My father has gone mad.
His verses read, ‘You are a whore’. He tied your waist with customary rites, snatched your virginity when you were just seventeen. He recklessly burdened you with five beautiful daughters and packed them all like firewood in front of a dying hearth, piled high, yet none touched a school certificate.
His unequal rhymes sang that you are useless, you are good for nothing, Mama Asana, because your womb never cared for a son. His sisters wobbled him into the arms of another woman who visited him with three sons, and he wore them like medals around his neck.
My father has gone mad.
His metaphors of you burned like boiling palm oil on a child's skin. He laughed at the bruises on your face, saying you wore a painful smile, that your laughter was borrowed, and your beauty looked like the wrinkles on the back of your hand. He smeared shame on your skin like shea butter and dared you to look like what you were at seventeen.
His language grew thorns, deliberate and hurtful, full of curses across the days and nights you slept in his bed. He slung your body with insults, shared your prayers with the neighbours like street meat ready to be devoured. They chewed it with peppered glee, topping it with mockery.
My father has gone mad.
His image of you was tattered, broken, scattered all over like daytime gossip. He spat your name out through the middle of his teeth as if he had just chewed bitter leaf, and when your shadow approached, he called it a bad omen. He called you ugly until your mirror doubted the reflection of your own face.
His punctuation, full of commas, brought pauses to your breath. He broke you into pieces, piled you up on a kitchen stool, torn and bruised. Then he sneaked out the window one night and left you without a husband.
My father has gone mad.
His foreshadowing drew exactly what you prayed not to become before you were seventeen: a wife without a husband, raising your daughters without their father, and nursing fist bruises. He mocked your prayers, saying they were too loud because you wore the same fate as your mother.
And when the madness was done, all that remained was a house where silence was the daily bread, where whispering was the best way to say, ‘I am fine’, and our door no longer opened to laughter. His legacy was not in his sons or daughters, but the shame he stitched into our names and the scars he nailed to our bodies, an inheritance of pain we never asked for.
My father has gone/mad.
Emmanuel Papa Quansah is a Ghanaian poet born and raised in Takoradi, Ghana. He holds a Bachelor of Education (Arts) in English with History from the University of Cape Coast. His poetry draws on personal experiences and extends to explore themes such as postcolonial memory, intergenerational trauma, religion, gender, etc. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in notable journals, including Kalahari Review, Rigorous, Spillwords Press, Literary Yard, and All Poetry. His poems, "Echoes of the Chain" and "Meditation on the Coast," first published in Rigorous, have also appeared in the maiden edition of the Ghana Poetry Festival Anthology. He was a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, a 2025 SprinNG Writers Fellowship graduate (9th cohort) and the New Voices Poetry Contest Shortlist.
IG: _quansah
X: @_Sagalin