There are other threads, or cracks in the earth of her life, that she weaves in and out of these narratives, so that at times there is a sense that we are wandering away from the main question a chapter opened with. Owusu always brings us back just on time, so that what seems at first like free association is revealed, instead, as potent context. The effect ties directly into another of Owusu's main themes: Storytelling is how we understand ourselves, others, and the worlds we live in, and any story that is too simple or that holds no contradictions is suspect, for that means it lacks the nuance necessary for a deeper understanding. In her capable writing, stories become nearly tangible objects she holds to the light, turns over and over, eager to discover a never before glimpsed sparkle or a surprising divot in their familiar shapes.
For a young woman whose foundations were shaken several times in her life — including numerous moves to locales with literal tectonic rumblings along with the more metaphorical tremors of civil unrest — [Owusu's] approach effectively portrays the inner angst of individuals who have grown up amid trauma and have learned to be vigilant, to read the slightest shifts as foreboding. Owusu’s narrative deftly demonstrates a keen sense of others’ emotional states ... It takes a skillful hand to weave complex concepts so seamlessly into a narrative, and Owusu executes this masterfully. By relating the events of her upbringing, she is also telling the story of her father and the history of the countries that had become home to her ... While Owusu displays a reverence for her background, she also addresses some potentially harmful cultural practices ... Unable to find stable ground, Owusu centers her narrative on her body, which she brilliantly reclaims in these sections ... you will journey across countries, hear numerous languages, and feel how deep a loss can go.
Owusu’s history gives her the authority to write about many identities with confidence ... Owusu makes this period of reckoning and high emotional drama the axis around which the rest of the book revolves. Dedicated to 'mad black women everywhere,' bursting with flashbacks, flash-forwards, research-based asides, and returns to the Blue Chair, Aftershocks is all over the place. Which is exactly the identity it claims. Full of narrative risk and untrammeled lyricism, it fulfills the grieving author’s directive to herself: to construct a story that reconstructs her world.
In some of the most self-aware prose I’ve seen...Owusu reexamines everything she’s come to understand ... Woven among powerful scenes in the chair are time-stamped vignettes where the friction intensified ... In her deft handling of history and memory, raging madness and crystal-clear insight, Owusu crafts a gorgeous work of art from the story of her life. After a lifetime of abandonment and wandering, Owusu is able to step into her own rights as creator, mothering herself home ... Nadia Owusu charts a way forward for herself and for all of us, as we look for home within our own stories.
I have particular interest in and compassion for Owusu’s cultural complexity, for the code-switcher’s attentiveness to what’s necessary for survival ... The gamut of Owusu’s youthful experiences...make for compelling reading, interspersed as they are with elucidating histories of the countries with which she is affiliated or in which her family made their home ... the memoir is triumphant: the survivor’s account of a thoughtful, passionate young writer grappling with life’s demons ... But this sense of hard-won redemption doesn’t feel entirely convincing, given the tenor and form of the memoir. Aftershocks is written in an elaborately fragmented manner, looping and uneven, held together by the metaphors of the earthquake and the chair ... Owusu’s memoir is affecting despite, rather than because of, its structure ... At times the book feels more a howl of agony intended to command compassion from a distance than a work of art created to evoke an emotional experience in the reader. This is perhaps more generally a risk of memoir than of fiction, but the difference arises, too, from the artist’s control of narrative form.
Throughout the book, Owusu writes poignantly about belonging and assimilation ... But the connective tissue of the book is the near-constant guilt she experiences as she grapples with identity and her willingness to erase the most vibrant parts of herself in an attempt to belong ... Owusu is unflinching in examining herself, which is commendable, but her self-reflection can veer toward the melodramatic and her repeated ruminations don’t yield further clarity ... In the end, Owusu ultimately answers what home is. Her definition is pure and restorative to read.
... stunning ... Aftershocks...spares little in the way of capturing the disorienting atmosphere of an earthquake: the fear of the earth’s sudden movement, the terror of being in the midst of a tragedy, the trauma that follows and lingers. And, of course, there are actual earthquakes in the book, the first of which, in a remarkable case of life being stranger than fiction ... a hallucinatory, harrowing tale. We witness, in sections both tantalizing and tragic, Owusu’s struggles with mental illness. The book becomes a form of attempted self-care, repair through revelation. This is no ordinary jeremiad or jejune recounting of events; instead, it is an evocation of a feeling, of what it feels like to be constantly in search of a place to call home, constantly in search of peace amid trauma ... this sense of uprooting and uncertainty feels real and resonant, and it is in her capturing of this curious sensation that Owusu shines brightest as a memoirist ... Addressing all of this is no easy feat, and Owusu succeeds overall but occasionally stumbles. Her prose is often beautiful and lyrical, as well as limber ... nonlinear, improvisational ... At the same time, despite my love for challenging nonfiction, this structure sometimes feels too disorienting, if not vertiginous; I lost track of people and places more than once, and several sections spiral through topics, places and voice changes so quickly that it becomes overwhelming.
Still, Owusu’s brilliance as a prose writer keeps me hooked even in these moments of uncertainty.
... an intimate work told in an imaginative style, with the events that shaped its author rippling throughout her nonlinear story. The structure mimics the all-consuming effect that a moment—a personal earthquake—can have on a life.
Raised by a single father who looms large in both her happiest memories and her most complicated periods of soul-searching, Owusu has written a memoir powered by a central dilemma: roots give you a solid sense of self, but they also cause you pain ... Does trauma pass between generations? How does a 'colonial mentality' live on in African countries that once fought long and hard against European rule? These questions underpin Owusu’s thoughts; and, as she embraces the idea of multiple belonging, her book shows us how others make us who we are.
... vivid ... Owusu captures how she is 'read' in different places with unflinching clarity ... in writing through the anguish, [Owusu] discovers if not peace, then something approaching calm.
[I] was struck by her thoughtful reflections on her own singular life and the life of her family, as well as by the confidence and skill of her voice ... In addition to colorism, Owusu addresses the ways in which contemporary Africans attempt to distance themselves from African Americans descended from enslaved peoples, and she contends with how her view of her own Blackness changed once she moved to the United States, where she has spent her entire adult life ... once readers grow familiar with Owusu’s voice and with the people and events she describes, the shape and pattern of her narrative become clear. She poignantly demonstrates that the stories we tell one another about our lives matter.
She employs this quaking metaphor with its terminology—faults, foreshocks, mainshocks and all—as an overarching, self-excavating structure, weaving personal stories together into a compelling, international tale of a biracial woman's quarter-life marred by mental illness and devastating losses ... the book, which mostly rejects the linear form for more organic storytelling, buckles under the weight of the dramatic and overwrought. Yes, there is plenty of urgency and intrigue, but there are lost opportunities to reject pat analogies for deeper reflections on how maddeningly complex we are as humans, especially those who defy easy categorizations of race and belonging. Nonetheless, Owusu has produced a memoir that is well-written and timely, having documented the minutiae of her early years as if her very own life depended on it.
...gorgeous and unsettling ... Aftershocks is thematically structured an earthquake, including the rumbling foreshocks and the shuddering ground after an upheaval. The narrative swings back and forth in time ... Aftershocks knits together the author’s own experiences with the histories of some of the places she has lived. She has seen poverty and suffering and civil wars, but always at a remove, while ensconced in the privileged bubble of expat life ... Elsewhere in the book she writes of the kind of split loyalties that were fostered and exacerbated under colonial rule — another fault line. The more Owusu looks, the more fissures she finds.
... a genre-straddling epic ... The story builds in concentric if not entirely closed circles around this set of characters and the places they call home, delving into questions of identity, belonging, Blackness, motherhood and family ... Aftershocks offers an incredible account of a life both privileged and fraught, and a rigorous accounting of living as heir and stranger to so many histories, voices and identities.
Owusu’s dispatches from the trenches of what she calls madness are brutally metaphoric, elegantly honest, and familiar to readers with similar experiences ... Aftershocks is a stunning, visceral book about the ways that our stories—of loss, of love, of borders—leave permanent marks on our bodies and minds.
... stunning ... [a] complex and compelling narrative ... At times, the memoir is lyrical, and other times, told with straightforward scenes and narrative techniques. Some readers might long for more story, for the writer to more fully tell these scenes and plumb those experiences. This is not that sort of book. It is as much an exploration of Owusu’s interiority as a retelling of anything she observes or does ... The foreshocks and main shocks and aftershocks of her story create an unsteady and surprisingly satisfying, shifting narrative ... It is this, then, Nadia Owusu’s earth-shaping, that pulls the elements of this memoir together. It is her terraforming that allows her — and by extension, her readers — to inhabit this world of Aftershocks.
Almas’s story is certainly testament to what can happen when borders are porous and opportunities abound ... offers an incisive and tender reminder that life does not take place in neat categories, no matter where you are from. We are many-sided and infinitely malleable, and all the better for it.
Owusu sometimes works a little too hard to mold her experiences into her seismic theme of faults and shocks. Repetition, too, is occasionally problematic, stalling the already non-linear narrative. But beyond any imperfections, Owusu's raw vulnerability hauntingly, steadily beckons readers.
Owusu’s yearning for a maternal figure and acceptance of her identity surround this moving memoir. Recommended for readers who enjoy stories of identity and multiculturalism.
Though the prose is sometimes self-consciously stylistic and the earthquake metaphor strains by the end, this is still an impressive debut memoir. An engrossing, occasionally overwrought memoir by a promising writer.
