The Nigerian-Nordic Girls Guide to Lady Problems: Irony & Naming
Lisa Patten October 9th, 2017
The Nigerian-Nordic Girls Guide to Lady Problems: Irony & Naming
All human beings, regardless of
age, race, gender, physiology, environment, lifestyle, history and genetics,
will die. Our mortality is inescapable. Yet when faced with serious disease, we often
find ways of denying it, or sugar-coating it, or escaping it to avoid the pain
of giving in to its power over us, and acknowledging our own mortality.
Faith Adiele uses self-irony, humor
and different conventions of naming to protect herself and us from the true nature
of her illness.
From the start, she identifies her tumors
by assigning them personalities. Seen in
this way, they aren’t abnormal diseased growths destroying her tissues and
threatening her life. Instead they are
autonomous creatures, like cartoon characters, each with its own personality
and characteristics, its own size and location. She has disempowered them by reframing them
with ironic humor.
Though the four or five tumors inside my
womb (one the size of a grapefruit) are supposedly benign, their behavior is
not as friendly as the word suggests. It’s difficult not to interpret their
actions as downright hateful. One shoves angrily at my back, forcing me to
sleep upright against a bank of pillows, like a princess. Another hunkers
against my bladder, malicious, sending me constantly loping for the bathroom to
strain and strain. Two clutch high, one churning whenever I eat, the other
morose as a prisoner, twisting on its stalk and cutting off its own blood
supply. The unconfirmed fifth one waits on the bench, ready to go in if any of
the first string tires.
They’re not only angry but slightly mad, the
result of a single cell gone awry that keeps reproducing itself. Enamored of
its smooth musculature, its beauty reflected in white on the glistening pink
walls of my uterus, it creates an entire veined community to keep itself
company, a family of narcissists. Me, me, me! 1
The tumors accompany her
everywhere. Imbedded in her body while
she “waits and watches” for months on end, they are as inescapable as a witch’s
deadly curse. They are attached to her
womb, like four malformed fetuses, growing at different rates, aggravating
different organs, and causing her discomfort, pain and fear on their own
schedule, at their own whim. The tumors have
become such a constant, prominent presence in her belly and in her life that
she almost gives them names, like unborn children. This would help to lessen their true potency,
and make them more tolerable and user friendly.
And yet, afraid of getting too familiar with them, too “attached,” she
avoids this, and instead thinks about names for the real, vital children she
may one day have. Or not, depending on
the outcome of her disease.
Faith’s clinicians and cultures offer
different meanings and explanations for her condition, leaving her caught
between her Western upbringing and her African roots.
According to Western medicine, Faith’s
disease is the result of inheritance, being childless, and being of African
descent. When Faith researches her
disease, she finds several different names for it:
…uterine
myomas, fibromyomas, leiomyomas, leiomyomata uteri. I settle on uterine myomas as the most foreign of the pronounceable options. I’m not yet ready for the casual familiarity
of fibroids. … Fibroids sounds too ordinary, too acceptable, and I haven’t accepted any of
this.”2
In this way, Faith choses a term that give her the most
distance from her disease.
Years ago, however, when her Nordic
mother had the same condition, she referred to the disease with more familiar
word “fibroids.” Her mother has what
Faith later refers to as English “head-centered emotion”, and blamed her own
tumors on
“All
the things I never said, balled up inside me.”3
According to Faith’s African Igbo tradition, however,
“…illness
is the result of offenses committed against Ala, the land, or against one’s own
spirit-double, or against one’s ancestors. Health and well-being can only be
achieved when humans, community, and cosmos are in harmony. I wonder if I am being
punished for being born so far from home, for being the daughter of a twin*,
for something I’ve done, or for something someone else has done.”4
*Faith’s mother was a twin.
Unlike the Western head-centered emotion of her mother, however,
in Igbo
“…words
and emotions are experienced in the belly. . .Our stomachs are heavy with
feeling. I felt it for myself upon my return to the U.S. from Nigeria. I’d
written a poem comparing head-centered English emotion to belly-centered Igbo
emotion, and suddenly the loneliness of once again being the only black member
of my family on this continent nearly knocked me to my knees, my ache for my
new siblings actually physical.”5
For Faith, the Igbo
culture offers the most profound explanation for her disease, even if only metaphorically. Throughout her
life, Faith’s African roots have had a powerful pull on her. She feels guilty for being so detached from
her African heritage, and for having so little contact with her African
family. In Igbo belief, illness is the
result of offenses committed against the land or against one’s ancestors; Faith has
committed such an offense by neglecting her African family. In Igbo belief, moreover, emotions are
experienced in the belly. Accordingly, the profound guilt and longing Faith
feels for her African family have their source in her belly, where her disease
is made manifest. It is her Igbo culture
and family which she feels she has ignored, yet with which she most clearly
identifies.
Behind Faith’s ironic sense of
humor and her attempts to distance herself from her disease, are the painful
realities. She has a serious illness,
in which the odds are against her, solutions may be unreachable, and pain may
be endless. Ultimately, she has used irony
to protect herself from the facts of her illness, and to draw us into our
company. Without an ironic point of view, she has only the disease, and “in pain we are all alone”6
Although she doesn't speak bluntly about her illness until the end of the book, her awareness of the disease
and ours have always been there. It is
in this unspoken space where the true nature of her illness lives, and her true
connection with the reader is formed.
Footnotes
1 Adiele, Faith. The Nigerian-Nordic
Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Kindle Locations 16-24). Shebooks. Kindle
Edition.
2 Adiele, Faith. The
Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Kindle Location 49).
Shebooks. Kindle Edition.
3 Adiele, Faith. The
Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Kindle Locations 81-82).
Shebooks. Kindle Edition.
4 Adiele, Faith. The
Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Kindle Locations 289-294).
Shebooks. Kindle Edition.
5 Adiele, Faith. The
Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Kindle Locations 417-436).
Shebooks. Kindle Edition.
6 Adiele, Faith. The
Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Kindle Locations 521-523).
Shebooks. Kindle Edition.
I agree with you that Adiele does a lot of distancing from the more painful aspects of her life through using humor (and through other devices). When she laughs with her black friends about Adiele's doctor likely believing that Adiele has already had babies because she is a black woman, the laughter is almost like a coping mechanism. If you can joke about it, you can distance yourself from it. And yet, the humor is what draws readers into her story, and as you say, this is indeed ironic. It is as though the humor is the connection between ours and her understanding of her disease.
ReplyDeleteI also loved your attention to the certain devices Adiele uses to steer attention away from what is going on inside of her. It seemed it was a way to sugar coat what was going on while navigating the path towards her own wellness.
ReplyDelete