Faith Adiele – författare

Reluctantly leaving behind Pop Tarts and pop culture to battle flying rats, hissing cobras, forest fires, and decomposing corpses, Faith Adiele shows readers in this personal narrative, with accompanying journal entries, that the path to faith is full of conflicts for even the most devout. Residing in a forest temple, she endured nineteen-hour daily meditations, living on a single daily meal, and days without speaking. Internally Adiele battled against loneliness, fear, hunger, sexual desire, resistance to the Buddhist worldview, and her own rebellious Western ego. Adiele demystifies Eastern philosophy and demonstrates the value of developing any practice—Buddhist or not. This "unlikely, bedraggled nun" moves grudgingly into faith, learning to meditate for seventy-two hours at a stretch. Her witty, defiant twist on the standard coming-of-age tale suggests that we each hold the key to overcoming anger, fear, and addiction; accepting family; redefining success; and re-creating community and quality of life in today's world.

The editors of this anthology have set out to chronicle the global quest for identity, making a strong case for the personal and political importance of sharing our stories as they consider whether coming of age is a Western - or universal - concept. With luminaries such as Ben Okri, Chang-rae Lee and recent bestsellers including Marjane Satrapi and Alexandra Fuller, this collection includes detailed introductions to each piece of memoir, graphics, lyric prose and tales which provide historical and cultural context.

When Faith Adiele realizes that she’s forgotten the sound of her late grandmother’s voice, she impulsively decides to make a film. The process reveals surprises like her mummi had a thick Finnish accent and blamed her terminal cancer on “all the things I never said, moving inside me.” Set against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, Her Voice: Hänen Ääensä: A Hybrid Memoir weaves together diary entries, home movies, ichthyology, Nordic and Pacific Northwest mythologies, and YouTube language lessons to examine the legacies of trauma, class, politics, and silence on women’s creative lives.Her Voice leaps playfully and poignantly across time, memory, and history, as well as between American pop-culture and multi-ethnic/racial experiences that reveal America as always hybrid. Knitting together gorgeous shards of written memoir and essayistic musings with playwriting’s realistic dialog and fabulist DIY-collaged illustrations, Adiele’s investigation of almost-forgotten voices and images re-embodies and reminds us of what matters.When experienced together with Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies (released simultaneously as an innovative “breakout” performative, a supplemental yet stand-alone praxis that pushes the vision of Her Voice and the memoir genre over the brink ) the two books offer an innovative approach that goes beyond traditional memoir’s conventions. In an America no longer satisfied with merely privileged authorized written texts, Adiele shows us that culture, like memoir, can be hybrid, inclusive, and multiple, and yes, can be (and is always) both personal and political.

Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies opens in the rural American west, following Faith Adiele’s whimsical coming of age as the only multiracial girl in a Nordic immigrant family obsessed with movies and voting. Set on one particular infamous election day, the formally-inventive memoir plays with the screenplay form, casting family members as characters in iconic American movies. Striking visual collages establish her union organizer grandfather, Finland’s reindeer battalions, James Bond, The Magnificent Seven, and others as unlikely models in Faith’s quest for heroism, identity and the American dream.  When read together with Her Voice (released simultaneously) Voice/Over provides an innovative “breakout” performative, a supplemental yet stand-alone praxis that expands the vision of the memoir genre (against capital-“H” History and capital- “T” Truth) beyond the singular, breaking free of convention, inclusive of hybrid, multiple, always personal/political, and ever-expanding genre/s.