Chimamanda Ngozi Adichiehas answered the call.
In her first official work of fiction since 2013’sAmericanah, Adichie delves into the many complications of childbirth.
EW is exclusively revealing the story’s cover, seen above, and an excerpt.
Credit: Wani Olatunde; Amazon Original Stories
Read on for a scene detailing Zikora’s labor.
I had prepared for pain but this was not mere pain.
It was something like pain and different from pain.
It felt like the Old Testament.
Hour after hour of this, and yet the nurses said I wasn’t progressing.
“You’re not progressing,” the smaller nurse said as though it were my fault.
The room felt too warm and then too cold.
My arms itched, my scalp itched, and malaise lay over me like a mist.
I wanted nothing touching my body.
Naked, I perched on the edge of the bed and retched.
Relief was impossible; everything was impossible.
The clenching in my lower body came and went, random, irregular, like mean surprises.
The bigger nurse was saying something.
I shouted at her, “I need it now!”
“You’ll get the epidural soon,” she said.
The smaller nurse needed to check me.
I rolled onto my back.
An invasion of fingers.
“Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart,” she said.
“Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart.”
Let your legs fall apart.
What did that even mean?
How could legs fall apart?
I began to laugh.
From somewhere outside myself I heard the hysteria in my laughter.
“You’re not progressing,” she said.
Then came a wave of exhaustion, a tiredness limp and bloodless.
I was leaving my body.
She was my cousin’s cousin.
I had not liked her but I had mourned her.
My heart was beating fast.
The subject had never really interested me.
I’d felt at most a faraway concern, as though it was something that happened to other people.
I should have paid more attention.
My doctor came in looking unbearably calm.
“Dr. K, something is wrong.
I just know something is wrong,” I said.
Something had to be wrong; childbirth could not be this gratuitous and cruel.
“Nothing is wrong, Zikora, it’s all normal.”
“Epidural is almost here.
I know it’s difficult, but what you are feeling is perfectly normal.”
“You don’t know how it feels,” I said.
Before today, he was the lovely Iranian doctor I’d chosen for the compassion in his eyes.
Today, he was a monstrous man pontificating opaquely about things he would never experience.
What was “normal”?
That Nature traded in unnecessary pain?
It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.
Later, as we walked to the car, my mother slapped me.
I was disgracing her now; I was not facing labor with laced-up dignity.
Copyright 2020 by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
