The Apology Letter I Wrote To My Mother After Having Some Ghanaian Waakye & Jollof In The Middle of Amsterdam
How The Second Last Supper With A Dutch-Ghanaian Brought Up Strong Emotions
ON THE 12TH OF DECEMBER 2024 MY FRIEND [AKWASI] TREATED ME TO AN INCREDIBLE LOCAL GHANAIAN RESTAURANT IN THE NETHERLANDS. AS THE AROMA OF ALL THESE DELICACIES FILLED THE ROOM, I WAS OVERCOME WITH LONGING EVERYTHING I HAD LEFT BEHIND AT A PLACE I ONCE CALLED HOME. A PLACE THAT MY MOTHER STILL CALLS HOME. I WROTE THIS LETTER TO SOOTH THIS LONGING :
Dear Mummy,
I am in a strange land in a strange place and yet I had the most familiar meal today — Waakye and some jollof. It didn’t I smell like yours. It didn’t taste like yours. But it didn’t have to — all of you was there on the plate and with that all the memories I still carry. And then I remembered why I cannot be near you. I am sorry for being an artist, for carrying this strange burden of wanting to put the unspeakable into words and images when you might have preferred I carry the certainty of actuarial tables and calculated risks. I am sorry for choosing a path that seems, from where you stand, to lead nowhere you can proudly point to. You raised me in the church. You taught me to pray, to kneel, to clasp my hands tightly as if the world depended on it. And yet, somewhere along the way, I loosened that grip. I found myself staring too long at the colors of a stained-glass window, wondering not what it meant, but how it was made. You must have seen it then, the beginnings of this divergence, this small rebellion of curiosity that grew into something larger, more unwieldy, more—to you—dangerous.
I imagine you, sitting in the home we once shared, surrounded by reminders of a life well-measured. The neatness of it all: the framed photos, the polished furniture, the books on actuarial science and theology lined up with precision. You, the woman who married a man who could calculate life expectancy, now watching a son who spends his days trying to capture the fleeting, the intangible, the inexplicable. I imagine your dismay as you try to reconcile the son you raised with the man who stands before you, openly gay in a country where that alone is an act of defiance, a country that legislates against the very essence of who I am.
It is not lost on me that I have failed you in ways that matter to you. I have not given you the comfort of certainty, the pride of convention, the ease of saying, “This is my son, the engineer, the doctor, the man who followed the script.” Instead, I have given you the discomfort of ambiguity, the burden of explaining to your friends why your son’s name appears in awkward corners of art magazines and not corporate directories.
Mother, I am sorry for the ways I have hurt you, for the ways my life has made yours more difficult. But I am not sorry for being who I am. I cannot be. This is the life I have, the only one I know how to live. And if there is anything I have learned from you, it is to live it with as much truth and love as I can muster.
With all my love,
Joseph
🖤