemies who should be avoided. The list was real. I found it pressed between two pages near the end of the second notebook. My grandmother's handwriting, young and hurried. The names of a life's complicated cartography.
I have been writing, in my own notebooks, about the act of writing about her. This is, I know, a kind of luxury, this nesting of stories inside stories. But I also think it is honest. I am not my grandmother. I cannot finish her manuscript as though I were. What I can do is sit with what she left and write around it — a frame for a painting I did not make, a record of trying to understand what I have inherited and what has simply arrived in my hands still warm.
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