NOTES ON GRIEF
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
June 2020 marked the 40th anniversary of my father’s death. In the months leading up to then I’d plotted ritualistic ways I might mark such loss. But by the time the anniversary arrived, more than 380,000 were dead from Covid. That grief of mine, no longer singular, was subsumed in the collective wail. That is, until Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s visceral exploration of her own father’s unexpected death that month. In 30 short sections, “Notes on Grief” lays a path by which we might mourn our individual traumas among the aggregate suffering of this harrowing time. Our guide, Adichie, is uncloaked, full of “wretched, roaring rage,” teaching us within the space of this work how to gather our disparate selves and navigate the still-raging pandemic. In doing this, she tells a global story of this moment, while mapping how her writerly voice, in particular, came to be.
“Enemies beware,” Adichie writes. “The worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.”
As many of our days do now, her narrative begins with a Zoom call — in Adichie’s case, with her five siblings and their parents, all spread out across America, England and Nigeria. In a season where the days and months could seem to shimmer and blur, Adichie demonstrates the ways grief further detonates our sense of time. She does this by trying to recount its movement. Adichie circles around four days in particular: from June 7, when she saw her father alive as his buoyant, if tired, self on Zoom, to the day he died, at 88 years old, on June 10. In a way that mirrors sudden death, she lays down the narrative without prelude. “My brother Chuks called to tell me,” she writes at the end of the opening section, “and I came undone.”
“Okey is holding a phone over my father’s 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.”
Adichie knows the limits of trying to describe what the body knows best:
“You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language,” she writes. Artists have tried this wrangling forever, in various mediums and states of composure. But we are better off under Adichie’s strain.
First published as an essay in The New Yorker three months after Mr. Adichie’s death, and now expanded, this intimate work implores, jerks us out of callousness, moves grief closer, right under our noses: Death and dying are still everywhere. Adichie is like many of us, stranded and at a distance from her beloved father, “unlooking in the oblique shadow of looking.”
Some days these death-shadowed times have the distant quality of a film about someone else’s life. Our comforting rituals have not been possible. In New Orleans, we mourn without the musical procession that accompanies most of our burials. There is the strange cruelty of sitting on my living room couch and watching a funeral on a screen. Not knowing where to train the eye — on the computer? Outside the window? This distance can threaten our perception of what is real. But Adichie knows to train her eye on what lingers.
Over the course of the slim book, a picture of James Nwoye Adichie takes shape. He died of kidney failure (but she can’t be sure it wasn’t Covid), in Adichie’s ancestral hometown of Abba, Nigeria. From the writer of such brilliant fictions as “Half of a Yellow Sun,” “Purple Hibiscus” and “Americanah,” we come to know the father in both granular and grand ways: We see him playing Sudoku, and “napping, reading and napping again.” We learn of his laurels too, how in the 1980s he was deputy vice chancellor at the University of Nigeria, the country’s first professor of statistics, but also a man who signed all of his kids’ birthday cards with “‘Your dad,’ and his signature.”
In the texture of many of these sentences you can almost feel where the writer has resisted bearing down with her refining tools — language and memory — so as to allow her emotional reality to remain splintered and sharp. Human loss means the loss of the stories the dead once told, in their particular voices. Adichie mourns the oral family histories she never recorded, the loss of a piece of paper on which her father had mapped a family tree. “There is a sensation that is frightening,” she writes, “of a receding, of an ancestry slipping away, but at least I am left with enough for myth, if not memory.”
This is the writer’s quandary: What might the written word preserve, and what can it never? “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite,” the poet Jack Gilbert tells us.
Adichie collects various tactile memories while we stand by witnessing: pinching her father’s neck, him gently slapping her hand, her rubbing his bald head. What she narrates is not only father loss, but the ways Mr. Adichie endures in having made of her a writer. She recounts how, in the Biafran War, Nigerian soldiers burned her father’s texts: “Mounds of charred pages in a pile in my parents’ front yard, where they once grew roses.” It makes sense that she would become a maker of books, to replace what was lost.
Naming, Adichie knows, is a powerful inheritance, and a summoning. Some of the most affecting moments are when the author uses her native tongue to call her father by various nicknames (like “Odelu-Ora Abba,” or “One Who Writes for Our Community”), and to don for herself, like a jeweled cape, the names he called her (like “Nwoke Neli,” or “the equivalent of many men”). Names — especially our chosen ones — are never lost. Mr. Adichie seemed to believe this so strongly that, while being kidnapped for ransom in 2015, he lectured his assailants on how to pronounce his daughter’s famous name properly.
Because this is Adichie, the story of her father’s life and death unfolds alongside one about his own final fight — dating back to the end of the war — against a billionaire from another town who was attempting to take control of the ancestral land in Abba. A consummate world-builder, Adichie suggests that her father’s demise was due not only to complications from kidney failure, but also quite possibly to the stress of trying to reclaim what was his. After all, she writes, “land is the jewel of Igbo cosmology.”
The crevasse exists here in sharp relief. The difficulty of Adichie’s desired return from America to Nigeria, where she also has a home, to mourn her father, is partly due to a raging pandemic but also due to negligence. Adichie’s attempts to get back to Nigeria bring to mind Lucille Clifton’s masterly memoir, “Generations,” in which she returns to Buffalo for her father’s funeral. This homestead, the historical lode, is understood as the place where one might come back, to once again appear in context. It is perhaps the opposite of displacement.
Something about the quality of this particular work, the way it rushes ahead chronologically then folds back onto itself, like a former self getting acquainted with the new, led me away from the written word and into Jason Moran’s “Cradle Song,” a piano lullaby that incorporates the sound of pencil scratching on paper. Moran dedicates this song to his mother, who died of cancer in 2005. During his childhood she attended his piano lessons, taking voracious notes, which Moran hated then. But the song could not exist in its power without them now. Some days, I can listen to “Cradle Song” for hours, my mood rising and falling alongside the feverish pencil scratches as I revel in Moran’s brilliance for incorporating his mother’s notes so artfully.
Adichie does a similar thing here, deconstructing for her readers her father’s own artful notes on her work: “He read everything I wrote.” But by the end, here too the pencil scratchings fall away and we hear only the artist in the melody — weary and unmoored, but going it alone, having been carried a long distance by the imagined sounds of a parent — both an act of inscribing him in the text and reclaiming his body like a sacred land.
Publishers are in the habit of turning essays and even lectures into books. They did so successfully with Adichie’s 2012 TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” a speech that worked its way into Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” It is hard not to wish for more from Adichie, to know how she might contend with this loss over time, but what we have here will have to be enough for now. She is, in this work, “callow and unformed,” and that may be the point.
“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed,” she writes. “A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I feel to death, the awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency. An impermanence in the air.”
Over the course of these 30 fragments, we witness a shift in perspective, an assurance that whatever comes next will never have been created before. This may be true of Adichie’s work just as it may be true of where we all find ourselves in days to come.
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