The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems

Miguel Cervantes

9/7/17

Commentary on The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems

            It’s not easy taking a serious medical subject like fibroids and transforming it into an engaging and humorous adventure, yet that is precisely what Faith Adiele does in The Nordic-Nigerian Guide to Lady Problems.  With Faith’s intelligent and ever wise-cracking voice guiding us through her experience, we get to see this condition in a whole new light, one that resonates on many different levels, helping her to draw fundamental connections to issues in her life like motherhood, identity and belonging. 

This is heavy, serious stuff, but Faith never allows us to spiral too far downward; the narrative she constructs is direct and honest, helping us to see right away that she is a consummate fish-out-of-water trying to deal with intensely personal physical and emotional issues that many of us might otherwise overlook.  Faith approaches her tale in a very no-nonsense way, grounding us in the sheer physicality of her condition by describing her fibroids in all their not-so-glorious detail:

“Two clutch high, one churning whenever I eat, the other morose as a prisoner, twisting on a stalk and cutting off its own blood supply.” (p.11)

Faith infuses her fibroids with life, with personas that transform them from strange physical anomalies into living, breathing characters.  Intertwined with this is Faith’s own indignant reaction to these unwanted intruders in her uterus:

            “I wonder if I am to blame somehow.  The Selfish Artist, Independent Woman.  Worse still, I’m my mother’s only child.  The irony of their presence, the fact that their actions mimic those of a fetus, is not lost on me, the SingleGirlWriter.” (p.21)

I found this pairing of Faith’s self-assessment with a lively description of her fibroids to be quite engaging – right away we are given a sense of who the cast of characters is.  Faith is not just a distant narrative voice pontificating about her body, she’s a real woman, someone with plans and school and hopes who is mortified at the sudden unexpected appearance of fibroids.  She is living her life, only to suddenly find a curious and painful medical condition crop up inside her.  More than that, we also learn (straight from the get go) that Faith is in the midst of exploring and internalizing her dual Nordic-Nigerian heritage, a heritage that leaves her feeling like an outsider just about everywhere she goes. 

So what we’re given in the first five pages is an immediate introduction to everything that’s relevant about Faith, her fibroids, her heritage and her mindset.  That’s a lot to process, let alone convey, in just the first few pages, but Faith does so with a directness and humor that really endears her to the reader.  Her tone is wry, real and open, allowing us to understand the immediacy of her problem without getting too overwhelmed by it.  We realize that this isn’t just a story about a medical problem – it’s a journey that encompasses place, identity and power. 

Faith’s place in the world, her identity and her lack of power in the face of fibroids and the American medical system cause us to wonder how we would react if given the sudden, unexpected task of navigating so much all at once.  This is important to keep in mind, because if Faith were to simply focus on the physical nature of fibroids and her treatment options, the entire fulcrum of the narrative would shift to the somber.  We’d have to stifle our laughter at her early jokes and put on our serious reader hats with the understanding that the story of her crisis (and all the confusion and pain involved) is an enterprise for only the most committed reader. 

Happily, Faith never asks that of us.  Instead she weaves in pictures of herself as a woman, as a writer, as a daughter trying to understand her identity, all the while drawing ties to Nordic and Nigerian mythology, making it seem as though we are on surreal journey of sorts, one that is not without its perils, its agonies and (especially important) its hilarity.  One of the most memorable examples of this comes in the form of Faith’s explanation for her absolute dread of hospitals and all things medical-related:

“When I awoke in the middle of the night, it was dark – no pastel night-lights shaped like cartoon characters in the adult ward – and an ancient woman, the old mother of the town librarian, had been brought in.  She was standing on her bed, nightdress clinging to her skeletal limbs, babbling.  Her hair stuck out in all directions like Hel, queen of the Dead, daughter of the Trickster Loki who starred in my Finnish grandmother’s tales.” (p. 66)

Moments like these show how adept Faith is at presenting us with moments that encapsulate a whole host of emotions.  We can picture Faith as a little girl, sleeping alone in a dark hospital, suddenly beset by this curious old crone of a woman.  Faith could very well be a tiny Gretel, or Red-Riding Hood, trapped in a particularly strange version of her own fairy tale.  But this fairy tale, as we see, is grounded in the real world.  Faith strongly suggests that the only reason she was put in this lonesome hospital room was because “I was the only black girl in town and they feared I would scare the really sick children.” (p.66)

All of this points to a very sad situation where a young girl, isolated in a strange place, is suddenly beset by the cackling of real-life old witch.  She shouldn’t really be here in the first place.  She should be sleeping soundly in a room with other children her age.  But the world Faith has grown up in has already seen fit to treat her like an outsider – relegating her like a fairy tale heroin to the margins of society where strange and scary things reside. 

It’s a very powerful way of expressing what is central to Faith’s narrative – that she doesn’t feel like she belongs, that she feels powerless as she attempts to get the proper medical treatment she needs and that somehow, someway, her fibroids are communicating a host of metaphoric messages that prompt her to go deeper into her own life.  Faith accomplishes all of this with humility, humor and style, making for a non-fiction narrative that is at times hilarious, heartbreaking and above all, honest.