Friday Feature: Amanda Borquaye

Amanda Borquaye is a Ghanaian-American creative nonfiction writer from the American South. She writes from the interior of a youngest daughter in an immigrant family, using the lyrical essay as a way to wade through the fragility of belonging in a decaying empire. Her work embodies the necropolitical, exploring who is allowed to live and who must die in the context of immigrant identity. By day, she works in humanitarian response and international development. She is an alum of the McCormack Summer Workshop, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and was the 2026 Disquiet International Literary Prize winner in nonfiction. She is at work on a memoir exploring migration as a ghost story shaped by the specters of empire, colonialism, and the yearning of a life elsewhere. Her work has been featured in The Audacity, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Get Ready, Room on Fire

[Verse 1 - Tell us a story, I know you’re not boring]

You’re listening to The Strokes on an iPod Nano during middle school band class. You feel a little bit special when you tell people you’re in band because it’s jazz ensemble, and every other school has a marching band. You like the chaos that jazz invites. You like how forgiving it can be. You’re frightened by sight reading, the expectation that you’ll be perfect and precise on your first try. You’re frightened but excited by improv, the assortment of notes you can string along however you please, how it’s scary not to know exactly where you’re going but comforting once the last note has rung out and it’s all okay. You chose the trombone, or rather it chose you. You got a sound out of it easily, to your relief. Your sister plays the saxophone, and you don’t want to be like her because you are so aware of how much you want to be like her.

Your tuning note on the trombone is a B flat. Tuning requires pushing in the tuning slide if you are flat and pulling it outwards if you are sharp. Your teacher teaches you a silly way to remember this — sharp - shout - out, flat - fin - in. You’re used to blowing air through the brass bell 2.5 times before confirming it’s in tune. You’re listening to The Strokes on an iPod Nano because the teacher had an injury. Some risers fell on his head as he was setting up for a gig, and he’s a short man so you imagine they crumpled down on him with a loud crunch like a car going over a tin can. He’s been gone for several weeks, and I guess there are only so many substitute band teachers in Savannah, so they put you all in a small auditorium to watch The Temptations miniseries for the trillionth time. Your teacher is a white man who always says that white people stole jazz and sanitized it into something palatable called swing. And now he’s put you in an auditorium with a bunch of white kids to watch this very Black series about Motown.

You remember all of the plot points. How the story starts out promising. Black boys racing across the screen with gleaming smiles chasing youth as if it were a lightning bug. You vacillate between which one you find the most handsome. You wonder what it would be like if there were more boys who looked like that at your school. You remember their big dreams and the big talent they each had to back it up. You remember how they serenade girls in fluffy skirts as they walk home and sneak out at night to make out with them in milk trucks, flirting with fatherhood in their cresting youth. You remember how boyish they are at the start, screaming in salon chairs while chemical relaxer sears their scalps until each kink of hair is smooth and straight, inviting a comb to pass through with ease. You’ll go and do the same to your hair in a few weeks as you have done since the age of 6, but you won’t be pleased by the end result like them. 

[Verse 2 - The room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair]

You’ll hate how stringy your hair is, how now it never grows quite past your collar bones, how you’ll adopt deep side parts and Sperry boat shoes and Lilly Pulitzer dresses as armor. You won’t laugh like everyone else does when Otis and Al fan themselves wildly with newspapers as the chemicals spread across their scalps with ferocity, a forest fire determined to decimate. You won’t laugh because you recognize that pain. You won’t laugh because you recognize how sometimes Blackness can look like endurance, enduring unseen pains just to dance between invisibility and hypervisibility. You will think of Miss Angie, tall and skinny like her cigarettes she puffs on after slathering the perm on your hair. You will think about how you sit in that chair, squirming as stinging turns into burning, how you endure it so every last follicle can be straight and your mother can get her money’s worth — how even the signal to get it washed off is a cry for help, the wild waving of your two hands or a holler so Miss Angie can see or hear from outside and come rescue you. Most of all, you remember your favorite picture of yourself from when you were little, your Kindergarten graduation. How Miss Laurie, your teacher and swim coach and woman who let you read in the corner during nap time hugged you tightly, her arms covered by your soft, blown-out hair exploding underneath a white graduation cap, the hair not yet tainted by chemicals and the girl not yet tainted by a desire to be invisible.

You recall yourself small, criss-crossed, between your mother’s thighs. Her arms raising high above your head with a wide-toothed comb and a hard-bristled brush, how this motion tugs at your scalp and how you cry. Your father comes in and says, “Why are you hurting my child?” which is to say she is our child, but she is my baby. Your exasperated mother looks at this man and the sheen on his bald head and explains she has to detangle your hair before she can twist it and put the little balls on the end. You are probably still crying. From then on, you will sit in the salon chair where your follicles will comply to chemicals. When you reach senior year of high school, you ask Miss Angie to cut off every last straight strand on your head. On the drive home, you wonder how many times Black parents have tried to hide their Black children from a world of pain but inadvertently welcomed the hurt inside instead. 

You like the series even though you’ve seen it too many times to watch it again. You like it until the plot of their lives becomes depressing. You watch these boys become men and how that destroys them, like aging is an automatic catalyst towards doom. You watch how David Ruffin gives the group hit after hit with his commanding and raspy voice. You watch how he becomes combative, can’t quit shoving coke up his nose. How this habit costs him his spot in the group and friends who care about him, but have their own futures and families to consider.

There are the parts you really like, so you’ll somewhat pay attention while Julian Casablancas’ voice croons over a thudding bass line and determined drum fills. You like how his voice sounds sleepy amidst the urgency of the guitar, the bass, the drums. When your dad attends your jazz concerts, he is always drifting to sleep in the darkened auditorium, and one day you will empathize with him. One day, you will know what it’s like to desire rest as the world drones on around you.

You like when they circle up and toss their hands in the center to shout “Temptations forever!” after they audition for Berry Gordy at Motown Records, and he really likes them. It makes you feel mature that already you know that nothing lasts forever, that people can get tangled up in drugs and deception, that death steals, that declarations made in youth rarely survive to adulthood. Your favorite song by The Temptations is “The Way You Do the Things You Do”, so you take out your earbuds for that part. Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto cradles into your ear while the rest of the vocal parts anchor the melody. You remember the choreography they do, how they dab imaginary perfume onto their necks when they sing, “And baby you smell so sweet / You know you could've been some perfume”. You remember how they struggled to get a hit before then, how the record label was perplexed at how all that talent couldn’t yield more hits. When they sing the demo, Berry Gordy asks a focus group if they would spend their last dollar on that record over a sandwich. Their hands shoot up in affirmation. You don’t think you like anything or anyone enough to spend your last dollar on it, but you wonder if you ever will.

They take that song on the road, touring down south in high school gymnasiums. The screen brightens up with their red coats twisting and twirling in synch under the red of the Confederate flag hanging above them. The crowd stares back at them as cops part the white kids and the black kids down the middle like Moses parting the Red Sea. You don’t like when you have to watch the euphoric high of that performance come crashing down when a truck full of racists shoots at the boys and tells them to go back up north. Your sister has gone to college up north, and you’re always visiting her there, daydreaming of when you’ll be a college student too. You want to go wherever she goes.

You remember when Blue and Otis are visiting Blue’s mom, and Blue goes to the kitchen to check on the ribs, but we don’t see him again. You remember that part because even though you’ve seen it so many times, it always makes you cry. Blue was your favorite, and bass singers never get the appreciation they deserve. Your friend J is the bass player in band. You sit together under the giant oak tree in the quad in between classes, Spanish moss sighing above you. He tells you another boy noogied him on the head, hard. Recoiled and looked at his reddened knuckles. Walked away, declaring that Black people’s hair is so rough and unpleasant. There’s another Black boy in your class on the football team. You ask if they won the away game. Someone tells you on the bus that a boy made a joke about how he didn’t want to sit next to no nigger.

[Pre-Chorus - You’re in a strange part of our town]

You know all of the plot points, so you’re listening to The Strokes on an iPod instead of watching. One earbud is in your left ear and the other in the ear of a white boy you’ll unfriend on Facebook sometime in college, when it’s 2017 and you’re up north and when you tell a homeless man you’re sorry, you don’t have any change, he spits at you and calls you a word and a word becomes a fist that steals the breath from your lungs even though you hardly had any from the cold New England night heaving your chest. You know you heard it, clearly, even though you’re listening to that alternative music you always listen to, according to your mom.

Folks you grew up with are on Facebook, foaming at the mouth for that man to become President. You’ll love a boy for the first time, and after America decides that that man will in fact be president, he taps off a text to you as you walk back to your dorm holding photobooth strips of you and your friends from the campus election watch party at the student center. In one of the pictures, your best friend, Ilana, is flanked by a Hillary Clinton cardboard cutout you’ll see by the dumpster the next morning. You’ll never watch election results with other people again. 

Goodnight, my angel. Sleep well. Today saddens me very deeply. I know that a Donald Trump presidency will never hurt me. It doesn’t make me fear for my citizenship, enfranchisement, safety, or life. But there are so many people in this country who do justly have those fears, and my heart breaks for those people. As a black woman in this country, you have some of those feelings, and I am so, so sorry that this country has chosen a path of hatred that will only amplify them. I love you very, very much, and no matter what, I will always stand by your side.

You’ll be impressed that a pre-med brain can write so emotionally and beautifully. You’ll think this is the most romantic string of words you’ll ever read. You think you’ll love him forever. You’d spend your last dollar on it.

[Chorus - You’re not trying hard enough]

You have a habit still of wanting your mom and dad as soon as anything goes wrong. You text your dad frantically. You ask why he chose to come to a country that hates him. He’ll respond immediately, reminding you he is proud of you, reminding you that racism is what stitches together the American flag and fascism is the frightening new frontier. You imagine him transporting himself back in time. He’ll remember being an army doctor, how nobody could see the white coat and just his disqualifying black skin. How his accent is exotic derogatory rather than exotic sexy. In the memory, he is a Major, a senior officer, and a Lieutenant, a junior officer, gives him a dirty glance as he walks into the operating room as the attending physician. Hierarchy doesn’t matter to him much, but he learns quickly that it does in this country and its institutions, that whether you like it or not, you are placed into tiers, and the audacity to not remain in yours is a grave offense. So he’s surprised when the Lieutenant, a white lady and the chief of the nurses, looks past the white coat and right to the black skin and says, “And you are?” You know that greeting people is a very Ghanaian thing to do. You know that anytime you walk into a space, you greet everyone on your way in and say goodbye on your way out, an acknowledgment that we are all inhabiting the same space at the same time, and how nice it is that we are doing that in a world as big as the one we all share. He begins to explain that he’s the attending physician, his response quickly turning into a curriculum vitae of why he is supposed to be there, but she stands in the way, still sizing him up even after he’s finished preambling his credentials to her. He realizes this is a burdensome place to be, one where you will think you have proven yourself only to have to prove yourself more. He brushes past her and begins to prepare the students, silently watching the standoff, for surgery. “I am the guy they unleash from Africa whenever Americans need to be taught how to do pelvic surgery.” He’ll remember how she felt embarrassed, which is a tier of feeling humiliated, which is how she made him feel. She’ll find him in the hallway, asking for his forgiveness and informing him she is not a racist. She does not offer any proof to bolster this claim. She does not feel the need to. He will feel like nothing. He will accept her apology because he has to because he has to keep working in this hospital, and he has to keep attending to pelvic surgeries, attending to rooms full of people who don’t believe he deserves to be there. You imagine he steps out of this memory when he attends to you, his youngest daughter, who is reeling with the reality that they live in a country filled with people who don’t believe they deserve to be there. He ends his text with a sentence that brands itself onto the side of your brain: No matter how hard you work and how high your achievements are, to the white supremacists, you are still nothing. 

[Verse 2 - Now every time that I look at myself / “I thought I told you this world is not for you”]

You’re still in middle school, feeling like nothing in the gym locker room, and your friend will slick her yellow hair back and look you in the eye. She’ll tell you, “Obama only won because of gays and Blacks.” You won’t know how to respond or why that’s a bad thing, so you’ll shimmy into the dark green gym shorts your mother labeled with your name in Sharpie on the tag. One other girl will gasp and turn to her locker. You’ll stuff your pink paisley Vera Bradley duffel with your things and wait for all the girls to file out, for their laughter like lashes to reach the other side of the door. You’ll sit there rolling deodorant under your arms, waiting for tears to roll down your face. You’ll push inward because everything outside of you feels too sharp to touch. The second time Obama wins, you’ll still be too young to vote, but you’ll feel grown up because you’re a licensed driver. You’ll put a little car magnet that came in the mail after your dad made a donation to the campaign on the backside of the cherry red Land Rover. You’ll come back to the school parking lot one afternoon to notice it’s gone, silver little lines wiggling along your car door instead. Your mom will ask, “What’s that?" and you’ll shrug, wanting to say “it’s nothing” when it is obvious that it is something. You’ll mumble about “I guess the parking lot is getting tighter these days.” You’ll have your suspects, but you won’t confront them.

The boy you’ll unfriend is tapping his thumb wildly to the bass part of Reptilia. It’s the intro, which is defined by the insistence of the bass strumming the B note. B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B like the song is about to burst. For now, the boy is nice, and you may even think of him as your friend. Three of your friends have had crushes on him, but to you, he’s just the boy you’re listening to The Strokes with, playing Reptilia over and over again until the bass and guitar and drums bounce their way into your brain forever. You decide you want to grow up and date a man like Julian Casablancas or Fabrizio Moretti. The bell rings, and the lights come up, and the red glow of the emergency exit sign dulls like the end of a lit cigarette. You watch the other kids shift their sliding backpack straps and shuffle onto the next class, and suddenly, you’ve become adults dismissed into the world with no bell. You are twenty-eight now, and your trombone hasn’t been touched in a decade. It is in your closet, in Georgia, under the shelf with the American Girl doll with skin like yours and plaits your mother’s hands used to make on your head before going to bed. You will visit home and open that closet, scared to touch it, unwilling to invite your past into the present. 

You are changing from the green line to the red line in Washington DC, and a man who is changing from the red line to the green line comes darting down the escalator to the platform, catching you in his arms as you exit the train and nearly collide. He catches you just above your elbows and holds you there, saying nothing, his two eyes trained on yours. You are reminded that you are a solid thing made of bones and flesh, not a bubble floating aimlessly before its inevitable burst. You want to tell him to hurry before the train door closes, but you say nothing. Others have walked past this scene you are frozen in. You feel like the two of you are in a film, something fast and fleeting that sears on a screen to an audience that cares or doesn’t. He lets go. He shakes his head in apology and smiles. The doors close with him inside as he waves to you. It is just you and the platform and the quiet.

In the opening scene of The Temptations miniseries, young Otis is running. He is running to something, but it is implied that he is also running from something. Adult Otis narrates for his younger self: “I was seventeen and about to burst.”  A busker at the Gallery Place metro stop puffs his cheeks out like a puffer fish, emptying his lungs into his trombone. Cold metal brought to life with warm breath. You want to feel the once familiar brain buzzing high that comes from willing brass to vibrate with sound, but you feel nothing. You stop for a while to watch, wondering where the notes will take him. You are twenty-eight and about to burst.

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