This essay argues that the airport is an international borderland where the nation attempts to position itself within the futural orientation of transit while also making gestures to cement its sovereignty. Drawing on Ghanaian writer Nana Nyarko Boateng’s short story, “Swallowing Ice”, which tells the story of two women French kissing at the airport in Accra, the essay interrogates how the airport’s embodiment of a kind of transit future is destabilised by the haunting of the present and past of the nation-state. Using Ayo Coly’s notion of “postcolonial hauntology”, I argue that non-heteronormative sexualities and the anxieties they generate form part of a historical continuum that is haunted by colonialist impositions on sexuality.
Ultimately, the airport in “Swallowing Ice” functions as a stage on which same-sex desires and intimacies destabilise the nation’s imaginaries of itself.
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