What Happens When a Country Forgets to Mourn?
- Nnamdi Nwogwugwu
- Jun 18
- 3 min read
In the aftermath of war, what happens to the stories we silence? Explore the emotional heart of Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter, a novel about memory, grief, and what it means to inherit both.
What Happens When a Country Forgets to Mourn?
There’s a question at the heart of my novel that I still ask myself:
What happens to a country that forgets to mourn?
Can it ever truly heal—or does it simply rearrange its wounds into silence?
Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter began not as a plot, but as a reckoning. A search for language deep enough to hold the silence I grew up sensing—in family stories half-told, in photographs no one explained, in the way Nigeria moved forward with a limp no one acknowledged.
The Biafran War officially ended in 1970. But what truly ended? And what was passed down instead?
This novel follows the lives of those born after the bombs stopped falling—those who inherited the aftermath not as history, but as atmosphere. For characters like Kasi, Amara, and Nadia, the war is not a chapter in a textbook. It’s a river that runs beneath everything—shaping memory, love, and the limits of what can be said aloud.
The Cost of Silence
In many post-conflict societies, silence is mistaken for peace. But silence is not neutral. It has weight. It shapes the stories children are told, the questions they stop asking, the parts of themselves they learn to withhold. In Nigeria, that silence echoes still—in our politics, our fears, our fractured sense of nationhood.
When we do not grieve together, we grieve alone.
And when we grieve alone, we begin to forget that we belong to each other.
A Story of Echoes
In Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter, grief is not always loud. It whispers through forgotten letters, through lullabies half-remembered, through the way a father holds a flute he no longer knows how to teach his son to play. It pulses in the spaces between words. It migrates. It survives.
But so does hope.
Hope flickers in the moments where memory returns—not to punish, but to bear witness. Where love becomes an act of resistance. Where storytelling becomes an offering to those who came before and those who will come after.
Why This Novel, Now?
Because we are still a nation learning to live with ghosts.
Because the generation that fought the war is aging—and many of their stories remain untold.
Because memory, if not spoken, turns into myth or disappears entirely.
Because the question is no longer just what happened? but how have we carried it? And what must we lay down to walk into a different kind of future?
An Invitation
This blog is not just a place to talk about a book.
It is a space for remembrance. For reflection. For returning.
Whether you lived through the war, were born after it, or are only just hearing its name, I invite you to journey through these shadows with me. Through music, memory, exile, and longing. Through silence—and the words that rise up to meet it.
This is not a story about a war.
It is a story about what war does to love.
What silence does to memory.
And what happens when we finally learn to mourn—together.
Welcome.
There is more to come.
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“Can a nation survive if it forgets to mourn?”
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Once Upon a Time in the Shadows of War and Winter – Available soon for pre-order.
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Because stories—especially the ones we inherit—need to be heard more than once.
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