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danadalloway 's review for:
Aftershocks
by Nadia Owusu
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. This was an absolutely riveting journey across continents and back and forth through time. Owusu has lived in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi, London, and New York. With astonishing self awareness, Owusu describes both her privilege and its cost -- on herself, her family, and the world at large. “Let me show you my home,” she writes. “It is a border. It is the outer edge of both sides. They drew the lines right through me.”
This is really two books, a fascinating reflection of an international childhood and the brutal “aftershocks” of the cumulative emotional and geographic upheavals that result. Her narrative intersperses memories of youth with those of a harrowing psychic break, darkly foreshadowing cause and effect. She demurs, “I can only talk about the wars in Ethiopia and Uganda from a remove, from a protected place.” Yet she is not protected enough to prevent the world from marking her. At one point, a violent local militia invades her house looking for children to kidnap as soldiers, and a boy she’s played with unthinkingly hides in plain sight on their couch; her family’s wealth and status shield him from being revealed as a potential recruit. But danger does not lurk only in Uganda, Ghana, and Ethiopia. Threats at a playground in Rome and even her boarding school also imperil her physical and emotional well-being.
The combination of a heart-breakingly fractured family and frequent moves between cultures and languages constitute the book’s earthquakes, in response to which Owusu develops what she calls her “seismometer,” which emotionally calibrates “foreshock, mainshock, and aftershock.” As a result of these quakes and faultlines, she explains, “The story is reshuffled. In the sequence, we only know what goes where in retrospect.”
While I understand the reason for the narrative fragmenting, I found this toggling between locations and time periods disorienting and had to reread chapter titles to remember where and when the action was set. This jumbled organization, combined with a tendency to provide exhaustive background, were my only reservations about this protean memoir. Owusu has lived so many places, speaking in different languages and accents, that some context is obviously necessary. Owusu explains the Black Lives Matter movement, colorism in the African American community, post-colonial theory, anti-LGBTQ laws in Uganda, the Armenian genocide, and Bush’s PEPFAR legislation, among other ideas. Obviously she has been so misunderstood in so many ways that perhaps she errs in providing too much background rather than presuming on her readers’ knowledge.
Having lived through two literal tremors and countless figurative quakes, Owusu writes, “An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: the earth’s, mine, yours. An earthquake is the ground breaking and the heart breaking.” Yet she bravely owns her history and writes, “A story is a flashlight and a weapon.” Reading this memoir is an insightful and inspiriting tour through the seismic moments of the last several decades.
This is really two books, a fascinating reflection of an international childhood and the brutal “aftershocks” of the cumulative emotional and geographic upheavals that result. Her narrative intersperses memories of youth with those of a harrowing psychic break, darkly foreshadowing cause and effect. She demurs, “I can only talk about the wars in Ethiopia and Uganda from a remove, from a protected place.” Yet she is not protected enough to prevent the world from marking her. At one point, a violent local militia invades her house looking for children to kidnap as soldiers, and a boy she’s played with unthinkingly hides in plain sight on their couch; her family’s wealth and status shield him from being revealed as a potential recruit. But danger does not lurk only in Uganda, Ghana, and Ethiopia. Threats at a playground in Rome and even her boarding school also imperil her physical and emotional well-being.
The combination of a heart-breakingly fractured family and frequent moves between cultures and languages constitute the book’s earthquakes, in response to which Owusu develops what she calls her “seismometer,” which emotionally calibrates “foreshock, mainshock, and aftershock.” As a result of these quakes and faultlines, she explains, “The story is reshuffled. In the sequence, we only know what goes where in retrospect.”
While I understand the reason for the narrative fragmenting, I found this toggling between locations and time periods disorienting and had to reread chapter titles to remember where and when the action was set. This jumbled organization, combined with a tendency to provide exhaustive background, were my only reservations about this protean memoir. Owusu has lived so many places, speaking in different languages and accents, that some context is obviously necessary. Owusu explains the Black Lives Matter movement, colorism in the African American community, post-colonial theory, anti-LGBTQ laws in Uganda, the Armenian genocide, and Bush’s PEPFAR legislation, among other ideas. Obviously she has been so misunderstood in so many ways that perhaps she errs in providing too much background rather than presuming on her readers’ knowledge.
Having lived through two literal tremors and countless figurative quakes, Owusu writes, “An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: the earth’s, mine, yours. An earthquake is the ground breaking and the heart breaking.” Yet she bravely owns her history and writes, “A story is a flashlight and a weapon.” Reading this memoir is an insightful and inspiriting tour through the seismic moments of the last several decades.