ABSTRACT
I grew up thinking that Biafra was a curse word. Late at night in the living room, my mother and other grown-ups whispered the term under their breath, and it had a nasty, frightening sound. What made it different from other things my mother didn't want me to know about was the anxiety I sensed whenever the topic arose. My mother was not a woman who scared easily. The daughter of Scandinavian immigrants who had stopped paying her college tuition and thrown her out of the family for having a black man's child, she seemed to be immutably fearless. Nevertheless, when I was between the ages of four and seven—the years of Biafra—there were times the word would appear, perhaps slipping out during a quiet moment with Joan Baez on the phonograph, singing about Bangladesh, and my mother's voice would get that low, hushed urgency. I had no idea what the whispered word meant, but it frightened me too. Occasionally I had nightmares and vague, unexplained feelings of shame.
