Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Notes on Grief

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Copyright Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2021

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Source ISBN: 9780008470302

Ebook Edition May 2021 ISBN: 9780008470319

Version: 2021-04-12

In memoriam:

James Nwoye Adichie,

19322020

From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual: two siblings joining from Lagos, three of us from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral hometown in south-eastern Nigeria. On 7 June, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. Move your phone a bit, Daddy, one of us would say. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying he hadnt had dinner because theyd had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our villages ancestral land. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. On 8 June, Okey went to Abba to see him and said he looked tired. On 9 June, I kept our chat brief, so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my playful imitation of a relative. Ka chi fo, he said. Good night. His last words to me. On 10 June, he was gone. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. Her work is read around the world, and has been translated into over thirty languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize (now called the Womens Prize for Fiction), and was named their Winner of Winners in 2020; a short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck; and Americanah, which won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the New York Times Top Ten Best Books of the Year. In addition to her writing, Chimamanda speaks at many events around the world. She has delivered two landmark TED Talks: her 2009 TED Talk The Danger of A Single Story, and her 2012 TedxEuston Talk We Should All Be Feminists, which started a worldwide conversation about feminism and was published as a book in 2014. Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. Chimamanda is committed to assisting young aspiring writers, and founded an annual Writers Workshop in Nigeria for which applications come from around the world.

www.chimamanda.com

www.facebook.com/chimamandaadichie

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

We Should All Be Feminists

Americanah

The Thing Around Your Neck

Half of a Yellow Sun

Purple Hibiscus

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My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was: utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon, he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day, he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor and so how can this be? But there he is. Okey is holding a phone over my fathers face, and my father looks asleep, his face relaxed, beautiful in repose. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed. It happened a few minutes before midnight, Nigerian time, with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone. I stare and stare at my father. My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue? My sister Uche says she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, No! Dont tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true. My husband is saying, Breathe slowly, drink some of this water. My housecoat, my lockdown staple, is lying crumpled on the floor. Later my brother Kene will jokingly say, You better not get any shocking news in public, since you react to shock by tearing off your clothes.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? Its from crying, Im told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual and I think,