The River Remembers My Name

I was born where the river meets the sea. In Ada Foah, salt and sweet water argue every morning, and the fishermen understand both languages. My grandmother said the Volta remembers every child it has cradled. I did not believe her until I left.

America taught me a different silence. The kind that fills airports and grocery aisles, the kind that does not know your father's name. I began to photograph strangers because I was becoming one. Behind the lens, I could be still. I could listen the way my grandmother listened to the water.

When I return to Ada, the elders do not ask where I have been. They ask what I have seen. There is a difference. A place is not the same as a seeing. I show them photographs and they nod, not at the images, but at the boy who left and came back with eyes still open.

Migration is a kind of dying. You leave a version of yourself at the departure gate and hope the ancestors escort him home. Some days I feel him walking beside me in Brooklyn, barefoot, confused by the snow. I do not send him away. I let him look.

The river remembers my name because I have not stopped saying it. Mershack. Kabu. Aklie. Three syllables that hold a lineage longer than any passport. When I photograph the children of Ada, I am not documenting them. I am asking the water to remember them too.

This is the work. Not the images. The remembering.