“My nationality, my accent, changes with the landscape, with the very weather,” Abeer Y. Hoque writes of herself in Olive Witch, and her resolute exploration of the limits of identity—both personal and cultural—give focus to the book’s disparate geographies: Nigeria, the US, Bangladesh (180). In this memoir of growing up, Hoque intertwines first-person recollections of family relationships, academic pursuits, and her deepening depression with third-person accounts from a psychiatric hospital stay, and the result is an atmospheric contemplation on the forces that make us who we are and that sometimes can undo us.
The book is structured as three sections of distinct, well-wrought essays, many of which could stand alone, particularly those in the first section, which recounts Hoque’s schooldays in a 1980s Nigeria that resounds with colonial influence, where corporal punishment and rote memorization are bastions of education, and where Hoque perceives that “memory is a treacherous thing,” a fitting observation at the outset of a memoir (12).
Each essay has an epigraph of sorts, and the epigraphs make note of weather conditions in addition to scraps of text drawn from songs, games, poems, and journal entries. In this way, the chapters are linked to each other through the language of the physical world across the book’s chronology and geography, though the epigraphs appear to be a barometer of mental or emotional as much as meteorological status.
The relationship of language and identity is a central concern of the book, and the languages Hoque remembers of Nigeria become some of the main conceits of Olive Witch. Here is the language barrier of not speaking Igbo, the local tongue, and of struggling to learn the “hieroglyphics” of French (37). Here too are the rhythms of songs and clapping games, of seasons and climate, all of which become a language of marking time; the silence required to never talk back that becomes another manner of speaking; the other students’ taunts that give voice to anxieties surrounding beauty and the body.
In Nigeria, the land of her birth, Hoque’s Bangladeshi heritage sets her apart as a foreigner, a distinction that becomes a drawn line:
The foreigners can’t help being foreigners, but being half-Nigerian is like being a traitor, betraying the black race. I tell myself that as much as I want my skin to be darker, I wouldn’t want to have half-Nigerian blood. I want all or nothing. It might be too hard to almost belong. Not belonging, on the other hand, is cut and dried, an easy place to find (23).
The book’s middle section, brimming with heart and broken-heartedness, takes Hoque and her family to the US, and for her thirteen-year-old self, it turns out that not belonging is easy in Pittsburgh, too. Eventually, she joins the swim team, obsessively counts her breaths, her every motion. She is marking time.
Throughout the book, interludes from a psychiatric hospital stay after a failed suicide attempt punctuate the chronology of the essays. These third-person accounts are a counterpoint to the first-person essays, enacting a removal from the self. The interludes push the book’s momentum, especially in the second section, for they enhance the sense of marking time that underpins the book; the tension between the essays and the interludes are an extended ticking, a countdown, as we witness Hoque wrestle with her “splintered existence” (104).
As Hoque moves through high school and college into graduate school, she faces the multivalent pressures of her parents’ expectations, a turbulent love affair, waning fulfillment in her coursework, and a deepening depression. Hoque recalls a doctoral course at Wharton, the language of math an insightful metaphor:
[O]ur professor is always scribbling stacks of letters and numbers on the board with transfixing speed. They subtract and multiply and differentiate, even on the last line (for god’s sake), and all of it balances on a hefty set of conditions… Such a careful term, conditions, never giving away too much, never touching the boundaries, perhaps never even telling the truth (123).
What conditions apply to identity, anyway? Among the so-called facts of test scores, of potential earning levels, of demographics and race and nationality, where does the truth about who we really are fit in? Hoque attempts to bury her growing identity crisis in study and research. “In drilling down to the singular,” she wonders, “was there a chance of finding meaning?” (126). Perhaps there’s little other reason to write a memoir.
In the book’s final section, Hoque travels to Bangladesh to live for a time with her extended family, moving beyond what has been largely an examination of her own experience into broader considerations of identity. Despite the richness of Hoque’s sharply vivid, nearly photographic descriptions in this section, parts of it don’t feel as forceful as elsewhere in the book, maybe because the overall focus is wider. Still, it seems important for Hoque to consider how the sacrifices of her parents and grandparents rippled outward to her, wherever and whoever she may be.
Olive Witch closes with a lovely concluding essay that expresses yearning for “the slow exquisite present,” a last nighttime hospital interlude, and an epilogue that takes us full circle back to Nigeria, but even with these three last beats, there isn’t necessarily resolution (229). There’s forgiveness, though, and there’s fortitude. There’s the sense that nothing could have ended yet because she and we are marking time. In memoir, the only limit is the present moment.
Olive Witch
By Abeer Y. Hoque
HarperCollins India
ISBN 978-9351777007
