Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

“The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered. I don’t want you believing that. There is more to life, and to the universe, than what is in a single book.”

My father used to say that no matter where lines were drawn, all human beings, all living things, are connected.

I wanted to throw my dying laptop to the ground. I wanted to push a button that would make everything stop. I wanted to hibernate in the blue chair, but I knew hibernation might turn permanent.

The closest thing I could think of to hibernation was getting drunk.

The alcohol made me brave enough, or reckless enough, to...

To answer my unsolved questions, as I had done my whole life, I turned to literature.

I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place.

People from different parts of Africa believe lots of fatuous stereotypes about one another.

My father continued to teach me about Ghanaian history after discovering that the entire continent of Africa was excluded from my world history textbook, except for Egypt. And the illustrations of ancient Egyptians in the book made them look decidedly European.

To this day, Ashanti culture is centered around a spirit of collectivism. Without it, they know, they would not have survived, would not survive.

“History is a story,” my grandfather said, finally. “What is told depends on who writes it. They put this in, leave that out; decide where the emphasis goes.”

A study from New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital found that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors were capable of being passed on to their children. Our genes change all the time when chemical tags attach themselves to the DNA and turn genes on or off. The study found that some of these tags—found in the genes of those survivors—were also found in their children. The changes led to an increased incidence of stress disorders. This passing down of environmentally altered genes is called epigenetic inheritance

What if you discover that your life has been reduced to a series of rote actions? You go to your graduate school classes, to work at a restaurant on West 4th Street, to bars with friends, but the purpose has grown vague. This does not make you numb, as one might expect.

Some faults are visible at the surface, but others lie deep within the crust.

white people are perpetual wanderers; that their privileges allow them to always be moving toward something, even when they don’t know what that something is.

hakuna matata and a slap on the back. It’s not about “no worries for the rest of your days,” but rather about carrying on despite those worries. It’s about acknowledging there are things in this world beyond your control.

We color in the outlines of our memories with our beliefs.

Some things are out of the gods’ control. And some matters require more from us than hope or prayer. They require us to see and support one another. They require us to defend one another.

Nobody traveling to anywhere in Africa travels light. Tourists carry giant backpacks full of tents and mosquito repellent and absurd khaki outfits. Africans carry gifts for everyone they know, and some for strangers.

I liked to watch the guards come and go. They gave each other low fives in parting. I wondered who they were outside of their station by the gate. One of them often had a book in hand. One was inclined to pacing. His boots looked too big for him. He didn’t look old enough for his weapon. Who was guarding their wives, children, and mothers? If the rebels or the government troops came, would the guards take bullets for us? What did we pay them for their lives?

Who was I to have so much and demand even more? Why was I in this chauffeured vehicle with a father who loved me while that child dropped dying or dead in the middle of the road with only a strange white woman to comfort him? The boy’s bird body haunts me. He hovers over me in judgment when I feel sorry for myself, but he cannot stop me from feeling sorry for myself.

In the North, children filed out of their family’s mud huts and walked barefoot on dirt roads. Some walked for ten miles. Every night, they walked to the nearest town: Gulu, Kitgum, or Lira. Eleven-year-olds carried toddlers part of the way. Much of the way was unlit. The children walked so they would not be stolen. Being stolen meant slavery and rape. The Lord’s Resistance Army forced children to kill each other in order to poison them with shame. The rebels stormed villages at night. The children slept on verandas, in bus stations, in hospitals, in the streets, in churches, in the homes of whoever would have them. They woke when the rain came, drenched them through. They woke when cars backfired, and drunkards fought. They woke from the rumbling of trucks in the distance and from fever dreams. When day broke, they gathered for the long walk home, to help their parents on farms and in kitchens or, if they were lucky, to attend school.

How does walking keep them from being stolen?

sepulchral

“All of that is going to be a heavy burden to carry,” Michelle Obama said in her speech at Tuskegee University. “It can make you feel like your life somehow doesn’t matter.”

was trying to understand the ways in which I had become a different kind of black than I was in England, in Italy, in Tanzania, in Ethiopia, in Uganda, in Ghana. In each of those places, being black meant something different. My particular shade of black—light to medium brown with yellow or red undertones, depending on the season; middle-class; biracial—was valued differently in each of those places as well.

The day after McCann was shot, Henry Glover was killed by a rookie NOPD officer named David Warren outside a strip mall. Warren’s charge was to guard the mall from “looters.” To the NOPD, whatever was in the strip mall—packaged American cheese, Twinkies, soda, beer, maybe some deli meat, potato chips, I imagine—was more valuable than the lives of black people. Five officers, including Warren, were charged with trying to cover up Glover’s murder by setting fire to a car with his dead body in it. Warren was acquitted. On September 4, nearly a week after the hurricane, several NOPD officers leapt out of a rental truck and fired their weapons at a group of black people crossing a bridge. Ronald and Lance Madison—brothers—were returning to a hotel where they were staying after being flooded out of their home. Also on the bridge were Leonard Bartholomew Sr., his wife

Susan, son Leonard Jr., daughter Lesha, seventeen-year-old nephew James Brissette, and Brissette’s friend José Holmes. They had walked to a grocery store in search of food and supplies. Leonard was shot in the back, head, and foot. Susan’s arm was partially shot off and later had to be amputated. Lesha was shot four times. José was shot in the abdomen, hand, and jaw. James Brissette and forty-year-old Ronald Madison, who family say was mentally ill, were killed. An officer stomped on Madison before he died. None of the people on the bridge had committed any crime. The police fabricated a cover-up story. The officers, they claimed, were responding to a police dispatch report of an officer down. They claimed they were fired at. All lies, it was later discovered.

It was definitely my friend Pam who said we don’t squat enough in Western culture; that squatting eliminates wasteful thoughts and creates calm