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So Devilish a Fire

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“You are lucky. We saved you.” In Nadia Owusu’s So Devilish a Fire, we experience Nadia’s coming-of-age story, in which she absorbs the split narrative that has defined her life: Born in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater to a White mother and Black father, motherhood curved into a complete question. She tells us of the two people pressed just under her flesh, the pressures to be lighter and whiter. We learn alongside her how whiteness represents a safety she can never fully attain. This chapbook offers the complexity of learning self-love while showing us exactly what her survival looks like.

The title is plucked from W. E. B. Du Bois, who said of Black women, “I sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.” Owusu, simultaneous to her brilliant courage to speak, invests in the duplicitous power of storytelling as yet one more way she brought herself up through these fires. Stories, as we know all too painfully, have many sides, as glimmering as they are putrid. She reminds us of this doubleness, a metaphor for her entwined bloodlines: “The most destructive weapon in the world is a story, purified and poisoned. It attacks from the inside out, and from the outside in. We soak in it. We drink it. We are it.”

Language: English

Pages: 41

Format: Paperback

Release: December 21, 2018

So Devilish a Fire

0/5 ( ratings)

“You are lucky. We saved you.” In Nadia Owusu’s So Devilish a Fire, we experience Nadia’s coming-of-age story, in which she absorbs the split narrative that has defined her life: Born in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater to a White mother and Black father, motherhood curved into a complete question. She tells us of the two people pressed just under her flesh, the pressures to be lighter and whiter. We learn alongside her how whiteness represents a safety she can never fully attain. This chapbook offers the complexity of learning self-love while showing us exactly what her survival looks like.

The title is plucked from W. E. B. Du Bois, who said of Black women, “I sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.” Owusu, simultaneous to her brilliant courage to speak, invests in the duplicitous power of storytelling as yet one more way she brought herself up through these fires. Stories, as we know all too painfully, have many sides, as glimmering as they are putrid. She reminds us of this doubleness, a metaphor for her entwined bloodlines: “The most destructive weapon in the world is a story, purified and poisoned. It attacks from the inside out, and from the outside in. We soak in it. We drink it. We are it.”

Language: English

Pages: 41

Format: Paperback

Release: December 21, 2018

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