Abeer Y. Hoque's "Olive Witch"

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, and a book of linked stories, photographs and poems called The Lovers and the Leavers. 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.

Hoque applied the “Page 99 Test” to her book, Olive Witch: A Memoir, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…universities and jobs in Enugu, Ibadan, Jos, Benin, Kano, Zaria, and Lagos, or they will have gone abroad. In another couple of years, even those in Nsukka will have gone. It is a university town, its population bounded by those studying or teaching there.

‘You cannot accept this,’ Abbu says after reading the letter.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, shocked.

‘It’s not for you. This scholarship is for black students.’

‘No, it’s for students who have ties to Africa,’ I protest.

‘They mean blacks. What if you went to their office? What would they think when they saw you? When it was clear that you weren’t black?’

I think about Kunta Kinte, his unthinkable trials repeated a million times over the centuries to where America is today. With less force in my voice, I say, ‘But we need the money.’

‘They need it more.’

In the break room at work, I read the scholarship offer one last time and then pitch it in the trash with the fast food wrappers and coke cans. I shut my book and take out Glenn’s latest letter.

My lovecrush is so overpowering that I don’t perceive the tension mounting in our house. So when my father asks why I must write Glenn so often, I’m not as careful as I usually am with my words.

‘I like writing to him,’ I say, capping and uncapping my inky blue pen as I look out the living room window. ‘Nothing seems real until I’ve told him.’

Outside, the summer heat shimmers on our black tar driveway. I notice the grass has to be cut. Maher is still too young to handle a bulky bladed machine on his own, so it falls to me and Simi to mow the lawn, and we hate it. We have a used lawnmower whose starter is so reluctant that it requires…

My book is split into three very different, chronological geographies of my life and identity: Nigeria (where I was born and lived til I was 13), the States (where my family moved and I’ve lived since high school), and Bangladesh (where my parents are originally from and where I lived as an adult for a few years). Interleaved with those sections are excerpts set in a psychiatric ward.

Page 99 falls in the American bit, just past high school into college, but it mentions my first hometown in the world, Nsukka, in southeastern Nigeria, and alludes to the nostalgia and grief of never really being able to go home after you’ve left. There’s a conflict between my father and me, telling because family dynamics and cross cultural and generational clashes are some of my memoir’s major themes. And the actual conflict is about how I identify myself, as African or otherwise. My first love makes an appearance, a relationship not approved of, par for the course for immigrant families. And there’s suburban America in the backdrop with its sprawling lawns and fast food chains and household chores – alien landscape slowly, resentfully becoming familiar ground.

As a writer, I’m also interested in language as much as story and place, and I think page 99 of Olive Witch gives the reader a thank you taste of much of what I hold dear: an attention to place via description and setting, themes of displacement and identity, and of course, love.

Learn more about the book and author at Abeer Y. Hoque's website.

--Marshal Zeringue