In our factory, my sister and I also repurposed the cutlery, but less effectively, and sometimes causing permanent destruction. We poked at little car wheels with forks and pried off our dolls’ limbs with butter knives. We could have used our fingers, but the presence of tools, to our minds, made our enterprise more realistic.
It was the 1980’s. We didn’t know then what a Telex was, and I still don’t, really. And, although I knew that the organization my father worked for delivered food to people in natural and manmade disasters, I couldn’t conceive of the mechanics. My father spent a lot of time reading, writing, and using a calculator. He flew to Geneva or Dhaka for meetings or missions that were too mysterious for my sister and I to reenact. Usually, he returned with Duty Free chocolates. In hushed tones, he’d speak to my stepmother about refugee camps and rebels, but he’d fall silent when he noticed me eavesdropping.
So, factory was a superior game. It was tactile, and playing it produced real consequences, which my sister and I could see with our own eyes, and which we’d have to live with. Could we reattach the helicopter propeller, and would it still spin? Did the babies look better or worse with their exchanged heads?
Sometimes, when my sister and I had broken too much and felt regretful, we’d turn our factory into a place of invention, using paper, plasticine, thread, coins, plastic bags, hair ribbons, orange peel—whatever we could get our hands on. We worked in a frenzied, ad hoc, way, with little, if any, initial vision.
“Look what we’re making,” we’d demand of any passing adult—our father and stepmother, their friends. They’d take in our precarious monstrosities.
“Oh, lovely,” they’d lie. “What is it?”
Usually, being the elder by fourteen months, I was the spokesperson. I’d come up with something on the spot: A time machine. A fairy hotel. A dragon catcher. A robot that could turn zucchini (which both of us hated) into cotton candy.
As soon as I spoke the words, we believed them enough to see possibility, and even beauty, in what we’d started. We’d resume our work with purpose. We didn’t have the language then, but now I’d call it improvising. Through these games, we learned to trust our intuition, and to try to realize, with our own hands, ideas and dreams we didn’t know we had. And, of course, we learned to fail. We came to know failure as an important, inevitable, step. Nothing we invented ever worked. We ruined more than we remade. But this was practice. Someday, when we were older, our processes would yield real results. We believed this absolutely.
My sister grew up to be a person who makes art, but never for money. “That would take all the joy out of it,” she says. Instead, to pay her bills, she waitresses. On her own time, she creates custom jewelry for me and other people she loves. For my birthday two years ago, she drew me a charcoal pencil portrait of our beloved grandparents who had recently passed away. She captured the gleam in our grandfather’s eye and our grandmother’s dazzling smile. Recently, she painted a mural of black and white shapes on a ramshackle shed in the backyard of her newly rented house in Austin, Texas, transforming an eyesore into unexpected elegance.
I became a writer. I approach my work as a practice toward creating new possibilities and inventing and transforming realities with words, even if only temporarily, and only in the imagination.
Last year, I held a copy of my first book in my hands. Finally, after years of trying and failing and trying again, of indefiniteness, here was something both magical and material. I thought back to the day when I’d opened a blank document on my laptop and typed the first sentence. I thought about the friends who’d offered encouragement when I felt unable to translate what was in my head to the page, and so considered giving up. I thought of my agent who’d believed in my book and sold it to a publishing house, the editors who’d helped me revise it, the designers who’d drawn the cover, the printers, the shippers, my mailperson who’d delivered the box to my doorstep. So many hands had done their part then passed my book down to the next pair of hands—an assembly line of sorts.
I took a photo of the book on my phone and sent it to my sister. “Look at what I made,” I texted, echoing our words from our factory days. I thanked her for being one of the people who’d made it possible. She texted back that it was a glorious thing.
I’ve also followed in my father’s footsteps. In graduate school, I studied urban planning and policy, and I work on issues of poverty and inequality. But, while my father’s work was global, mine is focused on cities in the United States, which despite this country’s wealth, are still places where too many people struggle to survive. I’ve helped local governments to design education, housing, and workforce programs.
Often, people say, “That sounds so interesting, but what exactly do you do all day?” I laugh and reply that I talk on the phone and read and write reports. I make budgets and facilitate trainings. The results of this work are far less manifest than what I imagined I’d be producing all those years ago, during those games of factory. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve made any difference at all. Then, there are times when I’m reminded that the two careers that I’ve chosen are not so distinct, not so separate, and that just because I can’t see something, doesn’t make it unreal or impossible.
On a recent trip to New Orleans, I spent time at Studio Be, a 35,000 sq. ft. warehouse that is currently the creative home of Brandon “BMike” Odums, a New Orleanian who works at the intersection of visual art and activism. I was there to interview Odums and several other artist-activists from across the United States about their visions for the future, and their efforts to address inequality, violence, and racism, and to foster joy and belonging in their communities. I was struck by how clear they all were about the need for physical spaces where people can come together to collectively imagine and build the future, unconstrained by the present. By build, they meant things both tangible and intangible: knowledge, sculptures, resources, connections, schools, hope, power, art installations, health centers, musical scores, stories, and on and on.
The future, they emphasized, is created through the choices we make and the things we create in the present. BMike spoke about how, in New Orleans, art is never a solitary pursuit. It’s something done in and for community—a reference to how jazz and other forms of improvisation are central to New Orleans’ culture. “Here, you play your horn in the hopes that your neighbor will hear you, and maybe join you,” he said. And, perhaps that is true of all our most vital processes. I couldn’t have played factory without my sister. Though I write alone, I’m bolstered by others. I couldn’t conceive of the mechanics of my father’s work because I only imagined his part. Day to day, it can be difficult to know if I’m making a difference, but I must keep trying anyway. I trust that someone else will pick up where I left off. I’m but one person along a long line, all of us trying, failing, improvising. I believe this absolutely.
Owusu
Nadia Owusu is a Ghanaian and Armenian American writer and urbanist. Her debut memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by Time, Vogue, Esquire, The Guardian, NPR, and others. It was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and a 2021 Goodreads Choice Award nominee. In 2019, Nadia was the recipient of a Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. Nadia is a director at Frontline Solutions, a consulting firm that helps social-change organizations to define goals, execute plans, and evaluate impact. She lives in Brooklyn.