Quite a few of her reflections rang familiar, her raw and astute evocation of the oppressive and substantial nature of grief, the intensity and inescapability of it, the rancorous disbelief, the wry sense of injustice reminiscent of W.H. ![]() I read it in one sitting in the café of the local library. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.Īt the time of reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story Zikora, a friend pointed me to Notes on grief, the compact piece Adichie wrote at the death of her father. Maybe it is this yearning for words that prompts to read testimonies on loss and grieving from those one can rely on to be more eloquent, even if such is painful and unsettling – and even if such means the cold comfort of learning that the struggle to find words is a common experience: Grief can render one speechless, hopelessly at loss for words while thirsting for them to make sense of the experience and the emotions as well as to hold on to and honour the life of that unique human being so dearly loved which cruelly ended – always too soon, a life always too short. Grief because of the loss of a loved one can be an overwhelming experience – one of the few that perhaps rightly might be classified as universal, as an experience most of us will go through if we are so fortunate not to die that young ourselves that we will not have to mourn the loss of someone dear. In those moments, I am sure I do not ever want to face the world again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.Ī recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Ms. Her 2012 talk We Should All Be Feminists has a started a worldwide conversation about feminism, and was published as a book in 2014. ![]() Her 2009 TED Talk, The Danger of A Single Story, is now one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. Adichie has been invited to speak around the world. Adichie is also the author of the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. ![]() Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment-a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever-and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.Ĭhimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book-a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page-and never without touches of rich, honest humor-Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. ![]() She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure.Įxpanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020.
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