OUT OF THE COCOON

The author, a medicaldoctor, initially explains her intention to write a book that details how she learned to heal from trauma: “The abuses I endured nearly turned me into a miserable soul, unable to find peace, love, and trust,” she says, but they “failed to make me a miserable soul because I recognized that I can reconstruct myself.” The book is divided into two parts: first prose, then poetry. The prose adheres more closely to the author’s biography; she tells of how she experienced sexual abuse from a peer as a child in Nigeria, and then endured other trauma in America as a teenage immigrant in a racist culture. She says that she “became a polite misandrist, but I also became a feminist (I am still the latter but not the former)”; she began healing, she says, in therapy, while also experiencing her first healthy relationship with a man. She defines trauma and notes that it’s “common in people’s lives,” then tells of how community, God, therapy, and a vision for her life helped heal her. Rare moments of specificity enliven the prose and make readers invested in her story; however, most of the text lacks imagery and in-scene detail. Still, there are some luminous moments of observation, as when the author critiques the United States for being a place where “the present buys the future on credit” and communicates in her poem, “The Way We Write,” how victims are forced to talk about their assaults in the language of their assailants. Such moments hint at a wonderfully radical unearthing of self.