Nima's “Incomplete” Humans: Storying Adolescents’ Black Inhabitations in Accra

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, I story adolescents as “incomplete” human beings whose inventive modes of storytelling and inhabiting community space shape a “black sense of place” in the Nima neighbourhood of Accra, Ghana. In collaborative arts‐based research with Spread‐Out Initiative NGO, Nima adolescents share stories and narrate experiences that witness everyday violences, dispossession, and neglect and also small, meaningful openings they create together in community space. From this collaborative research, I locate Nima as a black geography situated in an African metaphysical universe where human, nonhuman, and spiritual worlds and Ghana's interconnected histories of enslavements and colonialism shape place. I contend that following these adolescents’ storied experiences and inventive black inhabitations through the framework of incompleteness offers ways of knowing these adolescents not as deficient or less‐than‐human, but full of possibility. By tracing the everyday ways adolescents deploy magic to extend themselves and their spatial potentials in concert with other incomplete human, nonhuman, and spiritual beings, I argue they produce black life. This approach extends black geographic thought, by honouring Nima adolescents and their stories of ever‐incomplete human becoming and weaving together black indigenous, migratory, and diasporic ways of knowing in global black relation.