Hi friend,
For my birthday last month, a beloved pal got me a child’s toy from an antique store: some wooden blocks that you can use to build different styles of houses. I was so moved by it, given how complicated my relationship to home is, and how I’ve always yearned for one of my own. Having grown up between cultures and places, having spent much of my twenties in hospital rooms, I learned to make a home wherever I am. It’s the reason that to this day, if I go on an overnight business trip, I unpack my bag and put my three articles of clothing in the hotel dresser. I do not live among suitcases or boxes. When I move into a new place, I immediately unpack, find places for everything.
This search for home and a sense of belonging is something that my friend Nadia Owusu knows very well. Nadia has lived betwixt and between; the daughter of an Armenian-American mother and a Ghanaian father, Nadia was born in Tanzania and grew up in England, Italy, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Her young life was full of unsettling quakes and ruptures—her mother’s absence, her father’s death, and buried family secrets—that left her unmoored.
This rootlessness and the search for home is the subject of Nadia’s debut memoir, Aftershocks, which was one of the most anticipated books of the year. I’m excited to announce that it’s our August Book Club pick. I’m also thrilled that Nadia will be joining us for a Studio Visit on August 22 to talk about the book and how writing it helped her rebuild in the aftermath.
Today we have an excerpt from Aftershocks for you, and a prompt inspired by it. It’s about home—where or what or who it is.
Getting lost in my garden,
Suleika
P.S. Studio Visits and our Book Club are part of our paid subscription that supports the Isolation Journals. To join us, become a paid subscriber!
156. Homegoing by Nadia Owusu
Excerpted from Aftershocks: A Memoir
I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me, nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could just belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of all the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the backroads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. Instead, I moved further and further outside of my body. Most of us do. But I moved so far outside that I got lost and couldn’t find my way back in…
Once, I was in an airport somewhere in Africa, waiting for my father to arrive. It could have been Uganda, Ethiopia, or Tanzania. The memory is not a clear one. I so often waited for my father at airports. This airport had big windows that looked out on the landing strip, so you could watch people get off the plane with their suitcases and their cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Nobody travels light to anywhere in Africa. Tourists carry giant backpacks full of tents and mosquito repellent and khaki outfits. Africans carry gifts for everyone they know, and some for strangers. There were no arrival gates. People walked down a ladder and onto the tarmac. They paused and set their luggage down. They took off their sweaters or wiped their glasses. I scanned the crowd for my father, but my eyes landed on a woman with brown skin like mine. She had long cornrows down her back. I noticed her because her pause was longer than everyone else’s. I wondered what she was doing. She got down on her knees and placed her cheek against the tarmac and then kissed it. She stayed there, with her lips pressed to the ground, for a good long time.
“What’s she doing?” I asked Anabel, who was waiting beside me, examining her lipstick in the little mirror on its case.
“Greeting the earth,” Anabel said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s probably been away from home for a long time.”
With my cheek against the blue chair, I press my lips against the place in my wrist where my heartbeat whispers. “Hello,” I say. Up close, blue veins look like rivers trapped underground. Borders not yet burst.
Your prompt for the week:
Write about how you identify home—as a place, a person, a practice, a song.
We’re excited to host Nadia Owusu for our next Studio Visit. Nadia is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. Her first book, Aftershocks, A Memoir, topped many most-anticipated and best book of the year lists and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. By day, Nadia is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm that helps social-change organizations to define goals, execute plans, and evaluate impact. The recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, she is a graduate of Pace University (BA), Hunter College (MS), and Mountainview low-residency MFA program, where she now teaches.
I loved this prompt. Thank you for sharing it. I held the space to write for 8 minutes...small spaces are helpful.
The mobile signal goes out first. Spotify quiets and the heads in the backseat look up wondering what happened, the screens disrupted in tandem.
We descend the last hill into the quiet valley my parents live within. I had a bedroom here, but it wasn't my home. And yet, because they live here, these two people who give me unconditional love, it is where I go when I want to feel home.
There's a park across the street and a main street beyond that and the entire scene fits in the composed rectangle made from thumbs and pointer fingers. If you squint it looks well maintained, maybe even quaint. But when you get close you see how it is more about what once was than what is.
I exhale here. It's not trying too hard and it lets me do the same.
That has got to be one of the sweetest writing homes ever... garden's not lacking either.