a.opam's blog

My main tip would be to get out of Accra, which, while wonderful and exciting, can also be smelly and overwhelming. This weekend I went to Kokrobite, a fishing village about an hour outside of the city, and stayed at the cutest backpacker’s hostel on the planet. It’s called Big Milly’s Backyard, and comes complete with hammocks, friendly dogs, and a 24-hour bar (and staying in my own room for one night cost me the equivalent of $10!). I actually don’t think I can recommend Kokrobite more. My classes end this Thursday, and I intend to spend my last week chilling at Big Milly’s before I fly back to the States on December 16. Get out of Accra and into Kokrobite (and once you're there, I recommend you try the lobster, barracuda, and eggplant parmigiana...but everything on the menu is delicious).

At the same time, I have friends who have gone all over the region this weekend: Josh is in Ouidah, Carolyn and Michael are looking for elephants in Mole National Park. Get out! Go to the Volta Region! Go to Togo and Benin (but stay away from Cotonou)! Go on every organized trip; it really is a huge luxury that so many of the amazing places I’ve visited this semester have been included in the price of the program (personal favorites: Cape Coast, Tamale, and Wli Falls). I was on the phone with my native Ghanaian father a few days ago, and when I finished telling him about my trip to the Aburi Botanical Gardens (also fantastic!), he said, “You know Ghana better than I do now!”

Don’t be too sad about the lack of great variety in cuisine; there’s always KFC and pretty passable Italian (Mamma Mia), Japanese (Monsoon) and Thai (Zion Thai Restaurant) food in Osu.  

At the same time, be prepared that a semester in Accra is most definitely not a semester in London. Not only may you go a week or two without hot water (but with a daily average of 90 degrees, I'm really not complaining), you'll also be living in a country with a culture completely unlike that of the United States or Europe...for four months. Personally, I wish I’d known more about the LGBT situation before I’d gotten here, but I don't know if that could've been helped. No amount of researching gayghana.org could have prepared me to both be in the closet for four months and be aggressively propositioned by extremely macho men. I definitely don’t think that the less-than-friendly climate should be a deterrant for queer students, though; I have learned more about myself and my identity here than I probably ever could have in Greenwich Village. I’m not a great resource when it comes to events/nights/bars for queer ladies (probably because there are virtually none (trust me, I’ve looked)), but for guys: Wednesdays at at the Coconut Grove Hotel (Salsa Night!) and Epos have been really fun.

All in all, I highly recommend studying abroad in Accra, although I’m not sure if I’d recommend spending the semester at NYU’s site or doing a program that is more integrated with the University of Ghana (at the same time, I dropped both of the U Ghana classes I had originally planned on taking!). 

A few weekends ago, as part of my commitment to being this semester’s LGBT Ambassador for Accra, I planned and went on a dinner with a few of my colleagues and some queer-identified employees of the US Embassy and other American institutions in Ghana. The dinner was very pleasant; I had seafood pizza at a nearby Italian restaurant and, for a moment, I could have been at any pizzeria on Mott or Mulberry. I was feeling very full and content when I caught the tail-end of a conversation my friend Barbara was having with the assistant director of our program. They were discussing the evolution of our group’s dynamic as the semester has progressed, from one of initial wariness and race tension to mostly amiable mixing, laughing, and the possibility of lifelong friendships.

“Oh, I've totally seen that,” the director laughed. “It’s because you guys cram two years of personal growth into four months. You can’t come out on the other side of that without forming some strong bonds.”

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. I’ve been working on a short documentary on the LGBT question in Ghana this semester, and this past Sunday, my crewmate Ruby and I took our cameras and mics out to a nearby neighborhood downtown, hoping to get some “man on the street” interviews that displayed the public’s opinion of homosexuality in Ghana. 

Now, knowing that homosexuality is de facto illegal in Ghana, I knew theoretically what to expect. But once again, knowing in your head that prejudice exists in the world is different from hearing it with your heart, when people say that homosexuality is inherently “un-African,” that Ghana doesn’t have that filthy problem, or that lesbianism can be cured by raping those women who express same-sex desire.

Sitting around a table of friends a few hours later, taking shots of dark rum and swigging sangria, I wondered about my privilege: how I could be so privileged as to have not heard things like this until turning twenty. And I remember thinking how sad it is that the absence of self-loathing can be a privilege.

Study abroad is supposed to be a time for personal growth, for reflection and for dealing with situations and people and smells that are completely foreign to you. And I guess that all came to a head while I stood, headphones on, behind a camera and listened to people say that they would hate me if only they knew one more thing about me. So in the end, I’m still processing my time doing interviews, much as I am still processing most of the past four months, but I wouldn’t hesitate to say that my epiphany has been that I have grown a lot, and I have so much growing left to do. So much more than I could have imagined.

Here in NYU Accra, we have Community Resource Assistants, or CRAs, who function much as RAs in New York do, except they don’t write you up for smoking hookah on your balcony. One of the members on staff, Chris, is our librarian-slash-resident-handyman, and once upon a time, Chris was a CRA.

Chris isn’t very tall, but Chris was the first person to know everyone on our program’s name. This seems like an easy luxury, as there are only 32 of us currently in Accra, but there have been plenty of occasions when a security guard or IT technician has asked one of my friends for her name. In October and November and December, this still happens. But I’m thankful that, whenever I walk into the cool wooden stacks of our tiny library in our tiny academic center, I can count on a soft, cheerful voice saying, “Good afternoon, Abena! How are you?” followed by an equally friendly “What book are you looking for?”

It is something of a running joke here that we are almost always off balance in some way.  The refrigerator/toilet/sink/generator is broken, the electricity is out, the internet box has exploded, the roof has fallen in. Today, for example, we all woke up hungover and generally sweaty from last night’s farewell dinner. We also all woke up to no electricity and no running water. It is also a national holiday, so the closest CRA on duty was three hours away. After going out to the emergency water tap and filling a blue plastic bucket with water, I was preparing myself for a cold bucket bath when I heard cheering. 

“Thanks, Chris!”

“Chris is the best!”

I left the bathroom and house just in time to see Chris walking towards our front gate; he turned around and smiled shyly, waving. He had come specifically to fix our water and power. And so, once again, I felt the comfort of strangers in our librarian-slash-resident-superhero, Chris.

(My friend Mary took this picture of Chris last weekend).

A few posts ago, I mentioned a weekly ritual: Sunday night poker games at the nearby Turkish-fusion restaurant, Chase. Chase is funny in the same way a cat wearing a frog suit is funny: it has no idea what it wants to be (silly analogy?). There’s wood-paneled wine cellar on one wall, viking hats and pirate ships on another. One page of the menu is plastered with pictures of burgers and manakish, falafel and sushi on the next. Chase is one of a kind in peculiarity, and I never expected to say this, but Chase really is my great good place in Accra. 

I go to Chase a few times a week, and many of the waiters there know NYU students in general, if not me specifically. We exchange small talk and there is no surprise when the time we spend eating, drinking, and chatting passes the three-hour mark. At Chase, I’ve taken my laptop and headphones and avoided all of my homework, smoked unhealthy amounts of hookah with friends, waxed poetic about life and class and privilege, taken free shots of Johnnie Walker Red Label, and played poker on at least four occasions (you might even say I’m getting good at it...or at least sort of know the rules).

Chase is a five minute walk from my house, and is a great good place to grab a cold Savannah or sushi-flavored falafel at the wine bar. I think it’s easy to complain about not being able to find good places in Accra, and I also think it’s easy to stop looking when you’re unable to find a Starbucks or a Think Coffee or a Washington Square Park. But I think what is great about living in Accra is looking past what is immediately difficult or uncomfortable and finding your place: be it the beach, the markets, or the corner stores. And while it’s hard for me that there is no structured green space to speak of (I never thought that, after reading Death and Life of Great American Cities, I would be advocating for more pointless public parks), I do have Chase. 

(The picture is of Chase, but I'm not in it).

Three weeks ago, four of my friends and I decided that we wanted to get out of Accra and Ghana and get away for the weekend. So we took an impromptu weekend trip to two of Ghana's neighboring countries, Togo and Benin, with a plan to see at least three cities along the way, Lomé in Togo and Cotonou and Ouidah in Benin. Upon returning home to Accra, I spotted a few of our housemates lying on the couch they had moved onto their porch. 

"How was it, guys?!! What did you do?!"
"It was alright. We got chased out of Benin."
"..."

Let me start over.
...with the firm disclaimer that I have no intention of dissuading anyone from visiting Cotonou or spending a quiet weekend in Lomé (which may be one of the most beautiful cities I've ever visited). 

However, I recommend planning very well, because Cotonou is a beautiful, loud, terrifying, smelly, exhausting mess of a place to be in without a guide. Unlike Lomé, which feels more like a sleepy beach town than a bustling African city, Cotonou is almost relentless in its energy and hundreds of motorcycle taxis. After 48 hours of sweaty traveling and questionable haggling in questionable French, my friends and I had landed in Cotonou with only the name of a nonexistent hotel and an expired telephone number. ("Are there any hotels around here?" "Oh no. No no no. The nearest hotel is a forty-five minute walk  away.")

While walking through the central market of Cotonou at dawn the next day, an old Beninese man whom I can only describe as menacing saw us trying to haggle for some ice cream. He seemed slightly intoxicated, and whether we were eating our leftover Chinese food out of styrofoam bowls or walking through dried herbs and animal skins at the fetish market, he was there. Half an hour later, we were arguing with the man on the shoulder of a sidewalk-less highway.

"Qu'est-ce que tu veux?!"
"D'argent."

Oh. Well. We don't have any money, Mr. Benin Man. 

And then he chased us. And we ran. For at least five minutes, the five of us ran, bags bouncing, through traffic and markets and babies. (which doesn't sound like a lot but really, imagine being dehydrated, running at the height of the West African day, through traffic, from a slightly-intoxicated man, not knowing what his intentions  are).

I believe that, for that weekend and for the rest of my life I will spend before I visit Cotonou again, that old man will be Cotonou's genius loci for me: a firm declaration of our naivete, a denial of our cockiness and believing that we didn't need to learn about a country in order to explore/conquer it, of a kind of desperation so severe as to seem laughable to privileged college students.

The picture isn't mine (I think I took a total of two pictures in Benin that weekend), but I think it. It's a beautiful place, and well worth a visit, but maybe take the advice of my friend Carolyn who was with us along the way:

1. do not get visas at the border!
2. understand when people want you to bribe them
3. allow enough time.

During Orientation week, we visited the Artist Alliance gallery, a small museum in the Teshie fishing community. The gallery hugged the coast and was showcasing Ga coffins. Brightly-painted wooden and metal and silk coffins in the shapes of eagles, crabs, cigarette boxes, bottles of Club beer. 

When I was in London over Fall Break, the friends I was staying with lived two blocks away from the British Museum. The museum is open daily and free students, so I spent one long morning walking through its high-ceilinged hallways. One of the museum’s exhibits was called “Living and Dying.” The description on the website reads, “People throughout the world deal with the tough realities of life in many different ways. The displays in Room 24 explore different approaches to our shared challenges as human beings, focussing on how diverse cultures seek to maintain health and well-being.”

One of the walls of the Living and Dying exhibit was lined with brightly-painted Ga coffins. Eagles and cameras and cigarette boxes.

The exhibit was significant to me for two reasons. At one end, this is art that explores an aspect of the culture I’ve been living in for two months –  families commission coffins representing the life achievements or dreams of a deceased relative, or characterizing their personality such as an eagle, a car, a plane, a bible, a fish, or a camera. Sometimes the deceased will have prepared a design brief during his or her lifetime. At the other, the presence of this Ghanaian art in a British museum asks, what does it mean to be postcolonial when you find yourself in the museum owned by your colonizers? At the Artists Alliance, the curators who spoke to us mentioned (in passing) what is difficult) about putting prices on artifacts in museums: how you must sometimes sell the art of your art and your culture and your people to rich collectors from former colonial powers in order to sustain your museum.

The British Museum, and the Ghanaian art within it, brought this perspective to mind. When I saw the ornately carved and intricately designed coffins on display under British glass, I asked, “How did you get here?” *

 

* From the exhibit: This coffin was made in the workshop of Paa Joe, who was trained by Kane Quaye. It was bought from the workshop by the British Museum in 2000.

The idea of authenticity as a “secularized version of the sacred” brings to mind D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land, in which Waldie manages to find the sacred in the everyday mundane of his suburban home. I think there’s something in that: in looking for the sacred we’re looking for something real, something quotidian.

If I could equate my living situation in Ghana to something in New York, it would be the suburbs. Long Island. Westchester. My house on the border of Nassau County. So for me, living in Ghana is not so different from living at home, at least in pure physical location/appearance. And for me, that is authentic because the feeling of being at home in the suburbs is so sacred (as much as I take issue with the suburban landscape and what it represents).

Our quiet  residential neighborhood is called Labone, and I think it’s easy to think of Labone –– particularly our nice two-story houses in Labone –– as particularly inauthentic. “This is supposed to be Africa” is the unspoken implication. “Where are the mud huts and flies?” But indoor plumbing do not an inauthentic Ghanaian experience make. Although we are a group of foreigners, we live next to businesses, shops, and homes owned and frequented by Ghanaians. Are these Africans somehow inauthentic because they don’t fit neatly into the village settings that dominate the West’s imaginings of sub-Saharan Africa?

We all talk about how study abroad stops being vacation and starts being real life when you develop a routine. And what more authentic than “real life,” the mundane banalities of shopping for zucchini and fabric, going to the bank, playing with the dogs who live next door. So I think my most authentic experience (of urban Accra in general and Labone in particular) has been walking around my neighborhood. In other words, living my life. 

I read All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes over the summer at the recommendation of a friend who was also heading for a semester in Accra (“I just finished reading a great book by maya angelou about when she lived in accra for two years in the sixties. It made me so excited to go!”). Through her travel to Ghana, Maya Angelou attempts to claim a piece of her identity: “Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal.” (3)

The “color of our skin as correct and normal” seems to be loaded with all sorts of things I wasn’t expecting when I signed up to come to this beautiful, surprising, strange country. For me, the most vivid moment of identity-clarity in Traveling Shoes occurs when Angelou travels to Berlin to take part in the play Dies Negers with her black American theater colleagues. Removed from Ghana for a few weeks, she is thrown right back into a situation where to have Black skin is to be, once again, incorrect.
 
This semester, our week-long Fall break fell on the second week of October. Feeling the travel bug, people in the Accra program traveled to all sorts of wonderful cities across the African continent: Lomé, Cape Town, Casablanca, Cairo. I, on the other hand, went to Paris and London. My parents were a little confused by my decision to run to Western Europe: "Don't you want to stay in-country? Maybe go to Burkina Faso?" And I did want to stay. And I do. But there is a lot about life in Ghana that can get very intense very quickly: spending most of your time living in close quarters with the same 32 people, among other things.

As I was preparing to take my week-long vacation in Europe, I thought again of Maya Angelo in Berlin, “Berlin, with its cold temperature, its high-rises, wide, clean avenues and White, White people was exactly what I wanted to see and where I needed to be.” (155) I felt a very visceral connection to this need to see white people, because all I’ve ever seen is white people; this need for cold air and scarves, because it was October and leaving the house without fingerless gloves felt very blank.

Today I went to the beach in October and I thought, there’s nothing very quotidian about this semester at all, really. It’s my eighth week here and even though I do all of the same things every day––class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, interning on Wednesdays and Fridays––it has yet to feel like a routine.

I guess I’m trying to avoid falling into a comfortable pace because of the nagging feeling that, “Oh man there’s only ten weeks left, only two more months man, oh shit it’s midterms week! I should start doing something! I should start having the best semester of my life like everyone thinks I should be having.” Who has time to relax when there’s cultural immersion to be had and obscure parts of a developing West African city to explore? I guess this is such a foreign feeling to me because, being from New York, I never felt pressured. If I miss a concert or club event during the school year, what does it matter? I have all of summer vacation and all of next semester to explore the far reaches of Prospect Park and Jersey City should I so desire. Here, every moment spent unoccupied seems like it’s been lost forever; in New York there’s always time. Sometimes I’ll feel compelled to go to bed at nine p.m. Here in Ghana, I’m always on edge, always acutely aware of the passage of time. I feel like I’m one sip of Savannah Dry Cider away from going home filled with regret, at having not gone to this poetry slam or that art gallery.

So I guess I’ll have found quotidian life when I can spend a day not doing anything and not feel guilty about it. In the meantime, it’s comforting to find something to look forward to in weekly rituals like Sunday family dinners and poker night. A few nights ago was poker night at a nearby Turkish restaurant called Chase. It started to feel like home, and not just a field trip or vacation. We sat with our hookah and drank our Star beers and chatted about the events of our respective weekends, and it was lovely, and I was almost able to relax. The picture above is of family dinner in the courtyard a few weeks ago.

In earlier posts, I touched upon what’s interesting and frustrating about blending in (really blending in for maybe the first time in my life) in Accra. Unlike my more obviously “obruni” (foreign) friends, my mini-afro and I blend in with the average Ghanaian citizen; when I walk unaccompanied through markets or malls, no one looks at me twice. At the same time, I watch with curiosity when children gaze open-mouthed at my friends' pale skin and fair hair, and am reminded of the times I walked through Istanbul and shopkeepers stared and shouted things like "Hey, chocolate girl!" and "How are you, Miss Obama?"

Because of my face and my ability to blend rather seamlessly into the woodwork here, it becomes a bit of an issue when I can’t speak any of the local languages. People scream at me or whisper behind their hands at me in Twi, under the assumption that I understand and can commiserate. It’s becoming a little frustrating because of the way language can be associated with cultural identity: am I a “true” (read: half) Ghanaian if I don’t speak Twi? Truth be told, I’m tired of people asking me why I don’t speak Twi. “Why don’t you ask my dad?” I long to say every time, because it's likely that they don't know what it's like to try and assimilate into white American culture by not teaching your children your mother tongue, and they definitely don't know that I don't even live with my Twi-speaking father.

More often than not, I lie and say I am, in fact, taking a Twi class, but my professor has had malaria for the last two months and is out of commission.

This is all interesting in that it gets me thinking about the use of learning a language. I think the fact that English is the official language of Ghana has gotten me lazy; if I were studying in Prague or Buenos Aires I think I would feel much more pressured to learn to function in Czech or Spanish. Here, all of the signs are in English, newspapers is in English, the music is overwhelmingly English. So when people ask me in “Do you speak Twi?” I don’t feel as uncomfortable as I probably should when I respond with a defiant “No.” So I guess we all do things to avoid looking like a “near-idiot,” a feeling I’m all too familiar with: when I was studying in Montreal, there were far too many occasions where I would be hanging around with my 22-year-old host sister and her friends and feel stupid trying to explain what Gallatin is, in broken French Canadian.

When I went to South Africa this past winter, I remember being pleasantly surprised when a group of giggling little girls tugged on my arm in Soweto and asked me a question in Zulu. “They think I’m one of them,” I thought in wonder, when their eyes got all big and round when I asked if they spoke English. However, that was South Africa and I am not Zulu. Here, I am half-Ashanti and everyone knows and it is interesting to actually be one of them.

Let me preface this with the fact that Ghanaian maps are awful and no one uses them. They gave us a map of Labone, our neighborhood, during Orientation Week and it’s done about as much good as a handkerchief as far as getting me around goes. Here, it is very uncommon for people to use (or even know) street names and addresses. It’s all about the landmarks, baby. 37. Max Mart. Accra Mall. Labone Coffee Shop. If I gave them my address, I’m certain I would get little more than a blank stare.

People scream at me in Twi, assuming I speak the language, and a small but loud part of me is frustrated because, unlike my white friends who are obviously foreign (or “obruni”), I look like I belong. Coming from the whitest neighborhood in Queens and NYU Gallatin, I have become almost uncomfortably accustomed to being among the few, if not the only person of color in most social situations. Trying to navigate blending in as opposed to always standing out has been wonderful and jarring and awful and frustrating. I’m used to getting “You’re probably not from around here” sideways looks, but now unless I’m with a bunch of my non-black friends (or even non-Ghanaian friends) no one will look twice at me when I walk down the street.

SO because I’m still finding my way in Accra, I decided it would be a good reason to leave Ghana altogether and take a day trip to the neighboring West African nation Togo!

On Sunday morning, five of us took a tro-tro on the three-hour trip over highways and dirt roads and through cities and villages to Lomé, the capital of Togo. This is a trip that I will definitely take again and which I wholeheartedly recommend: Lomé is quiet and beautiful, a coastal city that hugs the ocean where you can take a motorcycle in lieu of a taxi for short distances for less than 5 dollars. I liked practicing my French and walking through the much less busy, but just as swelteringly hot streets. There was no pressure to know where I was going because I’d lived there for six weeks, or know the language because I don't look especially Togolese. It was also a chance to leave the NYU Labone bubble, if only for twelve hours.

Because we only had about four hours in Lomé before the border closed, the only thing we really had time to do was visit the Fetish Market, a traditional market filled with dried animal skins, lizard bones, cow and leopard and lion skulls, and talismans used by healers in traditional West African medicine. Even as we got our tour, men and women on motorcycles were roaring through with prescriptions, waiting to pick up their pouches of crystallized chameleon. I almost bought a necklace made of a cobra’s vertebrae. The picture above is me hanging out with the skull of a hippopotamus. I think its dried skin cures gout, but I could just as easily be lying.

It feels strange to write about my processes of anticipating this place and study abroad in general when I’ve lived in Accra for a month. I think the most accurate way to describe me in the weeks leading up to departure was “noncommital.” Everyone had an opinion to offer me when I told them that I was leaving and where I was going: that I would have a great time, that I would learn so much, that I would see countless elephants and great apes.** And I would respond to their excitement or trepidation with an “Eh. Maybe.”

When I wasn’t feeling noncommital, however, I spent a lot of time worrying. Two weeks before I was scheduled to fly to Accra from JFK by way of Atlanta, I saw something interesting. On my way home from work one weekday, my coworker sent me a link, Ghana Orders the Arrest of All Homosexuals. Under it he wrote, “Did you hear about this? Is it true???”

I read the article on my smart phone, pausing at sentences. “Ghana’s Western Region Minister. . . has ordered the immediate arrest of all homosexuals in the country’s west" . . .  “[calling] on landlords and tenants to inform on people they suspect of being homosexuals.” I called my friend and former roommate Maria in tears, thinking, Will I still be able to go?

Don't get me wrong. I knew perfectly well (in theory) that homosexuality is illegal in Ghana and in fact persecuted on much of the African continent. Under Ghanaian Law Code 1960, "carnal knowledge"--most often taken to mean pedophilia and same-sex acts--is outlawed. But something about that article added color to a fear that had once been monochromatic and two-dimensional. In the days that followed, I became more nervous than excited and wrote things in my journal like, “What will it be like? Will I be able to embrace this part of my identity, will I be able to embrace Ghana and being half-Ghanaian while also remaining my gay self? Or will I unravel in a country where a chunk of Abby is illegal and invisible?”

I’m currently re-reading the study abroad application I threw together last March. The first question was “What do you think the most demanding aspects of studying and living in Ghana will be, and how will you work with those challenging aspects of this?” Like de Botton looking at a glossy brochure for expensive Caribbean vacations, I wrote a lot of fluff in response to that question. Blah blah, it’ll be hard to not live a train ride away from my friends in Paris or speak English with my classmates in London. Thinking of these expectations, I’d like to add that what has been most demanding about my five weeks here so far is my wish to understand people's hatred.

But still, here I am. Life is funny. And there's supposed to be something of an LGBT night at a salsa club in a nearby neighborhood coming up this Wednesday, so I'm excited for that. Updates to come!


**I have seen little more wildlife than the family of (adorable!) street puppies that live two doors down from our residence hall.

My name is Abby and I’m a junior in Gallatin, studying Creative Nonfiction and Social Justice. Mostly I try to study the role of identity in film and literature, along with the ways identity affects and is affected by natural and social environments. Essentially I’m a social science nerd who loves writing and making films. I have no idea what I’d like to do with my life further down the road, but I have a feeling travel and graduate school are somewhere on the horizon. I found out about Art of Travel through taking A Sense of Place with Steve last semester, and am excited to share my experiences with the rest of you travelers.

I was once told something very interesting. During the last day of the course The Constitution and Communities of Color, our professor told us, “Everyone should go somewhere where they are part of the majority, and test out what that feels like.” So, during the Winter 2011 term, I traveled to South Africa with the Albert Gallatin Scholars. Before landing in Johannesburg on January 5th, I had never set foot on the African continent. I am black–my mother was born in Saut D’eau, Haiti, and my father was born and raised in Kumasi, Ghana. For all my life, my parents have tried very hard to assimilate, to make their children some abstract image of America. I speak neither Twi nor Creole, and I know so very little about my ancestry, my parents’ upbringings. They are both doctors, and I grew up in an affluent white neighborhood in northwestern Nassau County, and for the first time, in Johannesburg and in Cape Town, I saw people all around me with my face.

There is a scene in the 1997 Disney movie Tarzan where Tarzan, the man raised by gorillas in the West African wilderness, is taught to walk upright and speak English like a proper Anglo person. The Phil Collins song that underscores this montage of encounters expresses the strange elation that Tarzan experiences, finally confronted with pale faces like his own: “I want to know, can you show me? I want to know about these strangers like me.” While walking through Soweto in January, at the height of South African summer, I was one of the three that didn’t stick out like the rest of the pale moon faces of our tour group. A little group of eight-year-old girls followed our group curiously, whispering and smiling shyly. This wasn’t such an odd occurrence; we had spent the day being looked at curiously by children. I felt a tug on my shirt sleeve, and when I looked down, saw five inquisitive little faces. They asked me something in Zulu, and pointed at our group. When I apologized and asked if they spoke English, their eyes widened in amazement. “I want to know about these strangers like me,” I felt in their expressions. “Something’s familiar about these strangers like me.”

And so, here I am back again. I’m currently living and studying at NYU’s campus in Accra in the West African country, Ghana. I am half-Ghanaian (my father is from Kumasi, a large city in the center of this West African country), and am excited to explore my history and ancestry. The other 35 students and I landed in Accra on August 14th, which was followed by a week-long Orientation in which we drank lots of Star beer and visited Kwame Nkrumah’s mausoleum, among other things. I have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and am taking Creative Writing and classes on medical anthropology and documentary filmmaking. I am also going to be interning at the West Africa AIDS Foundation, and am hoping to do some work with the LGBT community here with regards to HIV AIDS education and activism.

My friend Brittany took this picture of me; the rest of the students on my program and I were on a tour bus on our way to visit Ashesi University. Ashesi is a small liberal arts college in the Greater Accra region where a few of us NYU-Accra students have been able to take arts and Africana studies courses.

“Soho has, however, become part of a tourist archipelago where the definition of place falls into a set of increasingly generic categories.” (Sorkin 142)
 
While reading the chapter on Soho in Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, a question occurred to me: What is place when the life you lead there becomes a commodity to be consumed?
 
Place as a commodity is an interesting concept. After the rapid gentrification of Soho, the people who moved there (the gentrifiers) and the tourists seem to suck the “authenticity” out of the neighborhood by their disingenuous desires for being there. As Sorkin says on page 141, the streets of Soho—West Broadway in particular—become inundated every weekend with people “who, with no thought of art, had come simply to shop and brunch and to look at each other shopping and brunching.”
 
A city’s “Soho” becomes a place where this alternative lifestyle is sold to the highest bidder. This sense of commodification creates a sense of false ownership—a sense that I paid a price for this space, which includes all of the space around it—that blurs the idea of public versus private space. As Sorkin writes, Planning constantly revises the relationship of ‘public’ rights and property rights and the street is the scene where private citizens enact and adjudicate the proprieties of public behavior millions of times a day.”
 
This point is best illustrated by Sorkin’s example of the street artists on West Broadway, who are shuttled around street corners and abused by police officers in the name of safety. To me, those artists, celebrities, and rock stars who inhabit the high-rent lofts seem to be saying, “I bought a certain lifestyle when I moved into this apartment, and that life I purchased does not include people who sell their art on the street.”

For more photos, see my tumblr


In a conversation about final exams and class schedules, I mentioned to a friend my plan to bike to Greenpoint, to figure out its sense of place. She paused, then responded “Oh, Cassie lived in Greenpoint.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, but she’s moving now. It's way too expensive over there now.”

Cassie is a 22 year old college graduate, and was recently priced out of an apartment in Greenpoint. Greenpoint (or "Little Poland," as it is sometimes affectionately called) is a traditionally blue collar immigrant neighborhood in Northern Brooklyn. As we discussed the phenomenon of gentrification in class, we agreed that its waves of social and class upheaval may sometimes (at least in the more well-known cases of Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side) function according to this cycle: old immigrant families live in a working-class, industrial neighborhood. “Starving artists” move in to take advantage of low rents and large spaces for their studios. The presence of artists creates a pleasurable environment that attracts university students, who settle in these places in search of fellow young people and a low cost of living. Young professionals follow, seeking to consume Greenpoint's high-rent condominiums and the “hip” environment created by artists, students, and other bohemians. Along the way, rents and costs of living rise, and a former working-class neighborhood becomes increasingly white-collar. These yuppies offer the most pernicious vehicle for this type change; as Michael Sorkin says of the trendy neighborhood Soho in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, "[It] has become part of a tourist archipelago where the definition of place falls into a set of increasingly generic catagories. The act of touring devolves less on the particulars of geography than on a set of prepackaged lifestyles, defined by a fixed array of goods and services." (Sorkin 142)

According to this model, and using Cassie as a singular example for a large, complicated issue, Greenpoint is cycling from its student phase to its yuppie phase. However, place is not static, and the places I passed during my 4-hour bike ride through Greenpoint and Williamsburg included a second-generation Polish hardware-repair shop, a studio apartment priced at $2600/month, and a public park where Dominican piragua vendors vie for sidewalk space with solar-powered smoothie trucks. I’m hoping to put in tension my own experiences with gentrifiers and the gentrified in Greenpoint in order to illustrate something about what I like about Greenpoint and what is changing about it.


According to Google Maps, the bike ride from my building in Chinatown to 113 Franklin Street in Greenpoint takes approximately 26 minutes. In reality, it took me, my Biria cruiser, and my general ineptitude an hour and a half to find the little tattoo shop by the water that I'd been looking for. I was a little late to meet with my friend Sue, who was happily cleaning and chatting with an acquaintaince when I burst into their converted factory garage, huffing and panting about close encounters with ice cream trucks. Sue lives due east in Williamsburg and walks to work every day. She was talking merrily about her idea to promote the store and the artists: a friend of her had given her a tub of sidewalk chalk, and she would set out chalk and candy for her neighbors and their kids to play with and enjoy. Knowing Franklin Street and the people who made their lives around it, this made perfect sense. Franklin has been a major avenue of transport in Greenpoint since the mid-1800s, when it opened as a turnpike. On the sunny spring afternoon, mothers pushed their children on bicycles and in carriages past the store's open window, and more than one dog ran through the wide industrial doors (pulling a bemused human along) in search of a head pat or a treat.

Leaving the shop a few hours later, I walked around the block and detached my bike from the telephone pole on West Street where I’d hastily stashed it. That part of West, removed from the thoroughfare of Franklin, is still largely industrial; cars and trucks kick up big clouds of thick dust as they enter and leave their loading docks. A mural is spray-painted onto the big corrugated steel door of one of these loading docks, the graffiti tags of a resident street gang rising in tall iridescent letters: Rask, Woe, Phil, Bat Man. Rest in peace, Joey Noodles. Looking up, I’m near the Greenpoint water tower, painted with a 30-foot-tall Polish flag. After getting hugely lost after getting off the Williamsburg bridge, the red-and-white tower is my main landmark.

Coasting along, I turned off of Franklin onto Manhattan Avenue, a major hub of commerce in Greenpoint. Like the sidewalk outside of Sue's tattoo parlor, Manhattan Avenue reminds me of Jane Jacob's ballet of quotidien life in the West Village. A man sells books and appliances on the sidewalk in front of Christina’s Polish-American Restaurant, and on Manhattan and Noble, Zayas Appliance is across the street from Sakura 6 Sushi Restaurant, where well-dressed young professionals rock their newborn babies in the shadows of Antoni Moszczynski’s law office. Couples stream out of Apteka Pharmacy, which is next to the little God Bless Deli, a bodega that is perpetually blasting reggaeton and salsa music. At 6:14pm, the sun was low on the horizon and I heard English, Spanish, and Polish. Coasting down a slight hill, I pass Nassau Avenue. My old friend Juliya’s family owns a little repair show further south down Nassau. I celebrated Polish Easter with them on more than one occassion in middle school, eating little besides tea and pierogies. When, in the middle of a conversation, I mentioned that I was writing about Greenpoint, she laughed and said, with more than a little contempt, “So I’m assuming you've learned how it was once a blue collar polish immigrant neighborhood and is now a flourishing yuppieville complete with vegan cafes and pet clothing boutiques?”

Riding through, considering the bodegas and boutiques, I looked to see if I could find McCarren Park, a beautiful if confusing public park where, on a good day, you’ll find vendors hawking everything from cotton candy to slices of fresh mango, a concrete skate park, and the friendly neighborhood falafel and smoothie van. If you were to walk further down, you’d hit the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This elevated expressway (one of Robert Moses's many automobile-shuttling brainchildren) loomed in the distance, casting a shadow on the mid-afternoon sun, and I realized that I’m on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border.

Turning west towards the city, I stopped again--noticing the unfamiliar-in-Brooklyn need to crane my neck--in order to see the tops of the multi-storied glass buildings that flanked me on both sides. My friend's boyfriend Garrett lives in a huge condo on North 10th Street. Referring back to the cycle of gentrification, Garrett is one step ahead of Cassie in that he is a thirty-something doctor, more of a middle-aged professional than a Generation Y yuppie. Thinking of Garrett and condominia, I don’t think I got a grasp of gentrification before I looked at the new Craigslist listings for Greenpoint apartments. Clicking through a see of capslock and exclamation points, I would be hard-pressed to find a listing that is not in a luxury condo building:

$2650/1br - MASSIVE *KING SIZED* 1BR! WASHER/DRYER~MODERN LUXURY___**NO FEE!!** (GREENPOINT STEPS TO G TRAIN)

$2100 / 1br - CONDO QUALITY 1BR IN TOP TIER GRENNPOINT BUILD. ELEV,PARKING,DECK,GYM (GREENPOINT).

$4000 / 2br - Stunning 2 bedroom Duplex , All new, Perfect connection to All!! - (Greenpoint)

In 2005, the New York City Department of Planning proposed its plan to rezone nearly 200 blocks in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. The rezoning, which included height bonuses along the waterfront (ostensibly to build more spacious low-income housing to accommodate the booming Brooklyn populations) converted many parts of the previously low-slung, industrial neighborhoods to high-rise condos. One of these is Garrett's apartment building: a seven-story glass box that boasts an elevator, gym, and doorman. North 10th seems a world apart from the sidewalks of Franklin Street and Manhattan Avenue, but in reality is only a few blocks away. Of the plan, Jane Jacobs wrote a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, saying,

Let’s think first about revitalization successes; they are great and good teachers. They don’t result from gigantic plans and show-off projects, in New York or in other cities either. They build up gradually and authentically from diverse human communities; successful city revitalization builds itself on these community foundations, as the community-devised plan 197a does.

Jacobs goes on to criticize the top-down logic of the rezoning plan (calling it an “ugly and intractable mistake”), favoring the community initiative 197A, which kept most buildings intact, and did not drastically distort the scale or function of the old neighborhoods.

The City's rezoning plan was eventually approved, and in a 2006 article for the New York Times, Jeff Vandam wrote, “Across [McCarren Park], on its southern end, the brown dome of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration is no longer the tallest item on the skyline. No fewer than four luxury condo projects, all on the same block of Bayard Street, are in various stages of completion. Three will be entirely new, while a fourth, called the Ikon, is a hollowed-out commercial building that will be topped by a gym and floor-through penthouses.”

Researching this and seeing Garrett’s prohibitively expensive, glass-walled condo, I felt like Jane Joseph, as though everything I loved about Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street is changing as rapidly as Soho once did. Michael Sorkin’s problem with this phase of gentrification, as articulated in his chapters on Soho and Tribeca, is that it represents the power of some neighborhoods (or even parts of neighborhoods) to pool all of their wealth, effectively draining the resources of places around it.

Riding back over the bridge, I felt buoyed on the warm wind, my newfound cycling skills, and a day spent in a place so radically different from what I'm used to. I'm also terrifically out of shape, and was heaving like hell when I decided to take a break on the bridge's first steep incline. The J train was crackling along above me, setting sunlight glinting off of its silver skin. I started to walk alongside my bike, and as soon as I hit the stretch of flat top, I got back on my Biria bike and kicked off. And I’m passing by those cardboard boxes again, and I’m wondering, are these ugly stupid fucking projects really any better than Greenpoint for the working-class? Although sometimes it's hard to not feel smug and condescending in my condemnation of them.

At the end of the day, seeing the houses on the Lower East Side reminded me of my own problems with the amorphous blob that is gentrification. When neighborhoods get nicer, poor people need to move to make room for the rich, but they don’t move to nicer places. For example: poor people live on the Lower East Side gets better/safer, rich people move to the Lower East Side, the poor move to the projects that line the East River. On Franklin Avenue and in McCarren Park, a sense of place is found in sidewalk interactions and conversations, not in glass walls or balcony square-footage or high price tags. In the New York Times article "Signs of Transformation in Neighborly Greenpoint," Amy Itrocaso is a 26-year-old casting director who moved to Greenpoint as many have, looking for lower rents and what she calls its “neighborly nature”–families tending their gardens, shopkeepers tending their sidewalks. When asked about her opinions on Greenpoint’s changing population, “I worry about Greenpoint becoming Yuppie-ville. I watch the people like me get off the subway and I think, 'What are they doing here?' I sort of resent it. I want to still see the families sitting on their stoops.” Gentrification and urban renewal are complicated in ways that I never envisioned, ways that a study of Greenpoint only began to open up for me.



Sources:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/greenpointwill/greenoverview.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/15/nyregion/signs-of-transformation-in-neighborly-greenpoint.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/05/local/letter-to-mayor-bloomberg
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/realestate/30living.html