Two Books: Notes on Grief and Intimations
In which I recommend two intimate and tender short reads.
As I open my computer this evening, I see the picture of an owl with a ring of yellow in its eyes and a head rotated almost 90 degrees left. Its stare is threatening, the kind you don’t want to see when you look out your window at 2 a.m. And yet, a subtle tenderness I can’t place sits in the depths of its black pupils.
The books you read can affect how you navigate your day or week. At least, that holds true for me. This letter has nothing to do with birds, but reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief and Zadie Smith’s Intimations this week reminded me of how often tender and soft the world can be, even during personal loss and a global crisis.
Now, I keep searching for tenderness in everything.
Notes on Grief
Early this year, months after Chimamanda lost her father, my friends and I put together a letter full of pleasant, bittersweet nothings to share with her: it was a collection of where we were in our life, since the last time most of us saw her in late 2018. It was a thoughtful gift where ‘may God comfort you’ and other similar sympathy messages felt useless and meaningless.
Several months before sharing the letter with her, I read the first version of Notes on Grief in The New Yorker. My first read happened in a blur. Although I was full of empathy and sadness, I felt compelled to read it: everyone was talking about it, quoting, ‘Enemies beware: the worst has happened; my father is gone; my madness will now bare itself.’
The second time I read it this past week, I clung to each word — all of which suddenly had a different, more nuanced meaning. Followed by a wave of envy: that she could so articulately talk about her loss and that she had the liberty. Mainly, I recognised two parts of grief: the loneliness of mourning and how it takes different shapes for different people; the universality: the need to tell and retell stories, the need to see, hear about the dead through new eyes, fresh ears.
The older we get, the ‘more real’ loss gets. You need no primer on the kind of year 2020 was, but have you given yourself a chance to breathe? To gasp and count your losses? To properly grieve?
Intimations
I think, maybe too often, that I went the entire academic year without entering a physical classroom. It upsets me, even though my social anxiety is grateful for Zoom classes. I also talk a lot about how I can’t believe remote work wasn’t the norm pre-pandemic, how Covid-19 forced technology companies to create tools for WFH and forced teams to adapt. The change came a little fast. One moment I was in an office talking about videos, and the next, I was at home creating a ‘Guide to Working from Home’ and reading as many resources as I could.
2020 was a year of uncertainty, but for me, the moment of peak limbo was just before we knew how bad it was. The moments between normalcy and abnormality: to take a bus or not? To use a mask or not? To go out or not? To buy roadside food or not?
Before the first case of Covid-19 in Nigeria, I had a bad case of cold and catarrh, accompanied by the usual suspects, a sore throat, fatigue, and more: diarrhoea. On my way to work, after I thought I’d recovered, I told my uber to stop at a restaurant or was it a carwash, so I could use a public toilet. It happened in a daze. I spent only half the day at work before returning home and collapsing on my bed. I didn’t think it was Covid-19 — it was still only a western threat. There were arguments that it couldn’t come to Africa, or that we were resistant, and I held them somewhere at the back of my mind.
Days after my recovery slowly kicked in, I walked past a busy Lagos road and watched as a bus conductor swiped sweat off his forehead before handing customers change. Later, I saw an elderly woman stop on the side of the street, hold her back and let out a deep hacking cough, after which she spat (although targeted at the gutter, it landed right on the ‘sidewalk’.)
Other things I didn’t see me but imagined: how meat vendors in large open-air markets flipped and slapped meat as flies buzzed in their ears, cramped busses where passengers passed sweat around like party packs. Portraits of children and teens in low-income households trading handshakes, hugs, snot stole my sleep. I wrung my hands together, worried about the Lagos reality.
In ‘Intimations,’ Zadie Smith documents it with clarity: her reality, emotions and thoughts. When I say she’s a better writer than I am, I don’t mean skill alone. In any case, I’m not worthy of being compared to Zadie Smith. There’s the courage to sit through a crippling event and write about it. She’s walking through the streets of New York and writing about the people she sees and how the change happens, without explicitly naming it except for casual references to an apocalypse, PPEs, cold, etc. Specifically, how does a change like this affect a writer? And what does a change like this do to art? Zadie Smith argues with herself through six essays, but the answers lay themselves bare for readers to find.
I wish I’d been documenting more. A good writer doesn’t let fear cripple them. At least, I think. Fear of death loomed large — news, stats, symptoms. But was fear the better option? Things are usually so ordinary until they’re not. I’m learning to delight and treasure in this ordinariness enough to document it. This is why I like Zadie’s Smith’s collection of essays, ‘Intimations.’
That’s all, folks! Have a good weekend and forgive all my errors ❤️.