“Ka chi fo. Good night, in Igbo. These are the last words addressed to him by his father, on June 9, 2020. The next day, his brother calls him to inform him that he is gone. The news strikes him as brutally uprooted.
Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – bestseller author The other half of the sun and Americanah – turned to writing to record her grief, in a book that takes the form of a notebook where she describes this feeling of loss and the physical reaction that follows.
Stuck in the United States, unable to travel to Nigeria, where airports remain closed due to the pandemic, she must live this mourning from a distance, while one of her brothers watches over their father’s remains in the morgue , awaiting the funeral which will not take place for months.
The fear of the loss is followed by confusing and contradictory feelings as she feels that she is touching the “heart of sorrow”, having never experienced a bereavement of such magnitude. Irritation at the messages of condolence for which she reproaches their emptiness, frustration at this feeling of being stuck in limbo, desire to isolate herself … In the meanders of her pain, refusing to speak to the past of this father so “fiercely” loved, she deploys all the finesse of her pen to embody the inexpressible in words. “Sorrow puts new skins on me, makes the scales fall from my eyes.” ”
Gradually, memories – and laughter – resurface through tears and sorrow. She recalls the visits to her home in Maryland of that righteous and just man who was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics. This father who, in 2015, was kidnapped by a group of men demanding a ransom from “his famous daughter”. This admirer of the great African-American mathematician David Blackwell who saw all his books burned by Nigerian soldiers during the Biafran war.
In the end, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will have succeeded in identifying this impenetrable journey that is mourning, even managing to name, in the avalanche of emotions, the “bitter and unbearable” relief that accompanies this unconsciously dreaded drama for a long time.
Notes on grief
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
translated by Mona de Pracontal
Gallimard
112 pages