Kweku's Slippers In Ghana Must Go

• Why does Selasi keep putting such an emphasis on Kweku’s slippers and on his feet?
• What is Selasi reaction to seeing Kweku’s feet for the first time?
In “Ghana Must GO”, the author Selasi intentionally attempts to put an emphasis on Kweku’s slippers. The book begins with Kweku’s death; the dies with his feet barefoot in the garden. Throughout the beginning of the book, Kweku dying barefoot becomes a mystery to the children that he had a banded. Taiwo, the daughter that Kweku had abandoned, counties to ask where were his slippers. It seems that these slippers have a much more deeper meaning then the question suggest. Taiwo tells very interesting stories in the short chapter 8, which gives us a little more insight as to the importance of Kweku’s feet. In this chapter she can not sleep and so se wonders off to the down stairs living room where

She had never seen her father like this before, and when she got even closer to him she was surprised to see all the bruises at the bottom of his feet. She had gone her entire life only seeing the smooth side of his feet and not the side that looked as if we had walk on sand paper. For some reason this incident really shook her; seeing her father’s feet had a psychological effect on her. Selasi describes this is great details, she writes “ Taiwo pursed her lips shut to mute her revulsion, but what she felt had no shape and no sound: an odd emptiness, weightlessness, as if she were floating, as if it for a moment she’d ceased to exit: some new odd sort of sadness, part grief, part compassion, a helium sadness, too airless to bear” (44). This is a father that Taiwo did not know; she never imaged her father like this. In her later years when she feels this same feeling of airlessness, she goes back and remember her fathers; remembers how