Nadia Owusu: writer reflecting tragedy, cultural fluidity, and more

Among us every day are people who have survived and lived through a variety of places and cultures. Being an individual who grew up culturally mobile and fluid is especially unique because it adds a hidden diversity in a world among billions. Understanding others’ cultural fluidity and acknowledging this remarkable hidden diversity around us allows understanding of their meaningful experiences.

Owusu and her mother Photo: Courtesy of Nadia Owusu

Nadia Oswuw - Early Life:

Nadia Owusu, a 39-year-old award winning writer of the 2019 Whiting Award has created a space to acknowledge the good and the bad of being a cross-cultural kid who was very culturally mobile in her developmental years. Owusu was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and raised in Italy, Ethiopia, England, Ghana, and Uganda, and now works at a consulting firm in Brooklyn, New York. Her most profound work that touches on her childhood was her memoir Aftershocks which explores her trauma as a child.

Life as A Third Culture Kid

Owusu’s book Aftershocks discusses extremely powerful and devastating experiences she went through as a child. In an interview with Anita Sethi from the Guardian, Owusu says that “[she] wrote this as a way to process trauma.” Owusu was abandoned by her Armenian-American mother at the age of two. Her father who was Ghanaian passed from cancer when Owusu was 13.

Owusu also writes about the disasters of being culturally mobile before her father’s tragic death in relationship to the emotional trauma she has experienced altogether. At the age of 7, Owusu explain in the interview that an earthquake had destroyed her mother’s hometown Armenia. During the earthquake she recalls her mother visiting her family in Rome (where she lived with her father) only for her mom to leave again with a new husband. She says, “I wanted to show how our private disasters happen in the midst of larger forces that shape our lives without us realizing – from natural disasters to war and genocide and terrorism.”

Owusu was a culturally mobile child because her father worked for a UN agency where he responded to crisis such as famine and war. She grew up moving countries every couple of years due to this. In her book, she explains how with all the moving, it was extremely challenging figuring out who she was and maintaining friendships. While she may have been culturally mobile, she was indefinitely left emotionally immobile.

Working for a UN agency meant living in places where conflict was higher, more intense, with more likeliness to insecurity. She lived in Ethiopia at one point during a civil war and a drought where she mentions that “there’s inequality everywhere”.

Despite her emotional trauma, her life hardships, and her struggles all around, Nadia Owusu was able to attend college and graduate from Pace University and Hunter College. Today, Owusu works at black-founded and black-owned firm called Frontline Solutions that drives social change organizations make an impact by evaluating goals and implementing plans for change. She also teaches an educational institution she earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at, Mountainview, which is a low-residency program. For more information you can visit her site at https://www.nadiaaowusu.com/