Weekly Read: “A Nigerian Attempts Therapy” by Ucheoma Onwutuebe
BLR‘s Weekly Read series brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “A Nigerian Attempts Therapy” by Ucheoma Onwutuebe from Issue 43: Recovery.
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University of Nevada, Counseling Services Intake
Name: Ucheoma Onwutuebe
Race/ethnicity: African American/Black/African/Nigerian
To be precise, I am Igbo. Where I come from, a child inherits her father’s origin. You are not from the place where you were born. You are not from the place where you grew up. You do not belong to your mother or to anyone who raised you. You belong to your father, present or absent.
My father was enlisted as a child soldier in the 1967 Biafran civil war. Like most Igbo men who survived the war, he did not talk about it, but growing up I could see my father carry both the pride and shame of it square on his shoulders. He insisted my first language be Igbo, and he didn’t fall for the identity craze of the 1990s when most Nigerian parents forbade their children from speaking their native languages.
“Say it in English,” parents would chide their children if they dared speak Igbo. In school, students were mocked and punished for speaking vernacular. But my father stood above the pressure to present his children as “polished,” refusing to tuck away their mother tongue. I said bia, before I said come. I knew Mama Ukwu before I knew she was also Grandmother.
Why this essay?
“We don’t typically judge books by their covers—or, in BLR’s case, submissions by their titles—but this essay’s title really caught my eye:
‘A Nigerian Attempts Therapy.’ It was the verb that was so intriguing: ‘attempts.’ It makes you feel as though you will be heading on a journey with the author. Ucheoma’s essay starts
as a campus counseling intake form, and the journey becomes an adventure—of observations, ironies, explorations, and challenges that are both personal and universal.”
– Danielle Ofri, BLR Editor-in-Chief
More from Ucheoma
Ucheoma Onwutuebe is the recipient of a Waasnode Fiction Prize and has received residencies from Yaddo, Art Omi, and the Anderson Center. Her works have appeared in Catapult, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, Bakwa Magazine, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Read Ucheoma’s recent work and learn more on her website.
In 2022, Danielle Ofri chatted with Ucheoma at BLR‘s online reading for our issue on recovery. Listen to their full conversation, plus hear Ucheoma read from “A Nigerian Attempts Therapy,” below.
