BookLife Review: Aftershocks, by Nadia Owusu

mental health, memory, grief, identity, abandonment, loneliness, diplomatic service, nomadic life, multi-ethnicity, white supremacy

I did a complete 180 on this book. About twenty percent of my way through Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu, I was ready to let it go and quit reading this memoir. I hung in there, and I am so glad I did. 

This is a beautiful and complex examination of mental health, identity, abandonment, grief, multi-ethnicity, and white supremacy. The author stews in her multi-layered grief over the death of her beloved father, her mother's abandonment of her, and her stepmother's ambivalence. She plumbs the past, examining memory and the stories we tell ourselves about it. The author gives a gripping description of her not-inconsequential and lonely dive into madness or some sort of deep emotional crisis. Thankfully, she emerges from this episode, wiser and stronger. 

Osuwu uses the metaphor of earthquakes to probe the depths of her trauma and it is mesmerizing. The reader hovers on the thin line between Osuwu’s lucidity and her madness and strains for level ground. I struggled at first with the hopscotched nomadic life of an NGO/diplomat, but later appreciated that the author’s wandering rootlessness was a formative and critical piece of the woman she is and becomes. This story, this life lingers. Aftershocks is a challenging but powerful memoir.