The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems

Hearing Faith Adiele perform The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems was like hearing a series of punches to the gut.  Each sentence flashed like a brief but brilliant firework in my mind in a way imagery from most books do not.  Perhaps this was in part because Adiele’s voice gives momentum to the piece.  The plot is treating fibroids; the underlying story is the American medical system and its failings, Adiele’s heritage, and how the two collide.  Adiele accomplishes all of this in some 50 minutes.  She does this in part by creating a series of powerful quotes and images, coming at the reader one after the next.  We are on a rollercoaster ride of images, and Adiele, as both the writer and the reader, is very much in the driver’s seat.  As we contemplate the mixed advice to not eat red meat and to eat red meat, the narrator already has a health care worker’s arm “halfway up [her] vagina.”  We feel the violation.  An image of a bus shifts into “rutted pink roads” and “obscene purple veins” of internet images of fibroids which gives way to a depiction of the goddess of fertility.   We feel the intersection of the narrator’s Nigerian, Nordic, and American heritage through the collage of images.

The “tumor-child” is a particularly potent extended metaphor.  It connects the growths in the narrator’s uterus with their reproductive consequences.  It is informed by the Nigerian custom that child-bearing is the definition of marriage and marriages without children are not binding.  It illuminates the racism of health care works who assume that she has already given birth to multiple children and that a hysterectomy will “be saving her from herself.”  As doctor after doctor fails to take any interest in the consequences of fibroids to her ability to have children, we see the narrator turn to her own body for answers.  “Is this labor?” the she asks herself.  “Is this miscarriage?”  If the health care system refuses to take interest in her body’s maternal abilities, she certainly does.  “Both frightening and friendly?  Explain!”  By giving her “benign tumors” a life and personality of their own, she reclaims her body from the doctors, even while they attempt to distance her from it.  She places herself in an active role—even if she can’t be active in the fibroids’ removal, at least not yet, she can at least get to know them—and in this way avoids ever framing herself as a victim.

The narrative provides us with many voices, from the narrator’s friends and roommates to (supposed) health authorities and to traditional wisdom.  The friends and roommates are supportive, if not always helpful.  The American health care system, while capable of a surgery that could temporarily provide relief, sees her as Black and therefore fails to see her.  Her Nordic mother sees her as potential victim to an unscrupulous health care system.  Her Finnish relatives provide memories of racism and sexism.  Nigerian custom sees her as childless, not yet a mother.  Wisdom comes in the form of Nigerian gods and goddesses and traditions and rituals.  While the narrator refrains from privileging one system of beliefs entirely over another, she does repeatedly return in her mind to Nigeria.  She describes Igbo emotion as being “belly-centered,” the land being feminine, the mother valued, the foreign daughter automatically loved.  The narrative takes place during the time in which the narrator is writing about her three sisters in Nigeria.  As she navigates an impossible health care system, the narrator is grounded by something less fickle, even if it is on the other side of the world.  I could feel this grounding as I listened to the audio-book, and I think it made the irony in the narrative more effective.  

I was left with tremendous sympathy for the narrator (in a good way, not a pitying way) because of her use of irony.  She steps out of herself, narrates from a distance.  We don’t hear her reaction when the doctor “delivers a recap of everything I’ve read online.”  We react, but the narrator herself doesn't.  Instead, she is busy depicting the useless assistant as a “Norse god in training.”  The narrator depicts the tragedy without victimizing herself.  She lets other define her situation, allowing us to hear a multitude of voices, never telling us which ones to heed and which ones to scorn.  She has the ability to make light of her illness, drawing images of grapefruits in her womb and reclining “like a princess” through the pain.  She is resourceful and seeks multiple sources of wisdom, from traditional medicine to online information, taking a disinterested interest in the subject matter, at least enough to pause the narrative to educate the reader with what she has learned about hysterectomies and miscegenation.  We trust the narrator.  We cringe and laugh at the same time. 

--Gina