Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

In my version of the story of my father’s illness and death, my father and I were the protagonists: a hero father and a daughter who loved him more than anything. My siblings—Yasmeen and Kwame—were background players. This was self-centered, and I did not care. My father’s illness, in my story, happened almost as much to me as it did to him. I watched him shrink. I smelled his stale, dying breath as I lay beside him telling him pointless stories about school, and films, and what I ate for lunch. I heard him cry out from pain or humiliation when his bowels failed and he woke up in a pool of his own feces.

Being alone in New York, having to fend for myself, learning about money, struggling financially—all of that was a shock to my system. In many ways, my family’s high-mobility, global lifestyle had made me resilient and self-sufficient. But it had, in other ways, made me spoiled. At a young age, I had experienced a great deal of loss. I had been made aware early of the existence of profound suffering in the world—extreme poverty, violence, disease. But, before I moved to New York, I had never done a load of laundry.

On our bookshelf Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nurrudin Farah, Mariama Bâ, and Kofi Awoonor held the place of honor in the center of the top shelf. In our music collection Fela Kuti was joined by Miriam Makeba, Salif Keita, Youssou N’Dour, and E. T. Mensah and the Tempos Band. Yet I saw in my father’s use of the word bush evidence that the colonial mentality existed even in him.

This was not our country, not our conflict, not our calamity. My father and his colleagues were here not to occupy or prevent, only to bear witness. They were here to rebuild and replant what was lost and then rebuild and replant when it was lost again.