Studio Portrait, Accra, 1974

In the photograph my mother is nineteenand has not met the country I was born in.

The backdrop is a painted balconythat opens onto a painted sea.Neither of them is anywhere.That is what a studio is for: to lend youa window you can stand in for one shilling.

She has done her hair the way the magazine said.She is not smiling, because smiling was notwhat you did with a whole shilling.

I have looked at this so long I have begunto mistake it for a memory. It is not.It is a thing I inherited, which is different —a window she stood in, on the way to a seathat was painted, in a country I only visit,holding still for the length of one breathso that I would have her face to keep.