Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

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.

My father’s death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my mother’s leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.

When George left me, I thought he was my leading man. Now I know he was a supporting actor. I mean no offense to him in saying this. He was—is—a lovely person. He hurt me by not loving me enough. Heartbreak of that sort happens all the time. I didn’t love him enough either. It just took me a long time to see that.

When I met George, I was overflowing with want, need, heartbreak, and wrath. George’s body was the one I chose to pour it into.

He started leaving me on the day he told me he loved me, though it took him two years to do it. This caused me pain, but at least that pain didn’t require me to self-examine. I focused on that pain rather than on the greater pains of my father’s death and my mothers’ rejection.

I would force my face into a silent expression and look up to meet my father’s eyes. He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk. “Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.

As for injuries, pain is not always felt when and where it is inflicted. Grief is slow internal bleeding.

There are, after all, far more published redemption stories. People like a happy ending. People want the cap back on the bottle, the gun unloaded, the foot stepping backward, away from the edge.

We both hurled the insults; she hurled the objects. To be fair, I wanted her to. I pushed her until her eyes became wild. I wanted someone else to lose control so I didn’t have to.

In many African cultures, including the Ashanti tribe of Ghana, to which my father belonged, and the Chagga tribe of Tanzania, to which my stepmother belonged, it is believed that, after death, one is rewarded for living a good life by being made an ancestor. If a person is not properly mourned, it may be taken as a sign that he did not do enough to gain the love and respect of those around him. In this case, the dead person may become a ghost who will likely torment the living. There is no greater insult than to have your death ignored.

I couldn’t grieve, because other people’s flamboyant, feigned grief was all around me every second of the day.

Contradiction, to me, spoke to the existence of context and complexity, and beyond that, to the reality that, no matter how much we know, there is much that cannot be known. The universe, the earth, our bodies, are ever changing. What is real in us might not be real, might not be who we are, tomorrow. We might be one person in our houses and another person at our neighbor’s house down the road. For some of us, this is also true of our voices. But, to George, contradiction in an argument, discontinuity in a voice, signaled laziness, dishonesty. It was grounds to assume moral failure.

The dorm smelled like a pyre. The city smelled like a pyre. I was horrified because the dust in our nostrils contained particles of human beings. We were inhaling pieces of fathers and mothers and lovers.

A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people’s earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.