Book: Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu review – a search for home

For Nadia Owusu, the question “where are you from” does not have a straightforward answer. Rather it prompts an eight-paragraph rundown of numerous cities and countries; lists of family members spread out around the world, and half-sisters and half-brothers with multihyphenated identities – “Armenian-Somali-American”. “Confused?” she writes in the opening of this memoir. “Me too.” The sudden displacements in her life – from Tanzania to England, then to Italy, Ethiopia and Uganda – can feel like earthquakes that shake the ground beneath her feet, threatening to unleash chaos. Meanwhile, Owusu’s mind has developed a seismometer of its own, always on the lookout for threats, guarding against her persistent fear of plunging into an “all-consuming abyss”.

Aftershocks begins with the author, now 39, recalling a week spent in a blue rocking chair at her New York apartment: at the time she is 28 and the abyss feels near. Her stepmother, Anabel, has recently visited from Tanzania, and at a restaurant in Chinatown has broken the news that Owusu’s father who died when she was 13, she believed from brain cancer, had actually died of Aids. “You think your precious father was so perfect?” she asks Owusu, suggesting he must have had affairs. The revelation – the truth of which is unclear – is too much for Owusu to handle; she wonders whether she really knew her father. Strolling around the city one afternoon, she happens across the frayed rocking chair. Her father liked this shade of blue, she remembers. She brings the chair home, ignoring her roommate’s reservations about bed bugs, and sits on it, not leaving for days. It is home.

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 to escape racist bullying in Surrey. “Time, for me, is not linear,” she writes. Instead, the memoir is structured around the different stages of an earthquake. We begin with “foreshocks” – small earthquakes, such as that meal with Anabel – then move to “topography”, in which Owusu looks at her family’s roots, and “faults” – the long cracks in the surface along which her life splits apart.

 Racism can not only be seen in the external metrics of inequality, rights and opportunity – it also exacts a mental toll

In “topography”, we learn about the meeting of Owusu’s parentsin Massachusetts. After studying the future of food aid in sub-Saharan Africa as a graduate student, her father, Osei, gets a job at the UN, a position that will eventually move the family around the world. He meets and marries Almas, a woman in her 20s, and they have two children. Owusu remembers the one remaining photograph of the family all together. In it, she is a one-year-old in a frilly dress; her baby sister Yasmeen is cradled by her father’s friend in the background. She understands that the photograph can represent “what is possible when love wins and freedom rings and the pendulum swings towards justice” – such that “a young black man from Kumasi, Ghana, can move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and marry a young woman of Armenian descent whose grandparents escaped genocide and arrived in America with little more than the clothes on their backs”.

Almas’s story is certainly testament to what can happen when borders are porous and opportunities abound. But people can only remain paragons of virtue in myth. A year after the photograph is taken, Owusu’s parents divorce. She sees her mother less and less, until she moves out of view entirely. Besides, Owusu notes, while much attention in stories of immigrant life is paid to “the dream, achieved or deferred, of a new life in the new world”,little is said of what they’ve lost.

The memoir is written against the usual narrative of “onward-and-upward” migration. Owusu recalls being taken on a tour as a child to see the sacred throne of the kings of the Ashanti people in Ghana. This, it turns out, is her ancestral clan, but the seven-year-old Owusu is more interested in watching Yasmeen play on their GameBoy. Reflecting on the visit, she considers what the Nigerian activist and musician Fela Kuti called “colonial mentality” – the tendency of the colonised to aspire to be their colonisers, even after gaining independence. She remembers watching modern-day legal trials in Ghana on television, being bemused by the white wigs worn by lawyers and her great-grandfather, who always wore a three-piece suit with white gloves. As a 12-year-old at boarding school in Surrey, she joined her white classmates in bullying a black student. Like so many desperate children have done and continue to do, Owusu traded in self-hatred to secure the safety offered by proximity to whiteness.

Racism can not only be seen in the external metrics of inequality, rights and opportunity – it also manifests in the intimate domain of one’s mind, and exacts a mental toll. When Owusu is in the blue chair years later, she recalls her father telling her, when she was four, that she had to work “twice as hard to get half as far” in life. She sees how this lesson has shaped her relentless drive to work as she juggles multiple jobs and maintains top grades, all the while ignoring calls to rest. This is the double-bind presented by racism: mechanisms for your survival get turned against yourself.

Owusu begins to see her father as a mortal, both wonderful and flawed, and wonders what her adulation of him precluded her from seeing. Moving away from her worship of a fixed, singular ideal, she discovers love in a plurality of places. She pays homage to Almas and Anabel, whose inner lives she had never really considered; her aunts and half-siblings, and her ancestors. She finds slices of herself in every place she has lived. Aftershocks offers an incisive and tender reminder that life does not take place in neat categories, no matter where you are from. We are many-sided and infinitely malleable, and all the better for it. “I am made of the earth, flesh, ocean, blood, and bone of all the places I tried to belong to and all the people I long for,” Owusu reflects; and with that, “I am home”.

• Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£16.99). To order a copy go to . Delivery charges may apply.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/01/aftershocks-by-nadia-owusu-review-a-search-for-home