Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu Shahe Mankerian's review of Nadia Owusu's new edition. A collection about her nomadic childhood. IALA Board Member Shahe Mankerian reviews Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks: The last time I read a book to the amplified sound of my heartbeat was Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbu l over a decade ago. Armenian Ghanaian writer Nadia Owusu tells her story of moving between Europe, Africa, and New York in the wake of her mother's desertion and her father's death in her acclaimed memoir, Aftershocks. She'll appear in conversation with Chaya Bhuvaneswar (White Dancing Elephants). This is an online event Third Place Books Lake Forest Park.
Aftershocks is an incredible debut memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu that measures the ever-expanding vibrations of the experiences and traumas that shaped the fault lines that crisscross a woman’s adulthood.
Beginning with her young experiences being abandoned by her mother and subsequently brought up by her father silently suffering from a brain tumor up until his death in her adolescence, Owusu brings the audience on her journey of self-discovery pitted with the dangers of magnitude that a young woman of color faces from independence, to education, cat calls to assault, healthy relationships to bad choices, and peppers a strong contextual cultural history of her homes in Massachusetts, New York, Rome, London, Uganda, and Tanzania throughout. There are harrowing tales from her family’s experiences in the Armenian Genocide, near-escapes from a restaurant terror attacks and the twin towers on 9/11, and the gripping fears of learning her brother was arrested – a black man in America – for a crime he didn’t commit.
Aftershocks Nadia Owusu
Owusu swirls these experiences and historical ruminations around our heads from a blue chair, pulling each tale like Scheherazade from lessons woven with rich beauty and terrible traumas that seem almost impossible to comprehend from such a short life. Owusu guides us through her process of her mind’s rifts, subsequent repairing, and the destructive aftershocks that reemerge with every new moment requiring introspection.
This book is a gorgeous work of creative nonfiction as much as it is a lesson on colonial history, a remembrance on the horrors of genocide, a commentary on the state and history of race relations in the United States and elsewhere, an indictment of the effects of public health / law / and economic policy on the livelihoods of people of color, a memoir about love and family, a conceptualization of the long-term effects of abandonment and loneliness, a case study on epigenetics, and a firsthand portrait of how difficult mental illness makes navigating modern life in a complex, globalized world.
Aftershocks Nadia Owusu Review
Owusu’s prose, and seamless dreamlike transitions between countries, topics, and genres purely illustrate her mastery over her craft. This is a tale of truth. This is a journey. This is a heart-wrenching personal history. A perfect debut sure to send shockwaves across the world in January 2021, and keep aftershocks rumbling for quite some time.