Chapter 4: Hip Hop, Meet I

Ghana was where everything flipped.

Up until then, I’d been the outsider — always watching, always adapting.
New countries, new classrooms, new codes.
But this time, something shifted.

Maybe it was the start of highschool.
Maybe it was the energy — raw, alive, unapologetic.
Or maybe, it was Abigail.

She was magnetic.
Confident in that way only someone deeply rooted in themselves can be.
I was twelve, awkward, skinny, still figuring out what to do with my arms when I walked.
She made it all look effortless.

And she loved hip-hop.

So when I lied and told her I had an album coming out…
I don’t know if I was trying to impress her or convince myself I was someone.
But I said it.
She lit up.
Eyes wide. “Really?”
I nodded like it was nothing. “Yeah, dropping next week.”

She told her friends. Her friends told the school.
And suddenly, this skinny white boy with the accent and the awkward smile was the talk of the courtyard.

Now I had three days to turn a lie into a mixtape.

I faked being sick. Stayed home.
Locked myself in.
Downloaded whatever 6 second beat loops my dial-up connection could handle.
I then played them over my Skype headset as it lay wrapped around my mini-speakers, so the headset’s mic could record me and the looping beats simultaneously.

I wrote 12 songs and recorded each live all the way through – from start to finish.
It was chaos. But it was mine.

On Monday, I handed her the CD with my poorly photoshopped graphics like it was gold.
She smiled. She listened. She liked it.
And she passed it on.

That’s when the older kids caught wind.

They weren’t amused.

I was twelve. Pale. Foreign.
She was beautiful. Popular. Ghanaian.
To them, I was not part of the equation.

So they invited me —
no, summoned me —
to Freestyle Friday.

If you’ve never been to a Ghanaian high school freestyle battle, imagine this:
fifty students packed into a small classroom with more pouring out in the red dust courtyard outside.
Red dust in the air.
Shoulders tight. Energy thick.
No microphones. Just mouths and sway.

They put me up against a guy six years older,
built like he’d been bench-pressing bricks since a foetus,
gold tooth flashing every time he spat.

I stood there.
Tiny. Trembling.
But something inside me… settled.

I’d been an outsider long enough to know how to hold silence.
How to watch.
How to listen.

And when it was my turn — I blacked out.

The words didn’t feel written.
They felt like release.
Like everything I’d held in — every stare, every mispronounced name, every joke at my expense — just snapped loose.

And when I was done, the place went silent.
Then wild.

That moment changed everything.

I wasn’t the outsider anymore.
I was the glitch in the matrix.
The ghost who spoke.

From there, the music didn’t stop.
I recorded wherever I could — home setups, slums, back-alley studios.
Three albums by 14.
Pure grit. Pure voice.

It wasn’t clean.
But it was real.

And for the first time in my life — I wasn’t explaining myself to the world.
I was speaking it into being.

Hip-hop didn’t just give me a voice.
It gave me presence.
And presence, for someone who always felt like a ghost in every room —
was everything.

Tagged as: p3rs0na / persona iluminado / persona origins