5/11/2023 0 Comments Aftershocks a memoir![]() ![]() There are other threads, or cracks in the earth of her life, that she weaves in and out of these narratives, so that at times there is a sense that we are wandering away from the main question a chapter opened with. A third examines her mothers, the long and complicated relationship with each. Another involves the many ways in which she was racialized in the nations she lived in and made to feel foreign even in places she was taught to believe were home. One involves her stepmother telling Owusu that her father died of AIDS rather than the brain cancer Owusu knew he had. In the following sections, Owusu moves back and forth through several main fault lines that she closely examines from varying angles. Her speech patterns have shifted to fit her surroundings - to protect herself or to feel more at home. She is a Black woman with a Ghanaian father and an Armenian American mother, her looks questioned everywhere, by everyone, seemingly no matter the land she's lived on. ![]() She's been a server, a serial job applicant, a writer she's been a daughter, an orphan, a girlfriend, a friend, a lover, a sibling. She's been a student at several international schools, a boarding school, later college and graduate school. She's mothered her siblings as best she could. She's been orphaned by a mother who left by choice, a father dying, another mother trying and failing to give her the love and safety that she needed. She's witnessed and experienced the aftershocks of colonialism in several nations. She's been a world traveler, experiencing life in Tanzania, England, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda, and finally the United States, all before she turned 20. She's been the privileged child of a UN agency employee, ferried to school and back by chauffeurs while civil wars brewed outside walled compounds guarded by young men, where women called house girls cleaned and cooked for expats.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |