Dr. Agya Boakye-Boaten On The African Immigrant Experience

When we look at history, we see Western culture's invasive influence spreading around the world, replacing local beliefs and customs. Dr. Agya Boakye-Boaten grew up in a village in Ghana, where he was educated in a Methodist all-boys school beginning at the age of 10. Upon coming to the US, he found that many of the things he’d been taught were problematic and required dismantling. Sarah speaks to Agya about becoming "an unapologetic African," the struggle of immigrants to reclaim their identity, and the pressing need for Americans to listen to the pain of Black people.

Dr. Agya Boakye-Boaten, Ph.D., is an an Associate Professor and Chair of the Interdisciplinary / International Studies department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His research interests include alternative education for street children, and building the intellectual and creative capacities of students using alternative education strategies.. He is interested in decolonial options, construction of African philosophical thought, effects of colonialism on African aesthetics, and the transformation of indigenous cultures through global engagement.

Grief Gratitude & Greatness is hosted by Sarah Shaoul and is a production of Recursive Delete Audio/Visual in Portland, Oregon.

This episode was produced & edited by Jack Saturn, with additional production by Sarah. The music was by Samantha Jensen.

This episode is sponsored by Lori Mason Design. When someone close to us dies, having a reminder of them that you can see everyday and keep close to you can be a great comfort. Lori crafts memorial quilts for the deceased, transforming their garments — their favorite Hawaiian shirts, their judge's robes, uniforms and other personal fabrics — into a piece of art that reflects their lives. Visit http://LoriMasonDesign.com/ to check out examples of how she honors each individual's unique life with her art.

Grief Gratitude & Greatness is the recipient of a 2020 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council.

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TRANSCRIPT

SARAH SHAOUL: When we look at history, we see Western culture's invasive influence spreading around the world, replacing local beliefs and customs. Dr. Agya Boakye-Boaten grew up in a village in Ghana, where he was educated in a Methodist all-boys school beginning at the age of 10. Upon coming to the US, he found that many of the things he’d been taught were problematic and required dismantling.

As the daughter of immigrants myself, I’ve seen the struggles my own family members experienced, trying to preserve their identities while assimilating to Western culture. Like a school child who tries to fit in for fear of not being accepted, this is the story of so many immigrants to this country. 

AGYA BOAKYE-BOATEN: I learned a lot about the world from my educational experience. What I came to know after my education was that I was being trained to understand the world through a very Eurocentric prism.

I came to the United States to go to graduate school and my first graduate education was in African studies. When I tell people I'm coming to the United States to study Africa, it's like, “What are you talking about?” It was very interesting because the Africa that I knew was an Africa that I understood from a Eurocentric paradigm. Then I came to the United States, and I figured out that there were a lot more Africans in the world than just the Africans on the African continent.

I had not been exposed to this Pan-African consciousness. Coming to study Africa in the United States gave me a whole new perspective in relation to the structures that had formed the modern world, which are Eurocentric structures.

It's always important that when you get out of your bubble, you get to learn more about yourself. In that space, I have come to understand the complex nature of the African in his or her relationship with the global world: how Africans are viewed, what it means to be African. It has also informed my idea about my own relationship with the Eurocentric structures that were the avenue for my formative years. 

So now I've embarked on an epistemic journey of deconstruction. I am deconstructing my Africanness to confront the distortions that have characterized my being.  I have come to learn about the systemic dehumanization of the African where, as an African, you really need to deny you in order to be human. I am deconstructing that and becoming my African self, which is the authentic self, in opposition to the distortions that I've been used to.

How I see myself in relation to other immigrants here: my education, my profession has allowed me to have a very dynamic intellectual inquest into who I am and how I want to present myself. But I am no longer an apologetic African. I am an unapologetic African, and I am very right. I'm very happy to be who I am. I feel like I don't want to wear European clothes anymore. The mask is off.

SARAH: The mask is off.  I think it could be said that the Eurocentric perspective is also the American perspective.

AGYA: Yes.  

SARAH: You found this misalignment. At what point did you see the conflict between your being Asante and the Christian parochial school upbringing you were getting?

AGYA: My being itself tends to be slightly more complex than most other folks. Because here I am, I'm growing up in the parochial school at the same time my dad is the chief in my town.  I am having this hybridity of cultures. I go to my dad's very strong Asante cultural systems, and then I come to the boarding school—and it's set up that when you look at your cultural, traditional systems, they are viewed as decadent. The tradition was viewed as old, it was not modern. Your school presents you with a modern Eurocentric, Christian-centric outlook.

The Bible and Christianity, when I was growing up, was all framed as a white man's culture. We have a saying that, if you see a white man, you are literally seeing God.  You have that imagery in your head; when you go to church the pictures of God are white.

This is part of the colonial legacy of diminishing the humanity of Blackness and accentuating the humanity of whiteness, and so now literally white man has become God.  There is this binary, this Manichaean system: you're African, you're bad; you're European, you're good; you're Christian, you're good. The opposite is always bad.

When you come to the United States, America is not different from the Eurocentric, Christian-centric, male-centric domination. America is a reflection of the modern European construct. But this place is where you begin to see the tension between the good and the bad! You come here because in Ghana and most African places, it's only majority Black folk who are practicing European sensibilities. You come to the United States—you see the Black folk here, you see the Latinx folk here, you see different shades of folk here—all trying to figure out how their humanities could be recognized.

But you still see the pervasiveness of Eurocentric ideals. Now I can understand, because the other me, I can see my reflection in how I've been otherized. It's so apparent to me. And that's when you begin to learn, “Oh yes, my Blackness is as a result of whiteness.” I am beginning to make the connections.  In Africa you are still taught to believe in the supremacy of Eurocentric ideals and canons. In the United States, you begin to see the fallacies of this Eurocentric supremacy.

I began to deconstruct that very toxic dimension of who I thought I was. Because here is my dad, he's a Chief. He's also a professor! So he himself embodies this duality. I think he tried to rationalize this in many ways. Chieftancy itself, it's a very old, man-made institution before Christianity, and yet, here is my dad who is a professor in the university. And he embodies that.

Then I'd go to church every Sunday and I'm told that I cannot worship any other deity, or cannot even recognize the power of the supremacy of God. In the same breath, God is shown to me as very favorably white. The goodness of the world is intertwined with the goodness of Eurocentrism. Education was brought to the African by the Europeans. There was this idea that Europe came to “enlighten us”—and enlighten you for what?  “Enlighten you from your darkness and your darkness is your culture.”

So if you want to be part of this modern world, you have to leave your culture behind. You don't have a name like Agya. You need to have a name like Johnson, you need to have a name like John. Your whole upbringing is a massive mosaic of confusion. Now you want to believe that, “Actually, you know what, I think I really like the European kind because it feels clean.” It feels unconfusing, it has some much clearer path—or at least that's what we believe.

When I go to my town and visit my villages—“Oh, wow. These folks are so removed from modernity.”  When I think about modernity, I think about Rome, I think about London, I think about the metropolis. And I'm thinking, “Wow, I'm learning English, I'm reading Macbeth,” so that when I meet my colonizer, I can relate. I can speak the language. I can wear the clothing. I can eat with beautiful cutlery set up, and I don't want to eat with my hands. I don't want traditional style. “Tradition is bad! European modernity is good!” Oh, what a world.

SARAH: With this embrace of the modern world is this loss of your spirituality. And I'm not talking about Christianity, I'm talking about your African cultural spirituality. 

AGYA: European religiocity does not have room for African spiritual expressions. The African is a complex web of the human, the physical and the spirit. There is no way the African is a simple manifestation of the physical world. The African person represents the physical being and the spiritual being.

We have what we call the Sunsum. The Sunsum is your spirit. And that spirit is not regulated by some religious institution. That spirit is in alignment with the creator, Odomankoma boo adee, creator of Heaven and Earth, and that if you want to be whole, then your physical and your spiritual being will have to align. You ignore your spirit and body because I think that European religiocity is antagonistic to African spirituality.

By the African embracing this European institutionalized religiocity, he is already misaligned. He's gone. He's completely alienated from the self. For us, sickness is a relationship between the physical and the spiritual. If you are sick, it's not only a physical manifestation, but also a spiritual discontentment.

Where I'm sitting now., I'm not sitting here by myself. There are spirits around here with me and these spirits are both good and those that can harm you. This is how it manifests: what I do is not only to do something and then go to church on Sunday and ask for forgiveness. When I do something to you, I am afflicting you both from the physical and the spiritual.

SARAH: If you were to physically harm me, you mean.

AGYA: Even if I'm harboring negative thoughts about you. So it's not only simply physical, but I can also inflict mental, spiritual harm on you. For the African, both are very important because for the physical manifestation, we have laws that deal with how we relate to each other. In the spiritual world, we have the same. Consciously, I have to be whole by not extending evil.

When I go to somebody's land, I cannot go where they have buried the ancestors—I can not go with a bulldozer, scrape the land and build my house on it. It's not possible. Because for me, my existence is intertwined with the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be-born. I protect them all. If you leave here, you're not gone, you're gone to another village. That's why I revere you, that's why I call on you.

I was talking to a student that said, “I lost my cousin, a 17 year old cousin.” I said, “You know what? He may be dead, but he's not gone. I want you to talk to him. I want you to write him a letter, because you know what? He is listening to you. He's here.” We're sitting outside. I said, “You can see me and you, but your cousin is here. Don't let them tell you that he's gone, dead and buried, because he's gone to another world, and he's here.”

SARAH: You just brought back these memories of my childhood that I had completely forgotten about! I come from an immigrant family on both sides. When I was really little,  when I wasn't being good, I was threatened that this spirit would come after me if I wasn't good! They used to spit on me—not really spit on me, not with saliva, but they used to do this thing with their lips, where they were making you undesirable to the bad spirits by spitting on you. I think a lot of cultures have been far more in tune with something that our dominant culture has sort of washed out. 

AGYA: That's what I keep telling folks: Eurocentric ideals are so fundamentalist that it doesn't give room to some of these expressions that doesn't make sense.

SARAH: So many are assimilating to the dominant culture. And it happens with little things, like mispronunciation of a name. For example, the real pronunciation of my last name is “shah-ool”, but my father and his brother, when they came here, they made it “shawl” just to make it easy for people to say. It's crazy that people give up something so important, like their name and how it's pronounced, just to make it easy for the dominant culture. I think that happens so much every day with everyone who comes here.

AGYA: Yes—most of my students call me Dr. B. It's much easier than Boakye-Boaten. When I want to splurge and go to Starbucks, they ask your name and I'll say, “A.J.”

There is an internalized, almost intentional concealment of you. In order to belong, you do not want to accentuate your otherness. By concealing the real you, you inhabit the space that becomes relatable, and becomes less threatening, that becomes more accepting. That's  the struggles, the conflict that an immigrant would have to go through in order to reimagine their humanity. Cause whatever you brought here is very different. You literally have to go through a process of concealment: you change your name, you change how you look, you actually change how you speak, so that you start to belong.

SARAH: It's not so conscious, is it? For some people, maybe. I've seen it within my own family. I think it can be a very gradual thing.

AGYA: It's almost a deliberate act. There might be some that unconsciously are in a full-swing assimilation mode. There are two phases to this; there are those who see it and try really hard to conceal it, and there are some who have already internalized a space of assimilation that they don't even recognize. Du Bois talks about this dual consciousness that happens—either you are conscious about it and concealing it, or you have so internalized this concealment that you don't feel the urge to deliberately do it—it comes naturally to you.  But I can tell you that every immigrant, at a point in time, gets to the space of “I'm too tired of concealing.”

It might be my kids who will say “No, Pops, I can no longer do this. I want my real name.” So it comes. You could get to a point where you recognize it and try to fight it—or, you would never recognize it because in fact, the mask that you wear is so good to you, you don't want to remove that mask.

SARAH: The mask is so good to you that you don't want to remove it. 

AGYA: They give you a space, so why would you want to destroy it? Literally in the United States, the color of your skin would get you into some spaces. So why wouldn't you want to enjoy that? Changing your name may mean something else now—it's good!

SARAH: So you're a professor that focuses on racial justice. We are in a country where so many people are trying to assimilate to enjoy the American dream. How does that get in the way of the need to acknowledge the trauma of the pursuit of racial justice?

AGYA:  When you say, “We the People,” it means something. When those words were inscribed, there were people in this country, at least one fifth of the population of the country at that time, who were not considered to be humans, who were considered to be sub-human. What has transpired over the years is that these folks who were not part of the humanity that created the society—how do you expand the concept of “We”? We would have to acknowledge a very dark past of the United States.

Nobody wants to go there. The idea is that, “It happened a long time ago, so move on.” Because if you have to go there, you have to reassess the soul of this country, to acknowledge that dark past. By acknowledging that dark past, we place the idea of “We the People” into a very non-American spotlight. This is the country of “freedom” and we do not want to muddy the historical legacy of this country, because then it would mean that we have to think about, “What did we do?”

The only way we can acknowledge that, is that we have to give those who have had immense atrocities against them, the space to mourn. Which also means that there's an acknowledgement that we have inflicted pain. For those whose humanity has been stripped, there is no space for a recollective rebuilding because there's no way I can heal without truth. That's not even the conversation on the table now.

SARAH: It seems like the conversation on the table right now is defunding the police. 

AGYA: This is also interesting. The conversation now is, again, how white people are defining the struggle for Black folk. So we want to defund the police? Yes, we do. Yes, it's okay, you can defund the police. But there are immediate, structural dangers for Black folk that we want to talk about: the protection of Black bodies now.

There is so much here that is being deferred to very superficial demands—we want to do all these big things. I'm saying now, Black kids are failing in schools. Black kids are disproportionately affected by health outcomes. There are immediate pressing needs, and that's not the conversation we have. We are drawing roadmaps. The roadmaps are important, but white American co-conspirators need to listen to the pain of Black people.

SARAH: This moment is the greatest opportunity I've seen in my lifetime for that to happen. How are you seeing that possibility in this moment? Or what more do you think needs to happen?

AGYA:  I'm excited about the optimism that is cutting across a very vocal, young, and vibrant  cross-section of the society. And I think that it is important that, if there's going to be any seismic changes or shifts in the society, there ought to be that coalition-building.

But now? We can solve the police issue in the next two years. We need to figure out, right now, how do we protect Black children from violence in the society? How do we protect women, Black women? How do we protect Black trans people—now? Because they are in danger now! So I want a dual track: one looking at the future and one looking at now.

There is something there that we can no longer deny. There has been so much trauma in many indigenous communities and this trauma is real. We can overcome this by recognizing it and being gracious, to allow a space for accounting of the grief that many people have suffered and continue to suffer. If we can recognize the humanity of those who are struggling, I think we'll be having much better outcomes of our activism.

There needs to be an accounting, and a deep introspective realization of the systemic dehumanization of Black bodies. If we do not recognize that and try to reconcile our own humanity, then we'll be having these conversations forever.