King Maria
@mariaking4190
10 days ago

**The city I grew up in and how it shaped my creative eye**

I grew up in Accra, but not the Accra of glossy Instagram reels or the airport roundabout at golden hour. I grew up in a part of the city where the streets don’t have names, only landmarks: the blue kiosk that sells “pure water,” the mango tree where the okada drivers wait, the compound house with the broken gate that squeaks in the Harmattan wind.

I didn’t know I was learning to see until I left.

My creative eye was not forged in a gallery or a design school. It was forged in the chaos of a market in Maamobi at 6pm on a Saturday. The way the hawkers balanced trays of plantain chips on their heads, the way the light from a kerosene lamp hit the sweat on a woman’s forehead, the way the colours of secondhand clothes piled on a tarpaulin looked like a Turner painting if you squinted hard enough. I absorbed it all, unconsciously, like breathing dust.

Growing up in Accra taught me that beauty is not clean. It is not minimal. Beauty is the rust on a zinc roof catching the sunset. It is the geometry of a trotro queue — bodies pressed together, yet each person holding their own invisible boundary. It is the sound of a blender at 5am from the house next door, the one that makes *kelewele* for the school kids. That sound, that rhythm, became the BPM of my inner world.

My childhood best friend lived in a compound where the bathroom was shared by twelve people. The walls were painted a faded turquoise, the kind of paint that looks like it’s been crying for years. But there, in the corner, someone had drawn a small flower with a chipped red nail polish. That flower stayed for three years. I think about it every time I’m stuck on a composition. Sometimes the smallest detail, the most accidental mark, is what holds a whole space together.

I also learned about absence. The power cuts, the “light off” nights when the neighbourhood became a canvas of shadows and phone torch beams. That’s where I learned to see in the dark. To notice the shape of a silhouette before the face. To hear the story in a voice before the words. Accra taught me that the eye is not just a camera — it’s a muscle that needs to be stretched by scarcity, by limitation, by the beautiful friction of survival.

Now, when I shoot or write or design, I don’t look for perfection. I look for the noise. The cracks in the wall, the uneven stitch, the wrong note that somehow feels right. That is Accra in me. It’s the city that never sleeps but always dreams, even in the gutter, even in the dust.

I don’t romanticise it. It broke my heart more times than I can count. But it also taught me that the most compelling art doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from paying attention when it’s easier to look away.

So yes, the city shaped my creative eye. But more than that, it shaped my willingness to keep looking, even when the picture is messy. That’s the gift. That’s the debt.

#nircestories #ghanalife #LostWellnessArts