The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems

De: Faith Adiele

Narrado por: Faith Adiele

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 her uterus or to use it 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. One of the many great works offered by Shebooks, high-quality, short books you can't find anywhere else. Great listens by women, for women, to fit your busy life.

©2013 Faith Adiele (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Only Faith Adiele, with her humor and compassion, could bring so much - cultural differences, healing traditions, racial awareness...to the gynecologist’s office. This is a courageous, beautifully written piece." (Laura Fraser, author of All Over the Map)

The gift of story.

Whether we choose to see them or not, there are always links between our life stories and our bodies. Faith Adiele brings humor, depth, and resonance to her telling of “lady problems” that threatened her fertility - and all the hope inherent in that and which also symbolically represented some of her life story.

Motherhood-is this journey granted for all women?

Listen with an open mind!

Interesting to read the racial disparity in practicing medical doctors and those studying to be medical doctors in handling Faith's medical emergency.

Though this story takes place in the late 1990s this mindset exists in 2023 (I just listened in April 2023).

I wonder if she were not ill in Iowa but in another state that had diversity in its healthcare system if she would have been subjected to this dismissive treatment?