When Joe Jacquest Oteng’s father, Peter, died in 2011, he was in charge of arranging his paperwork, sorting his belongings and arranging a funeral. But he could not have predicted what he found. Here, Oteng, 38, from Wolverhampton and now based between Barcelona and London, reflects on this period of pain and discovery.
My dad was a hoarder. When he died, and I was clearing out the house, there were stacks of paper everywhere. When I was going through it, I found his original Ghanaian passport, which I’d never seen before. When I opened it up, the date of birth placed him 10 years older than my mum, which I thought he was, with a different birthday.
I thought it was a mistake. Then I found a marriage certificate to a woman who was not my mother. In fact, every piece of paper I found contained another piece of information that told me something completely different about my dad. All of the clues started to paint a very different picture of who he really was.
Shorts
I grew up with both my parents; they raised me together until I went to secondary school but they were never really together and were never married. They tried to make it work so I could have some stability; they tried their best, but they didn’t have a great relationship, and there was no romance. I never remember them being affectionate, and they always had separate bedrooms. As soon as I got older, they went their separate ways.
