Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was named a best book of 2021 by over a dozen publications, including Time, Vogue, Esquire, and the BBC, and has been translated into five languages. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, and selected by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai for her book club. Nadiahas been granted residencies at Yaddo and Art Omi. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. She teaches writing at Columbia University and at the Mountainview MFA program, and is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a consulting firm supporting social-change organizations.
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Aftershocks
Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book.
“So you know where your center is,” he said.
“Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked.
“So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.” I cannot be certain this is true, but when I remember him saying this, I hear his voice catch on the word mother.
Aftershocks:A Memoir -
Aftershocks
We sat in the back of a white Pajero, swimsuits on, arms squelched into inflated orange armbands. We were on our way to one of the beach hotel pools. Our tiny bodies sprang into the air as we flew over the rocky dirt roads. Every time we landed, we dislodged dirt from the old polyester car seats. Sparkling dust filled the car: Magic out of filth. We never wore our seat belts. Country music played on the radio. My father’s driver, Francis, sang improbably along in his Swahili accent. Tanzanians love country music. I think they like the gritty sagacity, the stories from an America that is more familiar to them, more like home, than the skyscrapers of New York or the glitz of LA. The American landscape that is bucolic and coarse and full of God-fearing people who corral bovine beasts on open plains and tell stories around campfires.
Aftershocks:A Memoir -
Aftershocks
I have lived in disaster and disaster has lived in me. My share of natural disaster was minor, my share of war abstracted. I felt numb during the terror in Manhattan, but my legs carried me. Almost always, I have found a hand to hold.
When I picture an earthquake, I picture an earthquake. And, I picture my mother’s back and my father’s tumor and planes crashing into towers. When I picture an earthquake, I picture orphans in Armenia and child soldiers. I picture myself, safe, behind guarded walls. I picture an absence. I hear thunder and silence. An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: The earth’s, mine, yours.
Aftershocks:A Memoir
“Nadia Owusu’s So Devilish a Fire is a chorus ‘possible only through fire and mother.’ . . . Owusu’s rigorous inquiry of multiracial identity, nation, ancestry and what traditions ask us to ‘burn to be beautiful’ is the manuscript, song and voice I have waited all my life to sing and singe alongside of. It’s an honor to live in the time of such lyric. In the tradition of June Jordan, who told the truth to become beautiful, Owusu is as unerasable as her forebears. Here, truly, is an author who writes a beauty that is a form of justice; gives me permission for some small, retroactive hope for the boy I was; and is for all of us who have had our bodies labeled a half-truth. To take this book in your hands is more than a gift—it is to receive permission to gleam.” —Julian Randall, author of Refuse
Ghanaian and American-Armenian by birth, Nadia Owusu’s childhood travels inform her gaze and language in this elliptical, questioning memoir. The result is prose that’s beautifully restless, always in search of music and meaning. Forged by a family secret, her sentences become skeleton keys that unlock memories and transgressions. The ambitious and elegant structure of this work houses a profound meditation on rootlessness, hybridity, and resilience. It’s rare a writer has the language and artistry to turn the raw material of a moving origin story into something that transcends the subject itself.