Book Summary
Aftershocks is not organised chronically, and instead dips back and forth as we see Owusu as a graduate student in New York, a party-hopping international school teenager in Uganda, a child trying.
- 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. Nadia Owusu’s memoir, Aftershocks Aftershocks.
- Nadia Owusu, author of “Aftershocks” Photo: Beowulf Sheehan. A 2019 Whiting Award winner and poet, Owusu is the associate director for learning and equity at Living Cities, a nonprofit that promotes racial and economic justice. Her career and poetry pervade and give heft to “Aftershocks,” her first book of prose.
- “I am the blue chair island. I rock and the island rocks. I pull at a blue thread on the chair’s arm. I pull a hangnail from the third finger on my right hand.” In this Books Are Magic virtual event, Nadia Owusu reads from her debut memoir, Aftershocks (Simon & Schuster, 2021), and speaks with author Catherine E.
- This is Nadia Owusu’s memoir AFTERSHOCKS. Nadia was raised everywhere.
In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.
Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia's nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia's stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.
With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.
Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life's perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.
Heralding a dazzling new writer, Aftershocks joins the likes of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron's Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts.
This poetic, genre-bending work—blending memoir with cultural history—from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu grapples with the fault lines of identity, the meaning of home, black womanhood, and the ripple effects, both personal and generational, of emotional trauma.
Nadia Owusu grew up all over the world—from Rome and London to Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala. When her mother abandoned her when she was two years old, the rejection caused Nadia to be confused about her identity. Even after her father died when she was thirteen and she was raised by her stepmother, she was unable to come to terms with who she was since she still felt motherless and alone.
When Nadia went to university in America when she was eighteen she still felt as if she had so many competing personas that she couldn’t keep track of them all without cracking under the pressure of trying to hold herself together. A powerful coming-of-age story that explores timely and universal themes of identity, Aftershocks follows Nadia’s life as she hauls herself out of the wreckage and begins to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one she writes into existence.
“The earthquake came and destroyed their homes, their city. On the same day, my mother came, and her coming toppled me. My mother became the earthquake. I was only seven.”
Aftershocks Book Review
What a beautifully written and profoundly moving memoir. I am breathless!
Nadia Owusu was a young child when her mother left her and her younger sister with their father. Due to her father’s work, they moved often, and she lived in several different countries and on three continents by the time she was eighteen.
She begins by describing a visit her mother made to her in Rome at the age of seven…. or rather, her mother leaving after this short visit. She likens the experience, and her mother, to an earthquake. And everything that follows is the result of that earthquake, the aftershocks reverberating throughout her life.
“I asked my father what an aftershock was. He said they are tremors in the earth that follow an earthquake. They are the earth’s delayed reaction to stress.”
Book Reviews Washington Post
With prose that is shattering in its intensity, Nadia describes her pain growing up and her journey as a young woman to find herself. She narrates her childhood and young adulthood while weaving in the cultures and histories of the countries and people of her ancestors – her father was Ghanaian and her mother Armenian American, the daughter of immigrants who fled the Turkish massacre of Armenian people.
It is difficult for me to describe how this book affected me. It is rare that a memoir truly moves me…. but like an earthquake, this book did.
Ms Owusu writes with piercing clarity and Aftershocksis a powerful memoir. It is both poetic and profound. If you enjoy memoirs, you don’t want to miss this one.