Olive Witch: A Memoir

by Abeer Y. Hoque (Read by)

Overview

In the 1970s, Nigeria is flush with oil money, building new universities and hanging on to old colonial habits. Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi girl growing up in a small sunlit town, where the red clay earth, corporal punishment, and running games are facts of life. At thirteen she moves with her family to suburban Pittsburgh and finds herself surrounded by clouded skies and high schoolers who speak in movie quotes and pop culture slang. Finding her place as a young woman in America proves more difficult than she can imagine. Disassociated from her parents, and laid low by academic pressure and spiralling depression, she is committed to a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. When she moves to Bangladesh on her own, it proves to be yet another beginning for someone who is only just getting used to being an outsider wherever she is.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781470828417
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/28/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d)

About the Author

Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She has published a book of travel photographs and poems called The Long Way Home (Ogro Dhaka 2013), and a book of linked stories, photographs and poems called The Lovers and the Leavers (Bengal Lights Books 2014, HarperCollins Publishers India 2015). She is a Fulbright Scholar and has received several other fellowships and grants. Her writing and photography have been published in Guernica, Outlook Traveller, Wasafi ri, ZYZZYVA, India Today, and The Daily Star. She has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. For more information, visit olivewitch.com

Editorial Reviews

2016-11-15
A Nigerian-born Bangladeshi writer/photographer's memoir about growing up in Nigeria and America and the inner turmoil she faced while coming to terms with her multicultural heritage.In 1972, just a year after Bangladesh gained independence, Hoque's (The Lovers and the Leavers, 2015, etc.) parents immigrated to Africa to live in the small town of Nssuka. The author was born soon after and became the family's "Nigerian baby." While her scientist father worked at the local university, Hoque grew up immersed in Nigerian culture and even gave herself an Igbo name, Ngozi. But political instability caused the family to leave Nssuka permanently when Hoque was 13. They settled in Pittsburgh, a city where Hoque's father had once spent a sabbatical year and where her youngest brother was born. Her transition to the U.S. was traumatic, yet within six months of arriving, no one could tell that she had not grown up "in middle America, going to summer camp, and watching bubble gum TV." Hoque excelled in school, just as her ambitious parents—and especially her father—desired. A breakdown in the middle of her doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business brought Hoque a greater awareness of the many personal, academic, and cultural stresses that had defined her life and her need to make sense of a fractured self. After a stint in an MFA program in San Francisco, Hoque traveled to Bangladesh, where she felt alienated despite the fact that "everyone looked like me." Yet within this space of disconnection, she began to find healing, especially after her father's revelation that he had once prepared for a literary career and even published a novel. Always aware of language and its limitations in fully fleshing out a life lived across cultures, Hoque charts a remarkably intercontinental journey of personal discovery while celebrating hard-won lessons of self-acceptance. A quietly moving memoir.

Kirkus Reviews