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Lady Problems: The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide
Lady Problems: The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide
Lady Problems: The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide
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Lady Problems: The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide

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What’s a Nigerian-Nordic-American girl to do when she develops fibroids in rural Iowa? Battle the American health care System or summon Nordic mythology and traditional Nigerian medicine? While at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop to write a book about meeting her African father and siblings as an adult, Faith Adiele develops a medical condition that can be interpreted—and treated—completely differently according to her three cultural backgrounds. Frustratingly, each tradition suggests that Adiele herself is responsible for her condition (and potential barrenness) for having violated gender or racial norms. While wittily detailing her struggles with doctors determined either to remove or to use her uterus as a Midwestern teaching tool, she draws parallels to history: her Nordic family’s immigration experiences, her Nigerian family’s independence struggles, and the fate of women, the poor, and folks of color in American medicine. Award-winning memoirist (PEN Beyond Margins Award for Meeting Faith; Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction) Adiele takes a clear-eyed, sharp-tongued look at healing, from Western science to a good metaphor to Nigerian healers advertising the cure for “Lady Problems”. Faith Adiele’s memoir, Meeting Faith, about becoming the first black Buddhist nun of Thailand, received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir. Her other honors include the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction, and 15 writing residencies in five countries. Visit her at adiele.com. This is a short e-book published by Shebooks--high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit http://shebooks.net.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherShebooks
Release dateDec 10, 2013
ISBN9781940838076
Lady Problems: The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide

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    Book preview

    Lady Problems - Faith Adiele

    Thanks for downloading a Shebook.

    To find out more about other great short e-books by and for women,

    click here, or visit us online at shebooks.net.

    Enjoy your read!

    Copyright © 2013 by Faith Adiele

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

    Cover design by Laura Morris

    Cover illustration by Alicia Buelow

    Published by Shebooks

    3060 Independence Avenue

    Bronx, NY 10463

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    The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to

    LADY PROBLEMS

    The Igbo always remembered that the dead ancestors lay

    reverently buried in the earth… That which was a source and

    cradle of life… that which produced and nourished and laid to rest,

    could be none other than a woman. Hence the earth was conceived

    of as feminine and gentle, benign and serene.

    —Chieka Ifemesia, Traditional Humane Living Among the Igbo

    Though the four or five tumors inside my womb (one the size of a grapefruit) are supposedly benign, their behavior is not as friendly as the word suggests. It’s difficult not to interpret their actions as downright hateful. One shoves angrily at my back, forcing me to sleep upright against a bank of pillows, like a princess. Another hunkers against my bladder, malicious, sending me constantly loping for the bathroom to strain and strain. Two clutch high, one churning whenever I eat, the other morose as a prisoner, twisting on its stalk and cutting off its own blood supply. The unconfirmed fifth one waits on the bench, ready to go in if any of the first string tires.

    They’re not only angry but slightly mad, the result of a single cell gone awry that keeps reproducing itself. Enamored of its smooth musculature, its beauty reflected in white on the glistening pink walls of my uterus, it creates an entire veined community to keep itself company, a family of narcissists. Me, me, me! 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 Single Girl Writer. Modern Career Woman gives birth to something less than useful.

    I didn’t come to graduate school, almost ten years after finding my unknown father and siblings in Nigeria, to get tumors (one the

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