Surviving grief’s onslaught with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Rajesh Sharma

This is a lyrical, moving journal in 30 entries. A daughter mourns her father’s death, circling around her grief like a bird that is its own prey, peeling her way to the core of the grief, pecking at it. It is a ritual of self-healing and it culminates in intimations of her own rebirth as a writer.

He was 88, but there was no sign he would go. He had only looked a little unwell when the family last came together on Zoom. But an infection stole up to get the better of the old man, made vulnerable by ailing kidneys. The worldwide Covid lockdowns kept the airports shut and delayed the funeral even as corpses piled up in mortuaries and suffered, under bribe-hungry morticians’ noses, ‘trans-substantiation’, a daughter’s euphemism for rotting. How would she reconcile with her father’s death, this self-confessed ‘daddy’s girl’?

He had been Nigeria’s first professor of statistics and a deputy vice-chancellor. Surrounded by deception, corruption and greed, he had lived a life of simplicity and integrity devoted to learning. If Adichie is a feminist of such powerful conviction and universal persuasion, she owes it admittedly to his teaching her not to fear men’s disapproval. He had been a cherished friend and colleague. His American colleagues replenished his library after the Nigerian army had burnt all his books during the Biafran war. And he had been a fighter. When he died, he was fighting ‘a diminutive self-styled philanthropist drunk on oil wealth and bereft of scruples’, who had set his eyes on the land in Abba, the professor’s hometown.

Adichie’s poignant lyricism flows probably from her view of grief as something that can also be ‘a celebration of love’. The love for her father gives her the courage to see her own pain without blinkers. She is not a Hamlet seeking solace in metaphysical speculation. Tears do not dim her sight. When emotion threatens her sanity, she turns to writing, as Hamlet does to acting. It is a performance and affords distance to survive grief’s onslaught. At one level then, the book is a set of variations on mourning performed in language to keep madness at bay. At another, it is a baptism of grief that draws the writer so far out into the wilderness of language that she senses a self-birthing: she hears ‘a new voice pushing itself out of my writing’. The voice has the urgency of death’s summons. It dawns on her that she too is mortal and may die, like her father did, any moment. And so she ‘must write everything now’. With this realisation, she has won the writer’s last freedom.

Mourning will rid her language of glibness, flaccidity and vacuity. The inessentials will fall away. Superlatives, when they exist, will possess full, naked force. She will meet language afresh, where it stands guard against chaos and slobbering sentiment. At that post, language will be lean, spare, muscular, in control, even when the writer is sobbing. Mourning is a process of purification.

It is her four-year-old daughter’s mimicry of her uncontrollable grieving that makes her see herself as at once a spectator and a performer. In the space that opens up between the two poles of the self, healing can take place. Adichie later sees logic in the Igbo custom of the prolonged performative acts of mourning in which the community participates to collectively wash and flush out the poison of private grief.

But, as she says, one comes to know grief only when it is one’s own. Empathy goes only so far and no farther. And we protect ourselves behind walls of delusion, that grief visits other people only, that it will not touch us. Until, that is, it crashes down on us. ‘We don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve,’ she writes. And you can already hear a new voice, Orphic, ringing with the lucidity of one who has fathomed the depths of grief and been to the world of the dead. This is the voice of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reborn.