Aftershocks Quotes

“Let me show you my home. It is a border. It is the outer edge of both sides. It is where they drew the line. They drew the line right through me. [...] It is a live fault line. The fault line is in my body. [...] I am made of the earth, ocean, blood and bone of all the places I tried to belong to and all the people I long for. I am pieces. I am whole. I am home.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“The Ashanti, he reminded me, are guided by, and survive through, the forces of kinship and ancestral linkage. "We take care of each other on earth," he said. "If a family member asks for help, I give it. When a family member needs money for school fees or hospital bills, I send it. And my whole extended family loves you as if you are their child. We take care of each other's children. We raise each other's children. My cousins are my brothers and sisters. My aunts are also my mothers. Your aunts are your mothers, especially Auntie Harriet because she is my eldest sister. You will never be alone in this world."

"And do you really believe our ancestors are watching over us?" I asked.

He smiled. "I believe in the power of remembrance," he said. "And I believe love does not die with the body.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Without other humans there is no such thing as shame.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“We cannot think another’s thoughts, but we can feel their pain. Also, their pleasure, but we focus on pain because pain threatens us. We turn our eyes and block our ears and pretend it is not ours to feel. We let our brains rule our bodies. Our brains tell us we cannot withstand all the feeling, that our bodies are not capable. But we have forgotten—I have forgotten—that we heal, not through logic, not through the brain, but through discharging energy. When we have a fever, we sweat and have fever dreams that make us writhe and cry out. When we eat something rotten, we heave and vomit and shit liquid. We absorb pain and anger through the body, and we must expel it through the body, like a virus, like rot. Can I lick myself clean? Can I scale my skin? Can I molt?”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people's earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Everything on this earth is connected!” my father exclaimed. “A better religion, to me, is the practice of noticing that connection, of deepening our understanding of it.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“I don't want people to think I mind being mistaken for African American. I don't. There are, however, many African immigrants in America who, to climb the social ladder, resist being categorized, by white people, with African Americans. Some even go so far as to claim superiority. This is not surprising. In America, the racial hierarchy has white at the top and black on the bottom. *We're not that kind of black,* I have heard a member of my own family--an uncle-- argue when a white person leveled a racism insult against him. Given this, is is also not surprising that there exists some animosity between the African immigrant and African-American communities.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“History is a story, my grandfather said. I offer a friendly amendment: history is many stories. Those stories are written, spoken, and sung. They are carried in our bodies. They billow all around us like copper-colored dust that sometimes obscures everything. In those stories, we grasp at meaning. We search for ourselves, for our place, for direction. We search for a way forward: a woman warrior, a complication man, an invitation home, a meteor, a lake, a child landing with a splat. Destruction and creation. Changes in light, terrain, and atmosphere. Delicate new freedom. Hope.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Black women," Toya said as I walked her to the subway, "are the meatloaf at a Greek diner. People sometimes talk about ordering it, but everyone's surprised when someone does, even black men.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Code-switching is dancing between vocal styles and rhythms. This dance is part celebration--of the richness, intricacies, and blurry borders of our cultures.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“No story, no metaphor, is innocent of theft, omission, obscuration, or violence.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“That apartment had been my home only because it had contained us: my father, Anabel, Yasmeen, Kwame, and me. In that apartment, we were whole.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“It made me slow to love people and quick to leave them, to hurt them before they could hurt me.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Grief is slow internal bleeding. And it turns out that my father was right, or almost right, about trauma being in the blood.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“How do I tell her about the trembling that leads to ripping, then to violent rupture; to whole lives and whole cities disintegrating; to piles and piles of rubble; to displacement and exile?”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Black people are expected by the white world to be strong but not angry. Pain must be hidden. Daily slights are to be borne with grace, humility, even gratitude. Weakness is intolerable. Vulnerability must wait until the day is done and the mask can come off in the privacy of our won homes. And by then we are too tired or too stiff to feel it. This is not just true for black people living in Europe or America. It is also true, in a different form in Africa and the Caribbean, where black people are the majority. People in former European colonies must see their lives in relation to the lives of white people. As communities, as individuals, we have been told we are inferior. Our economies, our livelihoods, are reliant on Western economies, white people's livelihoods.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“As I waited, my mind filled in the blanks, envisioned the future, wrote a nightmare of a story. Every black mother, sister, and wife in America has written some version of that story in her mind. In that story, our promises to take care of our sons, brothers, and husbands turn into lies. This a daily heartbreak. For too many, that story has become real, That story is an American terror.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“But the box, I suppose, formalized their absence, gave it a name. Knowing and accepting the inevitable are two different things.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“People of color know that not all of the safety and spoils of whiteness are available to us. Yet we can speak in the voice of whitness if we so choose. Some of us know no other voice. It was born in us. It is the voice colonization left us. Some of us adopt it later--in childhood or early adulthood -- and lose our other voices. Some of us never allow whiteness into our throats. Some of us code-switch. I am a code-switcher.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“A study from New York's Mount Sinai Hospital found that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors were capable of being passed on to their children. Our genes change all the time when chemical tags attach themselves to the DNA and turn genes on or off. The study found that some of these tags--found in the genes of those survivors -- were also found in their children. The changes led to an increased incidence of stress disorders. This passing down of environmentally altered genes is called *epigenetic inheritance.*”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“The Ashanti conquered forests to build an empire, but they knew nature was from whence they came and to nature they would return. They would tame the land, but they would know when Asase Yaa needed her rest. Their most sacred duty was to ensure harmony and peace between the community, the earth, and the ancestors; to ensure justice. To the community, the Ashanti pledged loyalty. To the earth and the ancestors, they made sacrifices -- to each their due. But harmony is a fragile thing, and so is justice. They bend and break easily. We bend and break them with greed, with violence, with lies and obscurations. The people sold into slavery are modern-day Ghanaians' ancestors too. Their backs and hearts broke under whip and weight. The incomplete story Ghana tells about slavery is a breach. Ashanti culture was breached by colonization. My family broke before and I knew it might break again. The earth broke from the force of a meteoroid, which sent shock waves in every direction.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“There is nothing wrong with seeking truth or grace or light . . . The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered . . . There is more to life, and to the universe, than what is in a single book.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“As my seismometer vibrated, as the alarm wailed, I did not stop trying to be twice as good. I would not have known how to stop. We become the stories we are told.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“I wanted us to be inevitable.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“at once destroys the oldest associations; the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, moves beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid; one second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never create.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“I loved growing up in many countries, among many cultures. It made it impossible for me to believe in the concept of supremacy. It deepened my ability to hold multiple truths at once, to practice and nurture empathy. But it has also meant that I have no resting place. I have perpetually been a them rather than an us. I have struggled with how to place myself in my family histories.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“There is nothing wrong with seeking truth or grace or light,” he told me. “The problem with organized religion is the assertion that all questions have already been answered. I don’t want you believing that. There is more to life, and to the universe, than what is in a single book.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks