"Lady Problems" as a Catalyst for Uncovering Identity

The title of Faith Adiele’s memoir, The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, perfectly encapsulates the contents of the memoir and the aspects of Adiele’s identity that she is attempting to highlight.  I might actually argue that the memoir is more focused on the former than the latter of the title, more on the Nigerian-Nordic-ness of the girl than on her lady problems.

These “lady problems,” or the fibroids surrounding Adiele’s uterus, are the foundation for a larger discussion on Adiele’s exploration of her biracial identity.  In fact, the depth with which Adiele conveys her medical problems almost shrouds her Nigerian-Nordic identity in some mystery.  We learn a great deal about Adiele’s pain, her symptoms, her Internet research, her methods of treatment, but we only get peeks and flashbacks into her identity.  It is as though Adiele is only able to talk about her identity through talking about the “lady problems.”

The memoir begins with a quote from Chieka Ifemesia, setting the stage for how deeply Nigerian culture is connected to the earth: “Hence the earth was conceived of as feminine and gentle, benign and serene.”  This is how Adiele presents to us the framework of half of her identity: a culture that associates womanhood with creating life.  “Gentle” and “benign” also describe Adiele’s fibroids, and Iowans, as Adiele’s friend suggests.  In this subtle way, Adiele has given us a through line between Nigeria and living in Iowa, using fibroids as the connection.

Adiele continues to connect womanhood and life for the Igbo as she researches her condition, turning in her mind to how the Igbo would bury newborn children’s umbilical cords and placenta underneath a fruit tree, “confirmation of how we come from and return to the earth.”  She then explains that in Igbo, “the word for land is the same as for the goddess of the land, Ala,” and we have more insight into her identity when she tells us, “I’m thinking about having children.”  The fibroids have brought to her present mind the concept of having children, and her Nigerian heritage does not allow her to disconnect her womanhood from her ability to create life.  It seems as though she only allows herself to come to this connection because of the fibroids, and as the readers, we make the connection with her.

Part of the reason we discover so much about Adiele’s identity in this memoir is because Adiele spends most of the memoir struggling with Western medicine and the American health system—or as she calls it in relation to her Finnish heritage, “the Amerikkalainen health system.”  Through this, we learn about her mother and her Nordic heritage.  She describes how her mother had ovarian cancer in the seventies, but her doctor dismissed it as hysteria, a diagnosis that has pertained solely to women for centuries.  Almost unwillingly, Adiele makes the connection between hysterectomy (the operation Western medicine continually tells her she must get to defeat her fibroids) and hysteria: “Whenever I try to type Hysterectomy in an email, Autocorrect changes it to Hysterical and I have to backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace.”  This causes her to describe hysterectomy as “the operation meant to punish women, to remove their female hysteria.”  For Adiele, everything about her fibroids comes back to her womanhood, and then to her biracial identity, whether that be the Nordic or Nigerian side.

The hysterectomy-hysteria connection continues back to Adiele’s Igbo heritage.  In Igbo tradition, “illness is the result of offenses committed against Ala, the land,” and again we have returned to the concept of Adiele’s Nigerian womanhood and her health problems being connected via the land, life, and childbirth.  This also touches on a lot of guilt Adiele feels in relation to her Nigerian identity.  She wonders if Ala is punishing her for “being born so far from home, for being the daughter of a twin”—since for the Igbo, giving birth to twins is considered an abomination.  She feels guilt for missing Nigerian rituals all her life, but she also feels guilt for being “The Selfish Artist, Independent Woman,” and her mother’s only child.  She feels inadequate as a Nigerian, a daughter, and a woman, and these all tie back to the fibroids.

Adiele also continuously connects being an Independent Woman to Western concepts of womanhood.  She tells herself, as she researches her ailments, “It is my responsibility to myself, as a Good Modern Woman.  I need to be informed, proactive, wary of Western pharmaceuticals, eager to know the worst.”  Adiele’s humorous depictions of Americans, especially of Iowans, continues throughout the memoir, especially in relation to the American health system.  When she finds out that there is no real prevention for fibroids, she quips, “The fatalism in the Surgeon General’s statement seems almost un-American.”  Iowans are benign and gentle, like Adiele’s fibroids.  Adiele must remain skeptical of the health system that she reliant on, has been reliant on ever since she was born in the United States, far away from Nigeria.

The fact of the memoir, a fact that Adiele never outright states, is that she is a biracial woman with a whole other family in Nigeria, living her entire life in the United States, and so half of her is disconnected and immigrant.  Her body is divided between two very different identities, and she herself is (perhaps solely) connecting them.  Her body holds the memories of her mother’s family’s immigration and her mother’s struggles with a sexist health system, and it also holds a vast Nigerian history and culture. 

Her body holds all of this sometimes without her wanting it to.  When she goes in to try healing touch for her fibroids, all of these connections come up.  She is told that creativity is located in two places, the belly (her fibroids) and the throat (her mother’s thyroid).  She has four fibroids in her womb, just like she is one of four children, just like the four days in the traditional Igbo week.  She mutters to herself upon this realization, “Why is my body so bent on creating metaphor.”  This line, for me, perhaps best encapsulated all of themes of the memoir, because it all comes back to Adiele’s body.  Her body holds her fibroids, and her fibroids are the catalyst for all of these aspects of her identity coming to light.  These aspects are ordinarily shrouded in mystery, distance, and guilt, but they have been within Adiele’s biracial body her entire life.