I am Ghanaian. Black. Afro-diasporic. Afro-German. Almost forty.
I am a daughter of Ghanaian migrants who came to Germany and, somewhere along the way, began turning themselves into Germans – and later into German-Ghanaians.
I am first generation.
The first in my family to graduate from the German Abitur. The first to attend university. A woman who has known poverty, social mobility, small towns and big cities. A woman who has loved Black people, BIPOC people and white people. A woman who has survived toxic and violent relationships and somehow learned to remain emotionally available.
I am a mother.
A single mother raising a dark-skinned mixed teenage boy in a world that will constantly try to tell him what his Blackness means.
I am also a woman whose body carries an invisible physical disability, yet I am constantly told how “strong” I am.
I have been called beautiful – sometimes qualified by the uncomfortable phrase “beautiful for a Black woman”. I once made it into the final 40 women of Face of Africa Germany.
I have been called a psychopath by an ex.
And I have been told by FLINTA* that I seem deeply at peace with myself.
Perhaps both can exist.
Perhaps contradiction is not a failure of identity.
Perhaps contradiction is the identity.
This blog is where I write from that place.
From Ghana and Germany. From Blackness and Germanness. From diaspora and belonging. From motherhood, class, migration, love, violence, beauty, disability, privilege and politics.
From the strange privilege of having a German passport that allows me to travel through African countries and introduce my son to possibilities beyond Europe.
From knowing that I am fortunate – while refusing to pretend that fortune erases the things I have survived.
I write because there are things that academic language cannot hold.
And because sometimes a poem can tell the truth more honestly than an argument ever could.
Welcome.
This is not a blog about having figured life out.
It is a blog about living inside the questions.
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