124 is where I am at. Sethe’s 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio, where the townspeople quicken their pace as they pass by. Aside from the red pool of the ghost’s light, I find dereliction. A house abandoned by the men, it has survived the grandmother Baby Suggs. Now only Sethe, her daughter Denver and the ghost Beloved dwell here. And Sethe “is not a normal woman in a normal house.”¹

—

He resents stillness: these muscles and bones demand motion. The skin spoils for sweat. But he must cut short the delicious heat of play and head home. The curfew is pending in the air. And as he plays deep into the evening, past the strict time, he is coming down heavy and terrified. He is late, slowly following the homebound path. At home, his greeting is not returned. Shame and guilt press upon his frame, and yet he is a presence without mass or volume. The density of his body turns and shifts into something to be guarded against by silence, like a harmless but unwelcome phantom better ignored. He has not mixed his energy with the food preparation, the dish washing, the sweeping of the kitchen floor. He is not of this house. For hours, he sits on the porch, startled to flight whenever the door opens. A fugitive who has returned home but cannot yet enter without the rituals. So, he begins to sweep the front yard in the night (taboo) and tries to weed in the backyard (also taboo). He goes to the kitchen, sniffing for food, looking for incomplete tasks. He is grateful to find water soaking through the burnt coat of dough stuck to the pot’s bottom. He scrapes and scrubs. Soon, labor softens the guilt, thins the shame, and, gradually, his solidity materializes in relation to this house. It is an event of physiology and psychology. He knows he can claim the covered bowl of banku and okro soup: his fingers won’t pass through the ceramic. This was me, when I was a child. Home was earned by labor, penitent or resentful.

—

I want to cut right through to the word house. It is opaque. It ends at the Indo-European root kus, which is of uncertain meaning but is related to ku and sku, which both mean to cover, to conceal,² from which we have skin and hide.  

—

In my wandering days in the university, I had nowhere to sleep and always carried my bag with me, and held (hid) within it only what was important and imperishable, and what was important but perishable I devoured immediately and I think of this and am reminded of Le Guin’s  Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and I slip, just then, into the essay, which, in this particular moment of thought, emerges for me as a hoarding of imperishable notions, while the perishable ones (the sentences only delightful at the site of inspiration, the white flashes) are removed during the process of editing, of socializing the text for the world beyond or bringing out, midwifing, a new skin from a mature one. 

—

I reflect on my attempts and listen for a method. I am to bring the text home, home in on the ideas and establish the boundaries of the argument. You must express your thoughts clearly. What I hear: You must write clearly. And they probably mean the latter expressed as the former. You must first think clearly, then write it.  Sethe and 124 offer me nothing clear or straightforward.

—

A reading of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum I find useful to my way of thinking about being and being at home is this: I think therefore I am; and, therefore, I must have annihilated all that was not me or was before me. To be (certain), the whole world must not be (certain). If I continue to construe the Cartesian radical skepticism of the entire world as the slashing and burning required for the settling plan of the Thinking I, then this being’s “home” is initiated and maintained by a globalized question, a quest to unsettle the other.

—

Wynter is steady in her guide when she elaborates how “Man” is a specific, historically constructed genre of being, universalizing itself. This Man whose other is not woman, but the Mad, also needs his lebensraum, which operates on a logic of containing or liquidating the dysselected beings, the indio, the negro, the Arab, “invasive species,” “the poor and jobless co-classified with the Mad,” while expanding the lifeworlds of the naturally selected Man, the Sane, Rational Thinking I. ³ 

—   

124 is viscid with undergrowth and “the rest of the world [is] bald” compared to it.⁴ An abnormal house teeming with flora and critters and kin belonging to other registers of being. Is it a genre of worlding indifferent to the monologic violence of homemaking, its quest of unsettling? 

                                                                                           —   

If the Cogito’s slashing and burning razes the world bald, as the requirement of its being at home, its territorialized settling, does its inwardness, in contrast, also thicken and mat together like 124?  

—

It is strange to me to think directly about the home even though spates of my homelessness should define home’s edges. In my infancy, my childhood, my adolescence and now my adulthood, the home has avoided form. Whatever it was, it never set: a dry, inviscid flow incapable of clinging to my clothes or hair, that is my sense of home. My mother, my only caregiver, moved from region to region, compelled by the state, and I followed her, becoming used to being a newcomer till my final year in junior high school. The first institution that offered a solid form to the notion of a home was the boarding house in senior high school. And I don’t want to talk about that. 

—

“Home-training” radiates the warm odor of the surveilling, punitive caregiver. Discipline, another name for this everywhere else, is the mandate of the home or the nuclear family. Its image and composition are replete in former colonies: the oedipal triad of the law giving father (colonial governor) curtailing the polymorphously perverse desires of the child (the colonized) for the pleasure-bearing mother (the metropole and the conserved natural resources of the colony).⁵ The nuclear family, a noble node in modern statecraft. Discipline is necessary for its civilizing project upon the not-yet-human child. Desire, which is ambiguous, dangerous, wild, must be rerouted, domesticated, made autonomously congruent with the state. Punishment, too, is required for this, but the most enlightened aspiration of this mandate prefers the subtlety of discipline. Like the borstal or juvenile penitentiary specific to modern Europe, the oedipal home’s product is the “docile and capable” body,⁶ that is, the normal subject, the model colony, the Sane who can keep a job, mortgage and a family to reproduce other normal subjects for the state. The nuclear family is a miniature of the modern state, granted the monopoly of legitimate total violence over domestic dependents.  

—

Force gathers to generate pressure over a surface, over skin. Violence is, to my mind, an intensification of forces that already exist and act on our beings, making and unmaking us, forces like the tendencies in thoughts and feelings, the tensions within matter itself, the attitudes of spaces and times. But there are technologies of mobilization, like weapons, that fashion on command spectacular forms of violence, brutality, that breach the membrane, injuring the mind; or webs of oppression that are atmospheric and so pervasive that they become imperceptible like a faint scent in the air, conditioning our will and in most desires, making obsolete the need for brutality. How can one distinguish hegemony from autonomy, when the punishing rod of the Law must have dematerialized and become common sense, underpinning our reflexes, our prejudices and habits as a civil subject? We are self-policed, disciplined, bound by our home training, knowing the right thing that also turns out to be what the state wants. And the other side, those who fail to become self-policed, fail to be at home, are they not condemned to policing, to being chained on their wrists and ankles, to forcibly inhabiting institutions under the many guises of madness?

—

In Twi, the predominant Akan language, to go mad and to create madness are the same phrase. I am hesitant to proceed with my formulation. I consider the phenomenon of homophony in Twi, and revisit the theories of the pun but they are under verbal humor studies. I demand more than humor. I reconsider: what if this homophony is only possible in writing but not in the speaking of Twi? Afe can mean “a comb” or “a year” and it causes the amateur philologist in me to spin a yarn to weave connections between Akan self-grooming and indigenous horology, but then I remember that the orthographic standardization of our tonal language is why the nasalized e is aerated to make afe (comb) impersonate afe (year). I hesitate, therefore, in saying that in the Akan imaginary, as evidenced in the above pair of phrases, to go mad is also to create madness.  

—

The word ɔdehye “translates” as royal, free-born. It combines ɔde-, owner, in a sense that blends property as a personal attribute with property as possession, with –hye boundary.⁷  Ɔhene “translates” as king, emperor or chief, a shortening of the expression ne ho hene (his/her/their itchy skin). Historically speaking, as Konadu is quick to clarify, the etymology implies that the founding patriarch, due to his occupation as a hunter, often itched all over.⁸ Perhaps he brushed with poisonous flora during his excursions through the untamed forest. 

—

I settle on the skin, its irritation. I am quick to do other things with this image of a sovereign itching all over. To be frank I see the dialectics of madness and civilization. Yes, I am reading the history of the Akan origin myth implied by this etymology, filtering it through Foucault and Wynter, as a dual emergence of the Sovereign Man and his other, the Mad Man. While in Foucault, the birth of Reason figures against the containment of Unreason,⁹ in ɔdehye and ɔhene, I contemplate the risk of saying, At the very moment the ɔdehye emerges, through the instance the boundary is drawn and owned, and it becomes his skin, an ontological irritability sets in and the sovereign begins to itch and this is an enactment of the iconic representation of the onset of madness in West African visual culture, that is, the sudden onslaught of an unexplainable itching over the whole body. 

—

In seeking a method, as beaten path, a disciplined wake, perhaps slashed and burnt towards home, something to follow after,¹⁰ like the Christian straight and narrow, in seeking that for my thinking and writing, I learn from Sethe’s abode, its openness, the mobius stripping up its stairs, dimmed to fullness, entangled, giving in and giving on and grafting together like hair matting into hair, like an undisturbed rainforest teeming wild with supreme vitality, where the intruding sovereign is touched with the itching-unto-madness and the wise civilian hurriedly bypasses. A delirium surges from it, veering my thoughts off the beaten, slashed-and-burnt track (and do they not say in Twi that the person cutting the path knows nothing of the crookedness of their wake) and I go spreading through these (ab)errant, derelict paths. I see before me unfinished concepts tenanted by squatter-phrases or doors hanging on hinges. The incompleteness of thought, the hesitations, the sudden flights and reversals, the crooked wake left to rewild and dissolve into the underbrush, are these not the features of the derelict method.¹¹

—

The Church conditioned me to anticipate the union between infliction and affection (for whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son […];¹² And Yhwh has delighted to crush [His only begotten son]¹³), between freedom and slavery (having been freed from sin, you became servants¹⁴ of righteousness¹⁵). Seeming contradictions, I know, but I can scent the heady logic and am still susceptible to its seductive power. Consequently, against this Christian understanding, I must instrumentalize a paranoid hermeneutics when reading idioms of domesticating power, which come wrapped in affectionate words. Hartman, whom I follow in this process, knew that the master was the one who said “Stay put” and “Don’t go.” She was not surprised that the Akan word for slave, ɔdɔnkɔ, was derived from the phrase, ɔdɔ nkɔ (love, don’t go)¹⁶. It makes one think differently of the Adinkra symbol that says, Ɔdɔ nyera ofie kwan (The lover does not lose the homebound path). It makes me also think of my young scofflaw self, knowing the homebound path, but taking the longest route, going off track many times, because he was terrified of his mother. And, really, does this revelatory connection between affection and slavery in Twi not indict every Akan discourse on love?  Hartman adds that it is one thing to “stay” and another to “live” and she really grasps the distinction between those “of the house” who merely stay and those “of the blood” who live on through inheritance, the transmission of possessions and rights.¹⁷ I do not know if anyone told her about ofie-nipa. 

—

To reduce home to its roots, I push beyond the Middle English hoom, to the earlier hame, go past its kins in Old Frisian and Old Swedish hem, not forgetting the Middle Dutch and Old High German heim. From Gothic haims, to Old Norse heimr, I am frustrated with circularity: the meaning passes around home, homestead, farm, village. But a further thrust, into Greek, note the h harden into a k, brings me to kome, which is also a village. But it is derived from keitai¹⁸ which means to lie down, akin to kayati in Sanskrit, and the Greco-Sanskrit alloy ferries me to the Indo-European root, kei, which means to rest. Now this kei, is the root for the Latin ciuis, a villager or citizen, and ciuitas, which is city-state.¹⁹ 

—

Before the home, there was the prison, from the perspective of the captive. Before there was the ofie-nipa, there was the ofie-ase. Ofie²⁰ stands aloof from the terror it hosts. Ofie-nipa, literally “translates” as home-person. Commonly thought of as a familiar person with whom one lives but to whom one is not related by “blood.” Ofie-nipa is both family and not family. They are of the house but not of the blood. 

—

I was afraid of being disowned many times as a child. I know now that it was unlikely that my mother would have abandoned me in jail had I been arrested for my delinquency. It was called nkɔla bɔne²¹ school, the local version of the borstal or juvenile penitentiary, and I was warned that I would be sent there if I did not respond to discipline. On the porch, whenever I violated curfew, I fantasized to my horror what it meant to be not of this home, this house, to be exposed to the government’s iron fingers scratching through the streets, to be collected among the “hardened homeless children” into the juvenile penitentiary, where I would be completely forgotten and remade into a mutilated being. Against my express wish for a coed school, I was sent to an all-male boarding school instead. I was thirteen.  

—

If the definition of the enslaved life as conditioned by total domination, natal alienation, and general dishonor²² is to be taken as largely true, then the figure of the enslaved can be further construed as bare life, as flesh,²³ without skin, without boundary, bio-available to the house, the body, or even the skin of the master.²⁴ The enslaved is the raw material by which the sovereign fashions himself, his taste, his dignity.²⁵

—

Familus, the Latin for family, familiarity, the familiar, means domestic servants, slaves.²⁶

—

Knowing what we know, how might we read this English saying: familiarity breeds contempt?  

—

The Ghanaian Pentecostal Christian reads the familiar spirit in the Bible as a very specific kind of social agency originating from precolonial kinship systems. The Christian, Europeanized into petit bourgeois aspirations for a nuclear family, inherits also the “normal” anxieties, that “reasonable” paranoid opposition to  entanglements with kinship systems, with the home village, a paranoia brought into relief by the popular trope of village people or ofie-nipa. 

—

There is a persuasive Marxist interpretation that can deepen our understanding of this logic of contradiction between the countryside (rural village) and the city (urban center). Another is the Fanonian analysis of double alienation in the colonial subject. But I take a colloquial approach, because Nigerians and Ghanaians recognize this expression. Ofie-nipa, in this sense, is akin to village people.

—

The nuclear family aspires to the barracks: the image of discipline is soldiery. The disciplined follows orders, like the soldier. Is it insightful that the word soldier, etymologically, means one who is paid?²⁷ And while I am on the subject, is salary, in a similar vein, not the money given to soldiers to buy salt, le sal?²⁸ There is something improper in this connection between discipline and cash. Where is the morality?  

 —

If I say the nuclear family home is a moral technology, I mean that it is a factory for producing morally responsible human beings. Not only in the sense of a child becoming socialized into a normal human subject, but also the adult becoming obedient. Women, keeping in mind queer folk who are perceived, read, inscribed as women, know intimately what violence this technology deals in their body, its casual thefts. A question presses out of the throng of other questions: Is the home—this genre of dwelling universalized by colonization and its Thinking I—necessarily desirable? 

—

A white child grows from a white family to a white world as a normal subject. A black child is not so lucky, because contradiction finds them when they enter the white world, and they encounter the abnormal category they did not know they embodied and it comes sedimenting in their skin, blackening it, damning their mind to a painful flight towards or from whiteness. The white world produces black psychopathology, Fanon says, calling it sociogeny.²⁹ Could I extend this reading to the production of African writing and thoughts?

—

Sethe’s 124 is discontinuous with the “normal” white nation, hence its abnormal domesticity. The black American home survives the plantation as something other to the white family,³⁰ which is a microcosm of the white state. The hinge between the formerly enslaved and slaving house remains, however fraught, with the fugitive. Sethe, in Ohio, is still oriented to Sweet Home, the plantation house, the territory of her bondage, in Kentucky.³¹ She thinks of this plantation house because the fugitive never forgets from where she is escaping. I want to think alongside the process of escape or forced errantry. 

—

The maroon, runaway slave, convict, victim of sexual assault, the abused queer child, simply put, any escapee, has a goal to flee, to be anywhere but here. Fugitivity is vectored outwards, from under the oppressive edifice (the plantation field and house, the shed, the bedroom, the basement) and its suffocating atmosphere, its saturating violence. Wherever the fugitive flies to, the gravity of the edifice and its structure, clings to the body, accumulates in their matter as history, as the chokecherry tree in Sethe’s back.³² There remains a rootedness in this flight, a missile compelled away from the intolerant root stock. She becomes within this organized system of knowing, of feeling and inhabiting, absorbing also the forces by which she was imprisoned, this paranoid reading of hints, clues, etymologies, x-raying through the flesh to the skeletal subtext,³³  mouthing under her breath the polysemous text of the world, a universe of signs calculating to mislead, to misguide her into the bedroom, that goddamned home, and she goes spilling away from “normal,” from “mother,” running out mad and murderous. 

—

What happens when there is no flight, nor organized nomadism away from the brutality? Recede into absolute quietus (a kind of death) or, or, or gush the screams out without the thought of the bit in your mouth? When the iron and cold used to keep you fixed cannot restrain the soft rebellion of your will and the bodymind is divided, dividing into molecules, and assuming the indiscipline of matter ardently vibrating, and, and, wait, I am intuiting here the schizophrenic process, where the embodied consciousness loses its organs, its molar organization, and bathes in the molecular body of our entangled, thick world, where well-sealed wisdoms loosen and language does not adhere or cohere because the glue is now goo and now sublimating with the structures and conventions and practices of traditions and narratives and self-correcting methods³⁴ and it is getting crazy out here because, look, there goes the mindbody fragmenting even more and fluidifying and sucking into the pith of the social world, soaking into links to the disciplining….  

—

Christianity for me was a flight from property. I was enslaved to righteousness. I owned nothing and preferred it that way. Even after my crisis of faith, this relationship to domestic entanglement did not fade. It mapped cleanly onto the attitude of skepticism. The figure who fit this character of the religious fanatic or the unremitting skeptic was the insane person. From both sides of belief, I looked upon insanity as a desirable condition. It was the touchstone of absolute faith and absolute nihilism. Even before I became a nomadic Christian teen, even before the nihilistic years of my early twenties, I was fond of the social category of insanity. I mean, the fuzzy category of adults (I have never seen an insane child) who simply roam. I remember, as a child, attempting to speak with mad people, being confident that I could learn their method of expression. I was fascinated with the maximalists who bedecked themselves with every found material—wood, metal, plastic, fabric—collecting, layering, hoarding, and wading through the public air with their habitation/clothing/atmosphere around them; and fascinated with the minimalists, solemn performers of nakedness, who scandalized public morality with exposed genitals. 

—

An Akan proverb says, If someone goes mad, the person went mad from home.³⁵ One can interpret it as: madness originates from home. The word for home, ofie, has in it the word fi which, when doubled, is fifi, a verb that means to germinate, and when inflected as ofiri, a verb that means to originate from. I am getting at the root, the idea encoded in it, in order to point to the social signification of madness in terms of the home. If a person goes mad, the madness originates, germinates, from home. Madness originates from and is continuous with home. This extends the other expression of madness, which is, The mind is not at home or The mind is wandering. Here the Twi homophony of being and having adds texture. Adwene no nni fie can mean The mind is not at home or The mind has no home. After an appropriate amount of hesitation, I proceed to say, Insanity can be read as a rupture of both being at home and the capacity to possess a home.

—

The phrase ofie-nipa is euphemistic, bifurcating meaning, directing the subtext to the appropriate receiver and keeping the novice confusedly entertained on the surface. It anticipates both the paranoid and the initiated reader. One must be suspicious, then, when thinking through this admission of one’s being as hinged to a home. Twi discards grammatical gender, so one cannot see clearly the sexed enfleshment of this bare life bound to the home. In the dictionary, ofie-nipa is glossed as a domestic slave.³⁶ Ofie-ase, literally “under the house,” the indigenous Akan prison, which was often the underground chamber of the palace, is relevant in composing the domestic scene. The ɔdehye (royal) lived on the domestic upper floor (ofie) and, ofie-nipa, in the carceral underside (ofie-ase). From another angle, ofie-nipa is possibly the shortening of ofie-ase-nipa, the person from beneath the house. 

—

This image of the suppressed being erupting, appearing, crossing the threshold, is it not haunting?  

—

Adofo, the musician, sings: When ofie-nipa ruins you, it deeply hurts. You will wander with your affliction without finding remedy. Ofie-nipa is the evil midwife who, instead of burying your placenta under a tree thriving in your hometown, throws it on a refuse dump. He conveys ofie-nipa as the small critter that gnaws against your skin under the folds of your cloth.³⁷ Notice how she becomes the shape of the singer’s nightmares. But Adofo’s ofie-nipa, it should be noted, works by opportunity. She is hidden in your clothes, biting you, hidden (hide, skin) at home, using her intimate knowledge of the domestic to cause your ruin. Okɔmfo Kwaadɛe’s ofie-nipa is overtly adversarial. He sings: Ofie-nipa has destroyed me, she pulls my finger ring through my shoulder, every day she makes me trip as I wander.³⁸

—

An Akan proverb says, If a critter will/can bite you, it is in/from your cloth.³⁹ If I read the cloth as skin and hide, and by analogy and etymology, as house, I have recomposed a domestic scene in which to restage the paranoid situation of the one who owns the house, the upper floor of the palace. The proverb insists, it is in/from your cloth. The critter, in many situations, refers to ofie-nipa. Say, the house is the palace (called ahenfie, in Twi, meaning the king’s home), say ofie-nipa, a captive woman who used to be beneath it, has been domesticated, through rape, and absorbed into the skin, the body, the dignity of this king; say these are true, then does “in/from your cloth” not ring like a reckoning? A fine dialectic between the master and the bondservant, the reversal and sublation, the recognition, and so on, but I return to the itching skin of the wandering hunter who becomes king, and the reversal, the settled king itching and wandering out of his own home. If I stitch here the reading of madness in the Akan imaginary as the double rupture of being at home and possessing a home, then this threat is most pronounced in the Akan free born, the ɔdehye, ultimately the king, the ɔhene. Does it now make sense that the modern Akan subject (ɔdehye) in our colloquial discourse is suspicious of the home and its slave ofie-nipa, who emerges from beneath, to haunt him, causing him to wander (like a madman)? 

—

Balakrishnan calls it the prison of the womb,⁴⁰ this gendered incarceration in Akan societies. That the indigenous prisons were peopled with women, is something I read as a perverse result of the immense value of the female kin in matrilineal Akan societies. The female kin or even wife of the debtor was a great assurance of payment, being the vein of lineage. Moreover, the threat of her pregnancy (through rapes), while imprisoned, heightened the stakes for the debtor. In the case of pregnancy, it is often a fine, hard cash in gold or pounds, that is paid to satisfy the man (the kin or husband). The woman remains captive though. This history of imported (captive or unredeemed) women goes to the very beginnings of Akan societies. These women often were captured from other communities. Therefore, she was isolated from kin, in the prison, creating one crucial condition for her enslavement. I am inclined to read it as a strategy of patriarchal aggrandizement in a matrilineal ethnic group; a strategy by powerful Akan men to solve the “matrilineal paradox.” Her impregnation absorbed her and her descendants into the man’s personal property, stripping her from her matrilineage, where she would have remained even during marriage. So, this was not marriage. It was something else. She was different from the wives, who were freeborn women with enforceable kinship rights. She was different from the pawn whose redemption time had not yet expired. She was, in every condition, akin to the slave, ɔdɔnkɔ, with all the connotations of care and desire softening the dominance into intimacy. 

—

I sit in the company of ofie-nipa and Sethe and the home reclaimed by the critters and ghosts and flora and the dense padding of moss and lichen and humus. 

—

I sit also with the self-identifying Latin ipse which alchemizes self into the possessive host⁴¹ and the Akan ɔde (self-possession and proprietorship). Is it derelict to leave this tantalizing parallel suggestiveness and not follow the path? 

—

One morning, in the front yard, an injured bird. A wild bounding creature of delicate bonework. Its brown fur is matted black with air-dried blood cutting aslant its slim neck. The left wing is almost disarticulated at the shoulder, hanging an inch lower in a folded position. It is limping too. You have escaped mortal danger, I say. By instinct or some obstinate self-assertion, it attempts to fly from my shadow. Soon, it understands its fate but does not permit contact. Here, this compound with its solicitous but respectful human, is your asylum. On the floor, it finds oats and rice and some crushed eggshells and a cup of fresh water daily refilled. I climb to the top floor to watch it eat and drink. I surveil. I, the host of this hospital, the doctor, I monitor. When it rains the bird crouches in a corner of the porch. Against the scorching sun it finds the cool shadows of trailing tomato and black-eyed bean stems. Outside the front door is now a charged viscous field for me. Slowly, access areas and no-go zones gain clear boundaries. I must lift my feet as I walk because a careless sound startles it, upsets the convalescence and pricks my conscience. I cut my paths in relative distance, avoiding the ornitho-domestic regions: porch, under the tomatoes and beans? I never see its healing, but I want to know whether the thin band of blood flakes off or hardens to scab. But I still see it pecking up the oats and rice and fine eggshells. I surveil.  I see its shit with milky streaks in little circles on the white-tiled porch, dried black or still wet green. I monitor. I see failed attempts at flight. Time passes, as usual, featurelessly. For days I see no bird at all. Not in the porch corner, not under the trailing stems. I fear it has succumbed to its injury. I anticipate the odor, the bloating, the black moist feathers. Over a month now and I smell nothing.

Notes:

1. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved.
2. Skeat, Walter W. 1910. An Etymological Dictionary of English Language. 
3. Wynter, Sylvia. 1989. “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles.” World Literature Today 637-648.
4. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved
5. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
6. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison.
7. Christaller, Rev. Johannes Gottleib. 1881. A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshii (Chwee, Twi).
8. Konadu, Kwasi. 2016. “Quest for the River, Creation of the Path.” In The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics, by Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbells.
9. Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
10. Skeat, Walter W. 1910. An Etymological Dictionary of English Language.
11. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks.
12. Hebrews 12:6 (Literal Standard Version)
13. Isaiah 53:10 (Literal Standard Version)
14. It should be noted that the Greek dolos, here, “servant,” is “slave” in other translations, including the New American Standard Bible, English Standard Version and the New King James Version.
15. Romans 6:18 (Literal Standard Version).
16. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
17. Ibid.
18. In Twi, kɛtɛ means a woven sleeping mat. An interesting coincidence that can go farther, if one also knows that that word is a contested relative of the popular cloth called Kente. That they are both woven is interesting, but mat and cloth also hold other significations, especially in our proverbs around “the visitor,” “the citizen” and the “the mad,” and these can enrich our understanding of dignity, belonging and madness, perhaps for another study.
19. Skeat, Walter W. 1910. An Etymological Dictionary of English Language.
20. Ofie means home in Twi.
21. Nkɔla bɔne translates as bad children. Still unsure if they existed then or still exist now.
22. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death.
23. Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White and in Color: Essays of American Literature and Culture, by Hortense J. Spillers
24. Graeber, David. 2011. “Honor and Degradation or on the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization.” In Debt: The First 5000 years, by David Graeber
25. Gikandi, Simon. 2014. Slavery and the Culture of Taste
26. Skeat, Walter W. 1910. An Etymological Dictionary of English Language.
27. Skeat, Walter W. 1910. An Etymological Dictionary of English Language.
28. Ibid.
29. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks.
30. Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In Black, White and in Color: Essays of American Literature and Culture, by Hortense J. Spillers.
31. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved.
32. Ibid.
33. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
34. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
35. Amfo, Nana Aba Appiah, Ekua Essumanma Houphouet, Eugene K. Dordoye, and Rachel Thompson. 2018. ““Insanity is from home”: The expression of mental health challenges.”
36. Christaller, Rev. Johannes Gottleib. 1881. A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshii (Chwee, Twi).
37. Adofo, Obuoba J. A. 1976. “Ofie Nipa Sei wo a.” Nya Asem Hwe.
38. Kwadee, Okomfour. 2002. “Ofie Nipa.” Me Toaso.
39. Adinkra Symbols Page
40. Balakrishnan, Sarah. 2023. “Prison of the Womb: Gender Incarceration, and Capitalism on Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500-1957.” Comparative Studies in Society and History
41. Derrida, Jacques. 2023. Hospitality (Vol 1).

*Photo by Augustine Wong on Unsplash