by Serena Owusua Dankwa
“Can I give you a peck?” Janet asks, as I am switching off the recording device. We are sitting in the dim hall of Janet’s friend, Vida. It is a hot afternoon and the blue walls of the narrow hall do not help to reduce the heat crawling in through the entrance next to me. The door needs to stay half open, even as we are talking about the intimate and the erotic – no need to perform secrecy by shutting doors. Facing me is another curtained opening that leads to a small kitchen stuffed with buckets, charcoal pots, metal tubs and piles of mortars and pestles of all sizes. A rectangle of light falls on the heavy boots that Janet removed after returning from the military campus. Janet, her yellow shirt unbuttoned, fixes me with her eyes, her compact, groomed hands resting on Vida’s armchair that is still wrapped in plastic, possibly never to be unwrapped.
She had arranged that I interview her at Sister Vida’s place. It promised more privacy than the bustling compound Janet herself lived in, where she shared rooms with her mother and brother. Sister Vida’s compound was located in an airier corner of their busy working-class neighbourhood of central Accra. She and Janet were more than friends. Not long after the two became lovers, she had decided to sponsor Janet for an unpaid internship with Ghana’s military vehicle repair services. I was eager to interview Janet that day. She was the first woman I had met in Ghana who was articulate about her same-sex desires and about ‘knowing women’ intimately – from an awareness of women’s capacity for same-sex love (Dankwa 2021, 122), to the knowledge of how to transform passionate friendships into kinship. When we met, however, I was still unsure whether I was ready to deal with a topic that I barely dared to address when talking to friends, let alone family, in Ghana. I hoped to gain clarity by listening to Janet, telling her about my research interest and getting to know more about her life – with and without women.
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