Thick Skin

After Nneka, a young Nigerian-American, is dumped and abandoned by her partner Jacob, she undertakes a ritual of thickening her skin physically and spiritually—with mud, knives, tweezers, and a questionable form of therapy. Nneka’s healing process is as layered as the emotional abuse of her interracial relationship and embodies all the ways we hide, obsess, flail, fail, and finally carve our way toward feeling and healing. This heavily metaphorical novella, inspired by the author’s experience, mines meaning from memories and half-lived moments. Told in vignettes, from the perspective of a someone-turned-no-one, it grapples with the question: who’s responsible for the wreckage?“N/A Oparah uses language that makes palatable the anguish and longing, and the pain and the need that we carry when love doesn’t turn out as we had hoped. The details shimmer, rendering the emotions brutally raw. An evocative must-read poetic novella.”- Opal Palmer Adisa, author of 4-headed Woman and Love's Promise"N/A Oparah’s fragmented language makes vividly intimate the ways an abusive relationship destroys identity while also leaving a stain of longing. Thick Skin’s vulnerability and honesty bring the reader into the arduous process of literally rebuilding her body, allowing us to hide and heal with her beneath layers of mud and language. Oparah’s use of the second person makes the reader feel complicit in her trauma while also identifying with the relationship that haunts the pages. This poetic novel is a work of beauty that shatters the reader as much as it does the narrator."- Dana Green, author of How to Carry Scars and Sometimes the Air in the Room Goes Missing"Thick Skin explores crises of self, time and body. The poisonous and ever-present abuser as collective of heteronormative patriarchy and white supremacy—and what that does to a queer black woman—N/A Oparah's sentences enact and embody her subtle, brave consciousness--Thick Skin is a brilliant, harrowing, necessary book, a great achievement."- Joseph Lease, author of The Body Ghost"I love that Thick Skin stretches reality by centering an impossible body caked with earthy protections. The thin veil of that stretch is honest as fuck about our so-called protections because N/A Oparah shows how our interiors keep forcing their way outwards, breaking the protections, like deal with this shit in order to heal. Thick Skin is making me look more deeply about how I am in relationships and how I’ve harmed and how I need to heal from harm. Right on to this book, and to N/A Oparah. Thank you."- Steven Dunn, author of water & power and Potted Meat Read more