Contemporary Authors

• Freshwater - 2018 Grove Press, https://smile.amazon.com/Freshwater-Akwaeke-Emezi/dp/0802127355/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1524546308&sr=8-1&keywords=Emezi%2C+Akwaeke

• AKWAEKE EMEZI - https://www.akwaeke.com/biography

  BIOGRAPHY

  Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. Her debut autobiographical novel FRESHWATER (Grove Atlantic, February 2018) is a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an Indies Introduce Title. It received rave reviews from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the LA Times, among others, as well as starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist. FRESHWATER was also recognized on 2018 best/most anticipated books lists by Esquire, ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Bustle, OZY, Electric Lit, and Book Riot, among others. Emezi's first young adult novel, PET, will be published in 2019 by Make Me a World, Christopher Myers' imprint in partnership with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers. Her short story 'Who Is Like God' won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. She was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and profiled in the February 2018 issue of Vogue Magazine (Modern Families With A Cause), and her video art series THE UNBLINDING recently premiered at Gavin Brown's enterprise in Harlem.

  Born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria, Emezi holds two degrees, including an MPA from New York University. In 2017, she was awarded a Global Arts Fund grant for the video art in her project The Unblinding, and a Sozopol Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction. She received a 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship to write her second novel, and is a 2016 Kimbilio Fellow. Emezi's writing has been published by The Cut, Buzzfeed, Granta Online, Vogue.com, and Commonwealth Writers, among others. Her memoir work was included in The Fader's 'Best Culture Writing of 2015' ('Who Will Claim You?') and her experimental short UDUDEAGU won the Audience Award for Best Short Experimental at the 2014 BlackStar Film Festival.

  She is currently making video art and working on her third novel. For her upcoming events, click here.

  CV

  "I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. Claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was." — Toni Morrison
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• AKWAEKE EMEZI - https://www.akwaeke.com/cv

  Akwaeke Emezi, b. 1987 Umuahia, Nigeria akwaeke.emezi@gmail.com | akwaeke.com

  SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  2017 'Nowhere', 212 Magazine ('Only You', Autumn/Winter 2017)

  2017 'Notes From Liberia', Vogue.com

  2017 'Who Is Like God', Granta Online

  2016 'The Texture Of Joy: A Stowaway Story', Commonwealth Writers (Adda)

  2016 'Welcome', Wasafiri Magazine

  2016 'Triumph 1360', Commonwealth Writers (Adda)

  2015 'Who Will Claim You?' Commonwealth Writers

  2015 ‘Sometimes The Fire Is Not Fire’, Olisa TV (selected & edited by Chimamanda Adichie)

  2015 ‘Burial’, Lusaka Punk and Other Stories

  AWARDS

  2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, 'Who Is Like God'

  2017 Astraea Foundation Global Arts Fund, 'THE UNBLINDING'

  2015 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship, 'THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI'

  2015 Wasafiri New Writing Prize Shortlist + Special Commendation, ‘WELCOME'

  2014 BlackStar Film Festival, Best Short Experimental, ‘UDUDEAGU’

  PANELS + EVENTS

  2018 The Only Light We've Got In All This Darkness: New Fiction From Kimbilio, 2018 AWP Conference, USA

  2018 Sound and Fury: Orality in Contemporary Literature, 2018 AWP Conference, USA

  2017 New Perspectives, Day of Dialog, Brooklyn Public Library, USA

  2016 Literary Displacements, International Literary Festival of Peripheries, Brazil

  2016 Nourishing Freedoms, Black Feminisms, 2016 AWID Forum, Brazil

  2016 Spirit Women, Chale Wote 2016/Spirit Robot, Ghana

  WORKSHOPS + RESIDENCIES

  2017 Sozopol Creative Nonfiction Seminars, NES Fellow, Bulgaria

  2016 Kimbilio Fellow, USA

  2015 Writer-In-Residence, Hub City Writers Project, USA

  2015 Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, Nigeria

  2015 Caine Prize for African Writing Workshop, Ghana

  2014 US Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, USA

  2013 Cave Canem Poetry Workshops, USA

  EXHIBITIONS

  2015 UDUDEAGU + HEY CELESTIAL, Design is the Personality of the Idea, Group Exhibition, Lagos, Nigeria

  2015 ALULU/ASUSU UDUDEAGU, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, USA

  FILMS

  2016 ‘BREAK FRUIT’ Brooklyn, New York, Writer/Director

  2014 ‘UDUDEAGU’ Lagos, Nigeria, Writer/Director/Editor/Cinematographer

  2014 ‘HEY CELESTIAL’ Paris, France, Writer/Director/Editor/Producer

  2014 ‘APOTHEOSIS’ Lagos, Nigeria Director/Cinematographer/Editor

  2014 ‘WAITING ALL NIGHT’ Brooklyn, USA, Writer/Director/Editor

  2013 ‘BLESI’ Albuquerque, USA, Writer/Director/Editor/Cinematographer

  FILM FESTIVALS + SPECIAL SCREENINGS

  2017 New York African Film Festival, Film Society Lincoln Center, NYC

  2016 Transforming Provocations-Regime Change, Flaherty NYC

  2015 Transoceanic Visual Exchange (Barbados + Lagos + New Zealand); 50Golborne presents AFRO FUTURES IN MOTION with the Portobello Film Festival, London; NOW Cinema presents Films Supporting Home Affairs, London; Analogue Eye-Mobile Drive-in Cinema, Vienna; The New Cross & Deptford Free Film Festival, London; Fribourg International Film Festival, Switzerland.

  2014 The Boda Boda Lounge Project (Addis + Bamako + Bulawayo + Cairo + Harare + Johannesburg + Kampala + Kinshasa + Luanda + Lubumbashi + Lagos + Santiago); Film Africa, London; Lights, Camera, Africa!!! Film Festival, Lagos; BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia; African Street Style Festival, London.

  EDUCATION

  2014-2016 Creative Writing (Fiction), Syracuse University, NY

  2010-2012 International Public Policy + Nonprofit Management MPA, New York University, NY

• Granta - https://granta.com/contributor/akwaeke-emezi/

  Akwaeke Emezi

  Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. Her short story ‘Who Is Like God’ won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, and her debut novel, Freshwater, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in Winter 2018. For more of her work, please see www.akwaeke.com.

• Muse and the Marketplace - https://museandthemarketplace2018.sched.com/speaker/akwaeke_emezi.1xduci7i

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  avatar for Akwaeke Emezi
  Akwaeke Emezi
  FRESHWATER
  Author
  Website

  Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. Her debut novel, Freshwater (Grove Atlantic, February 2018) was selected as one of the ten best Winter/Spring 2018 debut novels by Indies Introduce, and her short story "Who Is Like God" won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa.

  Born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria, Akwaeke holds two degrees, including an MPA from New York University. In 2017, she was awarded a Global Arts Fund grant for the video art in her project The Unblinding, and a Sozopol Fellowship for Creative Non-fiction. She received a 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship to write her second novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, and is a 2016 Kimbilio Fellow. Akwaeke's writing has been published by Granta Online, Vogue.com, and Commonwealth Writers, among others. Her memoir work was selected and edited by Chimamanda Adichie ("Sometimes The Fire Is Not Fire") and included in The Fader's 'Best Culture Writing of 2015' ("Who Will Claim You?"). She is currently making video art and working on her third novel.

QUOTED: "Complex and dark, this novel will simultaneously challenge and reward lovers of literary fiction. A must-read."

Freshwater
Poornima Apte
Booklist.
114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p25+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Freshwater.
By Akwaeke Emezi.
Feb. 2018. 240p. Grove, $24 (9780802127358).
It is not easy to corral traditional storytelling tropes into untraditional narrative formats without coming across as gimmicky or losing the reader along the way. In her mind-blowing debut, Emezi weaves a traditional Igbo myth that turns the well-worn narrative of mental illness on its head, and in doing so she has ensured a place on the literary-fiction landscape as a writer to watch. Ada, the protagonist, is a young Nigerian who never stood a chance. Right from birth, she has been controlled by evil ogbanje, spirits who mold a difficult child and who eventually create a young woman beset by multiple selves. Narrated by a chorus of the voices battling for control over Ada's mind, the novel brilliantly explores the young woman's slow descent into her own private hell. "The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin," the voices say, hinting ominously at worse things to come. Emezi's brilliance lies not just in her expert handling of the conflicting voices in Ada's head but in delivering an entirely different perspective on just what it means to go slowly mad. Complex and dark, this novel will simultaneously challenge and reward lovers of literary fiction. A must-read.--Poornima Apte
1 of 6 4/24/18, 12:03 AM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "Freshwater." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 25+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036175/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=632e8b84. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036175
2 of 6 4/24/18, 12:03 AM

QUOTED: "Emezi's talent is undeniable. She brilliantly depicts the conflict raging in the 'marble room' of Ada's psyche."
"an impressive debut."

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Freshwater
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p28. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Freshwater
Akwaeke Emezi. Grove, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2735-8
Gods torment the young woman they inhabit in Emezi's enthralling, metaphysical debut novel. Ada has been occupied by a chorus of ogbanje--her "godly parasite with many heads"--since her birth, but it is only after she leaves Nigeria for a college in Virginia that the ogbanje begin to take over. The libidinous Asughara is the most forceful, emerging after a sexual assault has turned Ada into "a gibbering thing in a corner" to become "the weapon over the flesh" that will prevent her from being hurt again. Asughara guides Ada through a tormented love affair with an Irish tennis player that culminates in a marriage doomed by Asughara's overprotection. Divorced, Ada begins cutting her arm as she did in childhood, feeding the ogbanje with "the sacrifices that were necessary to keep" them quiet. But the bloodletting fails to quell their thirst to "go home"; Asughara is intent instead on freeing her ghastly cohort by manipulating Ada into suicide. Though some readers may find the correlation between mental illness and the ogbanje limiting, others will view this as a poetic and potent depiction of mental illness. Emezi's talent is undeniable. She brilliantly depicts the conflict raging in the "marble room" of Ada's psyche, resulting in an impressive debut. (Feb.)
Caption: Akwaeke Emezi's debut novel, Freshwater, is a brilliant depiction of mental illness (reviewed on this page).
3 of 6 4/24/18, 12:03 AM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Freshwater." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575614/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3e6a8651. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575614
4 of 6 4/24/18, 12:03 AM

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Briefly Noted
Amanda Erickson
The New Yorker.
94.3 (Mar. 5, 2018): p75. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted tif75tif75tif75tif75
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi (Grove). This ambitious novel is narrated mostly by spirits-a "godly parasite with many heads"-inhabiting the mind of the protagonist, Ada, a Nigerian who comes to America for college. After she is sexually assaulted, one of the spirits propels her through drug abuse, bad relationships, and suicide attempts. Later, when a more masculine spirit takes over, Ada starts wearing men's clothes and undergoes surgery to achieve a "fine balance" of gender. Ada is torn between wanting to quell the spirits and feeling a certain security in submitting to them, until a historian explains the Igbo meaning of the name Ada and its links to the spirit world. The novel cunningly uses African traditions in order to show that they include ideas about gender, sexual orientation, and mental illness that are often presumed to be Western imports.
The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin (Putnam). Can we escape our fate? That question haunts the four Gold siblings in this novel, after a visit they make, as children, to a fortune-teller who predicts the day each of them will die. True or not, her pronouncements haunt the characters through their lives. One, told he'll die young, runs away to San Francisco at sixteen. Another becomes a scientist obsessed with cheating death. The book spans decades, touching on the AIDS crisis, 9/11, race, and marriage. But, at its core, it's an examination of free will and fate. "Was the woman as powerful as she seemed," one of the children wonders, or did she herself "take steps that made the prophecy come true?"
The Bughouse, by Daniel Swift (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In 1945, Ezra Pound, facing a treason trial for his wartime activities in Italy, was instead pronounced insane and held in a psychiatric hospital for twelve years. Swift examines the poet's personal and artistic struggles during this time, and the influence he had on the fellow-writers who visited him. Swift asserts that "Pound in the insane asylum encapsulates the central questions about art, politics and poetry of the twentieth century." That's an extravagant claim, but the book abounds in striking details-Pound's childlike hunger for gifts of apple candy, friends' tender letters to and about him, and, especially, the hours poured into his unruly, unfinished "Cantos."
5 of 6 4/24/18, 12:03 AM

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Fifty Million Rising, by Saadia Zahidi (Nation). In the early years of this century, more than fifty million women joined the workforce across the Muslim world. Zahidi, the World Economic Forum's head of Education, Gender, and Work, explores the origins and implications of this unprecedented "migration from home to work" in thirty countries. These countries' records on gender equality vary widely, and, perhaps inevitably, Zahidi's analysis is prone to generalization. Still, its scope is impressive. Drawing on economic data and interviews with female domestic workers, entrepreneurs, doctors, and C.E.O.s, Zahidi relates daunting and largely unheralded journeys.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Erickson, Amanda. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 75. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529962014/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2bc4d76e. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529962014
6 of 6 4/24/18, 12:03 AM

Apte, Poornima. "Freshwater." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 25+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036175/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=632e8b84. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018. "Freshwater." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575614/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3e6a8651. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018. Erickson, Amanda. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 75. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529962014/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2bc4d76e. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/akwaeke-emezi-startling-debut-novel-explores-the-freedom-of-being-multiple
  Word count: 1021

  QUOTED: "Freshwater is alive to the tension between the affirmation of owning a single identity and the freedom and mutability of being multiple. There is something self-defeating about trying to trace a self that is defined by indefinability; one achievement of Emezi’s book is to make that paradox feel generously fertile."

  A Startling Début Novel Explores the Freedom of Being Multiple

  By Katy Waldman

  February 26, 2018

  Akwaeke Emezi’s début novel, “Freshwater,” pinpoints the nebulous pain of being imprisoned in a physical form.
  Photograph by Elizabeth Wirija

  A recent interview with the author Akwaeke Emezi, whose début novel is called “Freshwater,” refers to certain autobiographical “realities” in which the book is rooted—realities that include Emezi’s “identity . . . as an ogbanje.” An ogbanje, Emezi has explained is “an Igbo spirit that’s born into a human body, a kind of malevolent trickster.” Its goal “is to torment the human mother by dying unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again.” We are all woven partially from labels, of course. Emezi, the article notes, is also “Nigerian,” “Black,” “trans,” and gender “non-binary.” But it is startling to see those designations laid matter-of-factly alongside a term of magic. “Freshwater” is wrought from that dissonance, insistent that the self, which is multiple, requires multiple frameworks in order to be understood.

  In the book, a Nigerian baby, Ada, enters the world with a miasma of spirits inside her head. These beings take turns narrating the short, non-chronological chapters, at times as a chorus and at times individually. Emezi has said that the legend of the ogbanje helped her comprehend why she was drawn to suicide (she has survived a suicide attempt); perhaps, she ventured to the literary Web site The Rumpus, death enthralled her because she has always had one foot in the afterlife. Spurred on by godlike voices, Ada, too, gravitates toward self-destruction: unprotected sex, binge drinking, relationships with harsh men, disordered eating. She breaks mirrors and maims her arms with the shards. The spirits observe her pain with a mixture of incomprehension and delectation. “Was I not the hunger in Ada?” asks one, Asughara, charming and sociopathic. “I was made out of desire . . . . I filled her up with it and choked her.”

  What impels us to sabotage our own interests, or to commit gratuitous cruelty? Freudian psychologists speculated about a wayward id. The movie “Inside Out” blamed our personified emotions. We have invented angels and devils; four distinct humors; a celestial zodiac. Between the covers of the DSM-V runs an entire gamut of pathology, from autism-spectrum disorder to trichotillomania. Igbo spirituality, Emezi radically suggests, has as much to offer as any of these schemas when it comes to decrypting human folly or transcendence. Ada’s story involves depression, loneliness, and the seductions of self-harm. The book would have made grim sense through a mental-health lens; instead, it is an indigenous fairy tale.

  “Freshwater” follows Ada from her turbulent girlhood, in Nigeria—wooed away by a work opportunity in London, Ada’s mother leaves her and her siblings behind with their aloof, self-obsessed father—to college, in Virginia, where she is raped by another student. The trauma jostles Asughara awake. She takes center stage. “Asughara was the blade, forever flirting with the softness of people’s throats,” the other ogbanje report. (That line is typical of Emezi’s propulsive, incantatory style.) Rounding out the brain trust is Saint Vincent, “long fingered and cool, with slow and simmering hungers,” and Yshwa, or Christ, who loves mortals “as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering.”

  As these personages drift in and out of the “marble room” of Ada’s mind, Ada vacillates between relationships, afraid to commit the property of the spirit world to human hands. Saint Vincent pulls her toward women. The other spirits reject intimacy. The pliant Ada is riven, “a question wrapped up in a breath: How do you survive when they place a god inside your body?”

  It would be too simple to call Ada pure chassis, obedient and without feature. She possesses her own personality; often, she argues with Asughara about morality, or demonstrates loyalty or sweetness. One almost senses that Ada and the ogbanje have divvied up their traits according to what society expects from young women. “I liked drunk Ada because . . . she actually agreed with me,” Asughara remarks, as if their differences were a matter of mere inhibition. Neat boundaries between form and content—body and soul—blur and waver. The ogbanje inside the marble room are not insubstantial spectres. They have armpits, skin that ripples with goosebumps, eyes that open and close.

  Emezi has described her own transitional surgeries as “a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.” Similarly, Ada pursues procedures that will mark her as “other,” neither male nor female, neither singular nor plural. She lets a “masked man take a knife lavishly to the flesh of her chest, mutilating her better and deeper.” The book becomes a study in dysphoria—not precisely the distress of being misgendered but the more nebulous pain of being imprisoned in a physical form, of losing your wraith-like ability to evade categorization.

  And yet “to be named is to gain power,” the ogbanje point out. “Freshwater” is alive to the tension between the affirmation of owning a single identity and the freedom and mutability of being multiple. There is something self-defeating about trying to trace a self that is defined by indefinability; one achievement of Emezi’s book is to make that paradox feel generously fertile. Ada does not narrate many chapters, but, when she does, her voice is a fugue of the voices that have spoken before. She says, “I am a village full of faces and a compound full of bones, translucent thousands.”

  Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.Read more »

  More:LiteratureBooksAkwaeke EmeziNovels

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-freshwater-20180216-htmlstory.html
  Word count: 1356

  A dazzling, devastating novel: 'Freshwater' by Akwaeke Emezi
  Susan Straight
  By Susan Straight
  | Critic at Large |
  Feb 16, 2018 | 8:00 AM
  A dazzling, devastating novel: 'Freshwater' by Akwaeke Emezi
  Akwaeke Emezi's book is "Freshwater" (Elizabeth Wirija)

  There is a devastating moment in “Freshwater,” the debut novel by Akwaeke Emezi, when the main character known as Ada gives herself over completely to the spirit that has implanted itself into her while she was in her mother’s womb. Asughara, as the girl names the being inside her, says this: “If you are a python’s child, then you are also a python — simple. There should have been a regular molting that came with that, but I was not regular. I wasn’t allowed some gentle and slow shrugging off of skin. No, my own was to tear it away as soon as I came through, splitting it into pieces that were never found, coming out damp with blood. This is what happens when you act as if a human can hold godmatter without it curdling.”

  From the opening of the novel, this baby girl, born in southern Nigeria, middle child of a Nigerian man of the Igbo people and a Tamil mother born in Melaka, is the body as vessel for this spirit that revels in wicked manipulation, violence and pleasure as experienced through Ada. She is ogbanje. Many cultures recognize children who grow up with “one foot on the other side,” as the author says in her dedication. In Ojibwe, they are called “two spirit” people. In Navajo, nadleehi means one who is transformed. In Igbo religious teachings, the literal translation for ogbanje is “children come and go,” meaning that the malicious spirit will continue to inhabit a family unless the ogbanje child is mutilated so that the spirit will not desire to return to that particular body.

  In a recent essay for the Cut, Emezi, who with her sister has a large international social media presence, details her own surgeries, her own painful process of stripping away the female — her breasts, her reproductive organs. The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer's life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone. In the end, this coming-of-age novel also has one foot on the other side, held between the open gates — a young woman of many nations and many souls.

  The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in shards as sharp and glittering as those with which Ada cuts her forearms and thighs, in blood offering to Asughara. The prose here is startling and filtered through the spirits from the very start. “We came from somewhere — everything does. When the transition is made from spirit to flesh, the gates are meant to be closed….Perhaps the gods forgot; they can be absentminded like that…. By the time she (our body) struggled out into the world, slick and louder than a village of storms, the gates were left open. We should have been anchored in her by then, asleep inside her membranes and synched with her mind…. We were her and yet not.”

  Ada’s parents struggle with her wildness, inconsolable and violent, and then after a terrible accident to her younger sister, and the sight of blood, the spirit inside their child demands blood always. As Ada grows, many gods converse inside her, fighting for her soul and comfort. Her parents take her to Catholic Mass, and the spirits inside observe Christ: “We knew him; we knew his name was Yshwa….It was, we also knew, impossible for him not to hear her. He hears every prayer babbled screamed sung at him….Yshwa too was born with spread gates, born with a prophesying tongue and hands he brought over from the other side…. he loves them as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering.”

  When Ada’s parents separate, and she leaves for college in America, the splintering of selves takes place in immensely painful scenes. For the next 12 years, the young woman makes constant sacrifice to the hungry gods inside her: “At twenty, when she was in veterinary school, after spending long hours separating skin from cadaver muscle and lifting delicate sheets of fascia, she would return to her room and use a fresh scalpel on her scarred left arm. Anything, you see, that would make that pale secret flesh sing that bright mother color.”

  Ada scars her arms and thighs. The spirit inside her demands sex. But after sexual violence is visited upon her body by a fellow college student, an athlete, “Danish according to his passport, Eritrean according to his blood, a skinny boy with pools for eyes and dark spilling smooth on his skin,” Ada descends into the fracture of herself and names one spirit, Asughara, who dominates the rest of the novel.
  Akwaeke Emezi's "Freshwater."
  Akwaeke Emezi's "Freshwater" Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze

  In Emezi’s powerful telling, violence births Asughara, and Asughara controls life. Ada cuts off her thick, beautiful hair, even waxes off her eyebrows, and the spirit remarks that now the girl looks more like her: offspring of the python goddess Ala. Sculpting to skeletal her body, through little food and excessive exercise, Ada finds it is not enough for Asughara, who wants pleasure and sex and betrayal for herself. Asughara is the impulse and action — “the Ada,” as the spirit calls her, is the body — separate and obedient.

  For the rest of the novel, as the fracturing deepens, and Ada’s life is in the balance, other holy figures debate her existence — Chango, Santa Marta, Yshwa and St. Vincent. Ada even marries, and Asughara destroys the marriage. Ada begins to date women, but the spirit dislikes this, and then, finally, after the death of someone beloved, Asughara tries to end Ada’s life. “Ada nodded and I kept the count for her. A few hundred milligrams down, several thousand, a few hundred more to go. She always hated taking tablets with water and she’d meant to make grapefruit juice earlier, but the juicer was dirty.” The painkillers are taking effect when a friend calls, and the plan is ruined. She is rescued.

  Then the rest of the Igbo spirits take over, because Ala would never condone suicide. And Emezi’s narrative grows into a battle for the body of Ada: “Even all of that was nothing compared to the best things we’d accomplished, when we laid out the Ada’s body on a surgical table and let a masked man take a knife lavishly to the flesh of her chest, mutilating her better and deeper than we ever could, all the way to righteousness.”

  But this is Ada’s power, for herself, as well. To survive the ogbanje means to change her very self. As the collective “we” of the spirits say, “When you break something, you must study the patter of the shattering before you can piece it back together. So it was with the Ada. She was a question wrapped up in breath: How do you survive when they place a god inside your body?” Emezi’s lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace.

  Straight’s new story, “The Princess of Valencia,” will be released by Amazon Originals on Feb. 27. She’s on Instagram @susan.straight
  Susan Straight
  Susan Straight
  Contact
  Straight is a recipient of the L.A. Times Book Prize’s Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. Born and raised in Riverside, Straight has made the region the subject of her fiction and nonfiction, and is a teacher in UC Riverside’s creative writing program. Her 2001 novel “Highwire Moon” was a finalist for the National Book Award; her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and Lannan Literary Prize.

• The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/books/review/freshwater-akwaeke-emezi.html
  Word count: 830

  In This Debut Novel, a College Student Hears Voices

  By TARIRO MZEZEWAFEB. 26, 2018
  Continue reading the main story
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  Akwaeke Emezi Credit Elizabeth Wirija

  FRESHWATER
  By Akwaeke Emezi
  226 pp. Grove Atlantic. $24

  In her remarkable and daring debut novel, “Freshwater,” Akwaeke Emezi draws in part from her own life to tell the story of Ada, a young Igbo and Tamil woman haunted by the ogbanje — the “godly parasite with many heads, roaring inside the marble room of her mind.”

  The story is narrated by Ada’s multiple personalities, and occasionally by Ada herself. Early in the novel, we learn of Ada’s untamable screaming as a baby in Nigeria and in Malaysia, where her childhood nightmares send her to stand at her parents’ bedside until they rise and tend to her. Later, to feed the ogbanje, she develops a compulsion to cut herself. But it isn’t until Ada arrives in the United States as a college student that the spirits and personalities inhabiting her come fully to life.

  The most forceful and uncontrollable of these personalities, Asughara, is unleashed after Ada is sexually assaulted on a Virginia campus. “Ada wasn’t there any more. At all, at all. She wasn’t even a small thing curled up in the corner of her marble. There was only me. I expanded against the walls, filling it up and blocking her out completely.” Asughara persuades Ada to chop off her long black hair and abstain from eating until she is frail, and also encourages her to have sex with a friend’s two brothers, among other men. Asughara breaks the hearts of people Ada cares about and intentionally breaks up her tumultuous marriage.

  We are later introduced to Saint Vincent, a gentler personality who prefers to “move in Ada’s dreams.” But it is Asughara who forces Ada’s rational self ever further into the background and takes over her body more than any other personality.

  “Freshwater” is a poetic and disturbing depiction of mental illness as it haunts the protagonist from birth to adulthood: “the brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew taller … but the ones you were born with, tucked behind your liver.” It is an unflinching account of the way mental illness can grow, transform and destroy not just relationships, but one’s sense of self as well. Unlike many depictions of dissociative identity disorder in fiction, Emezi steers clears of hysteria and fear-driven drama. The voices in Ada’s mind build creatively on a consistent belief about madness: that in the height of suffering, sufferers are not themselves; they become possessed by different spirits. As Sylvia Plath famously wrote in 1962, “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
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  Ada’s voices don’t just talk to her; they fight with her during the novel’s narration in a moving portrayal of a struggle against something that exists within, a mental anguish that no amount of reasoning can conquer. More powerful than Emezi’s prose, though, is what it brings to the real world. Eating disorders, cutting, depression, suicide, manic depression — in the popular imagination, all these things are most often seen as the struggles of young, wealthy, white American women. This novel expands the universe of mental illness to include women of color and other ethnicities. Rooting Ada’s story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness and how it manifests. It causes us to question science and reason.
  Photo

  “Freshwater” builds slowly, but that only crystallizes how fractured Ada and her personalities are. As the voices in her head get louder and grow hungrier, the story gains momentum. Only when Ada looks to her roots is there hope that she will wrest back control from her tormentors. For both the reader and Ada, that comes as a revelation, if not quite a relief.

  Tariro Mzezewa is a staff editor for The Times.

  Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), sign up for our newsletter, and sync your calendar with curated literary events.

  A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2018, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: All Her Shattered Selves. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• Nylon
  https://nylon.com/articles/akwaeke-emezi-freshwater-interview
  Word count: 2453

  QUOTED: "I ... wrote it for other people who are where I was. I know that feeling of being trapped in the reality that you’re not allowed to think is real, that everyone else tells you is crazy."
  "What ends up happening is that you just have a bunch of really isolated, really depressed, really suicidal people. It’s not fun. So, if I can help people shift realities a little bit into one that gets them a better way of being, a better quality of life, and helps them feel less choked, then hopefully, it’s gonna give to someone else what it also gave to me."

  Akwaeke Emezi On Writing Even When You’re Scared
  Her debut novel ‘Freshwater’ is out tomorrow
  by Taylor Bryant · February 12, 2018
  Akwaeke Emezi On Writing Even When You’re Scared

  When I speak with writer Akwaeke Emezi, it’s less than a week before her debut novel, Freshwater, comes out. “It’s been a lot more stressful than I would’ve anticipated,” she tells me. “It's weird to have this goal in your life that you look forward to, and you think it's going to be this magical ‘all my dreams are coming true!’ moment, and really, it's… it's that, but it's also very difficult and it hurts.” She laughs and continues, “Which was unexpected.”

  When I ask whether she thinks the hurt will fade or increase once Freshwater is available for public consumption, she’s unsure. “It’s one of those things where it’s uncharted territory for me. You can’t predict anything, you have to surrender to a lot of unknowns. I’m not particularly good at surrendering to unknowns.”

  In a recent piece for BuzzFeed, Emezi ruminates on doubts she held that the novel would even have a future. It’s not about the “immigrant experience,” nor does it look like what other popular African writers have done before her. It’s an internal experience that uses traditional Igbo religion as its lens. Not many Americans are exposed to that, and so she thought not many would embrace it.

  The book has been received beautifully so far, though, and that’s because it is beautiful. It follows a young woman, Ada, from childhood to adulthood, from Nigeria to America. After a traumatic event on campus, she retreats into herself and separates into the different selves present since she was a child. As such, the book is layered and dark and complicated. Trying to describe it doesn’t do it justice, it must be experienced. Emezi dedicates it to those “with one foot on the other side,” the people stuck in a reality not of their making. Though Freshwater is fiction, it weaves in many real-life experiences of Emezi's, and she considers herself a part of those people "with one foot on the other side." Specifically, she refers to herself as an ogbanje, a term from the Igbo language that refers to a “spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.” She recently wrote about this in a piece for The Cut, explaining that she discovered this about herself around the same time she came out as trans. And she’s been reinventing, rediscovering, and evolving ever since.

  Ahead, we talk to the author about what she uncovered while writing Freshwater, the complications of reading reviews, and how the work has changed her life.

  Have you always been a writer?
  I started writing when I was five, and I wrote nonstop through that. I wrote a lot more poetry before I switched over to prose, but I started writing my first novel when I was 14. Not because I was like, "Oh, I want to write a book," but it was just a thing that I did. It wasn't really offered as a viable career path—because, Nigerian immigrants—[so] I never considered doing it full-time until 2013 when a couple of friends told me that I should. And then I started applying to MFA programs and writing opportunities. I made the major pivot in 2014 when I left my job and then switched over to writing.

  You wrote on Twitter that you started as a blogger in 2006. Were you mostly writing shorter fiction and prose and poetry during that time?
  No, I was writing a lot more nonfiction. I was really just blogging about my life a lot. Which is interesting now, because people are like, "Oh, you're so open, and you're vulnerable, and you talk about intimate things on the internet." I laugh a little bit, and I'm like, "Oh, this is nothing." I used to put all my business out there, like all my business [laughs]. I bear in mind that the internet lives forever, and some of that stuff will probably surface, and it's like completely cringe-worthy and terribly written, but it taught me a lot about how to deal with being on social media and how to deal with the backlash. So even now when, like, there's backlash from my essay on The Cut, I know how to deal with that pretty well. I've had backlash about way more personal things and caused a lot more drama in my family with what I wrote online than whatever I'm doing now.

  Have the reactions to The Cut piece made you more excited or nervous about the book coming out?
  I haven't actually been nervous about the book coming out in terms of reader reception. The responses to The Cut piece were expected—from the really good ones to hate speech. People are predictable, mostly. My editor in the Nigerian edition of the book had tweeted: "Wow, y'all are having a fit over this essay, I can't wait for you to read the book." I think the thing that I forget sometimes is that the book is… I don't know what the word is. The book is a lot for some people. And that's interesting because, for me, it's clearly not because I wrote it. This is my normal, this is my baseline. So, I have a couple of West African readers who will specifically refer to it as blasphemy, and that's super interesting. A lot of the Goodreads reviews, they're like, "Oh, it's about mental health," but a lot of them also keep talking about trigger warnings, and they keep talking about how brutal the content is.

  When I read about these people being shocked by things in the book, I'm like, "Oh, there are people for whom this level of violence and pain is actually not a part of their life." There are people who don't live with this and who never had to live with this. And, to me, I know so many people who have had to live with more pain and violence than what is depicted in the book, so the book doesn't even seem extreme to me. So when people write reviews, and they're like "the sexual violence is extremely traumatic" or "the child abuse is traumatic," for me, I'm like the whole being alive part is way more traumatic than all of those things.

  I actually read your piece on The Cut after I read Freshwater, and I almost wish I did it the other way around because, I think, it’s a good precursor to the book. Because it does give you information about ogbanje and gender and transitioning, which is explored throughout the novel. Would you recommend that to readers?
  I'm not sure, I don’t try very hard to curate people's experiences of the book. I read the reviews on Goodreads, and there was a girl who had written a review of Freshwater, and she didn't finish it but I loved the review because it was very honest, and she engaged with the book, and she wanted me to come to D.C. so I could do an event. But the reason she didn't like it or finish it was because she followed me originally on Instagram and she thought that my book was going to be like my Instagram account, in terms of being positive and a bit uplifting. Then she read Freshwater, and I was like, "Oh, honey, it is not like that" [laughs].

  Someone else on Twitter kind of critiqued her expectations and they were like, "Before you read Freshwater, you might wanna look up other things that Akwaeke has written, so you can get a feel for what that is," which is useful advice. But for me, it's just interesting seeing people coming into the book from all kinds of directions, with or without a bit of foreknowledge of what the content is going to be. I had this understanding that the book doesn't quite belong to me once it's out there—I can't really control a reader's experience of it—but I can correct things. A bunch of people on Twitter keep summarizing the book inaccurately, and I was like, "Okay, we need a little bit of a guide, so we can stop prescribing facts in a way that is not true." I do care about the book being represented accurately to an extent. I know that I can try to guide people a little bit, but I can't control it. I think that's the distinction.

  You mentioned once that your mother has always been wary of you writing anything memoir-ish because she's been nervous about telling family stories. What's been her reaction to the book?
  I actually interviewed my mom for the book, and she got to pick the name of her character. I interviewed her because I didn't know a lot of my childhood stuff, I don't remember a lot of my childhood, and we talked about the blank spaces. A lot of the book—especially the first couple of chapters—is based on direct stories that she told me. She would spend evenings writing out the stories and emailing them to me so I could use them for the book. When I was done with the first draft, she called me and said, "I hope you haven't written anything that the family wouldn't like." I was like, "Woman, I hope you didn't tell me anything you didn't want out there because it's based on what you said." She read the finished book and I really thought she was going to have a problem with it, but she loves it. She sent me an email talking about how much she loved it, and I'm not sure which bits of it she decided were fictionalized and which bits were not, but she seems fine with it.

  The book feels very present, like you're uncovering things as you go. Were there any new discoveries and things that surprised you in the writing of it?
  The entire book was difficult. I had no idea what the book was going to be when I started writing it. I knew that I would go in chronological life order, so that was the skeleton of the book—follow these events that happened and use that as the framework for it. That was the thread I followed, but everything else that goes on top of that was a complete discovery because the book is also based in this very specific Igbo reality, and I wasn't in that reality before I started writing the book.

  In the acknowledgments, I mention a conversation with my sister in which I said I was hesitant to write the book because I did not want to step into that reality because I had a feeling that it was going to suck me in. I was scared because I'm already marginalized in human terms on so many different axes. There are already so many things that, when I meet new people, I have to tell them about my life: "You're black, you're African, you're queer, you're divorced, you have these ‘mental health’ issues." It's all these things that make you "other." I didn't want to add one more where it's like, "Oh! You don't even live in this reality." It seems like a lot. But my sister said to treat it like Method acting, where you have to step into the reality and get the work done. So, I did that.

  So the writing of the book was the thing that made the book exist. Even the idea of the book didn't exist until the book was being written. It very much came to life. It very much was spun into existence. The book and I discovered each other at the same time, so to speak.

  What do you think writing the book has given you?
  Clarity, for one. I used to say there was the "me" that existed before the book, and there was the "me" that existed after the book. And I understand why it had to be the first book I wrote. Because the books that I have afterward aren’t like this book; they weren’t transformative for me. They’re lovely stories, but this one, in particular, was a book that fundamentally changed how I saw myself, and the clarity that it gave me quite literally changed my life. It’s a weird thing to write a book where you understand so much about yourself only because you wrote the book, and understanding a lot about how what I was dealing with was because I was located in the wrong reality. And in order to have a better quality of life, I needed to be in the one that was more accurate. And the book was what helped me literally ascribe legibility to my existence and find my way through the reality that’s accurate.

  I also wrote it for other people who are where I was. I know that feeling of being trapped in the reality that you’re not allowed to think is real, that everyone else tells you is crazy. What ends up happening is that you just have a bunch of really isolated, really depressed, really suicidal people. It’s not fun. So, if I can help people shift realities a little bit into one that gets them a better way of being, a better quality of life, and helps them feel less choked, then hopefully, it’s gonna give to someone else what it also gave to me.

  Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi is out February 13 and available for purchase here.

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• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2018/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-akwaeke-emezi/
  Word count: 4391

  QUOTED: "It’s a bit of a difficult term to describe, just because it’s not an English term. Most of the times it gets translated as a spirit that’s born into a human body. But I’ve been finding that people start thinking of it as a binary. They think, Is it really a spirit if it’s in a human body? And they start trying to divide it into two because the description splits it that way. Really, it’s not one or the other. It’s both at the same time. It can’t be split."
  "It’s part of Igbo reality. Part of the ontology of the culture where there would be these children who were called “born to die.” They get born, and they die repeatedly. And the point of it is allegedly to torment the mother."
  "It’s central to my work because when I started doing this work, I’d been trying to understand suicidality, and Western lenses that were usually around mental health really weren’t helpful. And the only thing that sticks for me was going back and choosing a different lens, and ogbanje was the one that made a lot more sense than the “mental health” descriptions of what was going on."

  A Spirit Born into a Human Body: Talking with Akwaeke Emezi

  By Deesha Philyaw

  February 21st, 2018

  An ogbanje is an Igbo spirit that’s born into a human body, a kind of malevolent trickster, whose goal is to torment the human mother by dying unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again. They come and go.

  Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist Akwaeke Emezi offers this definition in a recent essay for New York’s The Cut. The essay chronicles the surgeries Emezi underwent to transition, procedures she calls “a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.” Those realities include her identity as a non-binary trans person and as an ogbanje.

  But the definition also applies to Ada, the main character in Emezi’s stunning debut novel Freshwater, released this month. When the story opens, Ada is an infant in southern Nigeria. An unusual child, she’s prone to violent bouts of anger and grief. With “one foot on the other side,” she experiences a fractured self. When Ada goes to America for college, these selves gain power after a traumatic event, and Ada’s life takes a dangerous turn.

  Rooted in Emezi’s realities, Freshwater is part of The Unblinding, a multi-year, multidisciplinary series of self-portraits that also includes Emezi’s paintings and videos.

  In this interview, Emezi talks about Freshwater, her public and private identities, and deciding when to translate culture for readers.

  ***

  The Rumpus: In your artist statement, you write about Freshwater as part of a multidisciplinary series depicting your progression as an ogbanje, “from unawareness to clarity.” How would you describe ogbanje, and why it’s central to your work?

  Akwaeke Emezi: It’s a bit of a difficult term to describe, just because it’s not an English term. Most of the times it gets translated as a spirit that’s born into a human body. But I’ve been finding that people start thinking of it as a binary. They think, Is it really a spirit if it’s in a human body? And they start trying to divide it into two because the description splits it that way. Really, it’s not one or the other. It’s both at the same time. It can’t be split.

  It’s part of Igbo reality. Part of the ontology of the culture where there would be these children who were called “born to die.” They get born, and they die repeatedly. And the point of it is allegedly to torment the mother. It’s central to my work because when I started doing this work, I’d been trying to understand suicidality, and Western lenses that were usually around mental health really weren’t helpful. And the only thing that sticks for me was going back and choosing a different lens, and ogbanje was the one that made a lot more sense than the “mental health” descriptions of what was going on.

  Freshwater is an account of a contemporary ogbanje. The ideas that people have around ogbanje are usually precolonial. A lot of things from our culture, our reality, were colonized, so to speak. And then it became, “Oh, all these things you believe in aren’t actually real.” Because of Christianity, ogbanje are considered superstition or evil. So most accounts of ogbanje are older ones, or carried through stories, but it’s faded very much from how it used to be.

  Rumpus: How long have you been telling stories?

  Emezi: Probably [I began] as soon as I could read and write. I started writing when I was about five. Little books. The principal of my school would give me these blank jotters. I loved playing with stationery as a child. So she would bribe me with them, and say, “If you give me one that’s filled with a story, then you can get another blank one.” And so, I would fill them with stories so I could get a blank one. And she kept those, and I think she gave them to my parents.

  Rumpus: When did you make the decision to formally study, to become a writer?

  Emezi: I had been writing pretty much nonstop. Back in 2013, I was living in Brooklyn and had a couple of other Nigerian artist friends who read my writing. I think I had six blogs running concurrently.

  I was very much in social media. I ran a natural hair blog for eight years. I ran several personal blogs. I ran a blog for queer Nigerians. And then, I had one that was just for my writing. My [artist friends] looked at that one and a couple of them sat me down, and said, “Why aren’t you doing something with this? You should focus on this full time.” At that time, I was working in a nonprofit.

  So, I started applying for grants. I had a Google document that is actually still running today, where I would list all these opportunities I could apply for. And I would go down the list and apply for everything. I applied for MFA programs that year, in the fall of 2013, and in 2014 I got into a fully funded one. So that was when I left my job.

  Rumpus: Were there certain inspirations for Freshwater, other novels or novelists?

  Emezi: Actually, no. I’m writing an essay about that, because that was a problem for me. I looked for them, because it was scary to be writing something that was rooted not just in Igbo traditions but also in my life, and blending the two and also doing it as fiction. It was a very specific thing, and being my first book, it made me incredibly nervous. But no, there weren’t really examples of that.

  The most popular example of an ogbanje in literature is from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which was written how many decades ago? And it’s written as complete fiction, set several decades ago. So it wasn’t really very helpful. I did a lot of research into where I could find examples of ogbanje in literature, and I found a lot of other interesting stuff. Entire textbooks written about the ogbanje in African-American literature. One that talks about Toni Morrison’s Beloved as an ogbanje. All of that was super interesting, but not particularly helpful for what I was doing.

  Rumpus: Some writers talk about worrying about what their families are going to think, or their cultural communities. Did you have any of those concerns?

  Emezi: A little bit. I had a lot more experience antagonizing my family through my writing when I ran my blogs. So I burned through all of that, so to speak. I wrote blog entries that were very upsetting for several family members who did not hesitate to let me know, and I kind of set a precedent at that point for being the troublesome writer who can’t keep her mouth shut. Which is actually a consistent thing since I was a child. The idea that, “Oh, she can’t keep her mouth shut.” So, in a way, I was prepared for that.

  I had interviewed my mom for the novel, and she got to pick the name of her character in the book, so she was quite involved. But still, after I finished writing the book, she called me, and said, “I hope you didn’t write anything that’s going to be embarrassing for the family.” And I said, “I interviewed you. Would you tell me anything that was going to be embarrassing for the family? Maybe you should have thought about that before you told all your marriage secrets to me, knowing I would put it in the book!” And she read it eventually, and I thought she was going to have strong feelings about it, but I think she was honestly just grateful for that amount of insight into me, because it’s not something I would ever have shared with her in person.

  Whenever you write something biographical, everyone in your family doesn’t share the same memory. So your version of the story is not necessarily their version of the story, and part of the flexibility in having it fictionalized is that there’s not really a need to adhere to the strict facts. Because everything is colored by memory, especially when you’re pulling from childhood memories. There’s a little bit of wiggle room. This is my story of these events, as I remember it, as I experienced it.

  But despite having all that precedent, I was still terrified to write it. I was terrified about whether it would be published, or whether it would do well, whether people would want to read it.

  I always thought of it—and it’s hard to say this without sounding like a little special snowflake—but I thought it was a very weird book. I thought, I don’t know who’s going to like this. This is a little odd.

  There’s uncertainty when, again, you’re looking for examples of books that look like this and you can’t really find any. In publishing, they try to describe the book—if you mixed this book with that book, then you’d get this one. No one could do that for my book. Even as we were writing the copy, they said, “We actually don’t have references for this.” So that’s a little scary because as a first-time author, you want to try and predict how well the book is going to do and where it’s going to go, or how it’s going to be received. And when you don’t have references, you can’t predict anything.

  Just in the past year, this ties into a larger life lesson I’ve been learning, which is that you can’t map everything. I’m a control freak and a planner, so I love mapping things. I love that I can control all my outcomes. And this has just kicked my ass. It’s just a massive reminder, even in the best of ways, that you can’t control or map anything, and you should stop trying.

  Rumpus: How does your identity as a non-binary person influence your work?

  Emezi: In the Cut essay, I talked about transitioning, not to non-binary specifically, but perhaps transitioning to an ogbanje, and what that looks like when you mix realities. A lot of times I feel like I’m having to translate my thoughts and my answers into two different languages. On one hand, there are all these classifications that make sense in a human context, like your race, your gender, your sexual orientation. All of these categories. I can say I’m Nigerian, I’m Black, I’m an immigrant, I’m non-binary. And they’re all categorizations that are useful in certain senses, especially in a political sense. But on the other hand, I’m just me. I’m not around my friends and they’re thinking, “Oh, you’re black. Oh, you’re non-binary.” You’re not thinking about that. You’re just existing. And so, when I work, I’m just working. When I write, I’m just writing as myself, and I’m writing from the reality that I know, that is perhaps more inclusive because I occupy so many spaces at once.

  It’s like an insane little Venn diagram of all these labels. And so I suppose that Venn diagram shows in my work. I think I’m just writing from the place that I exist in.

  Rumpus: For you as a writer, is it essential to be part of a community, or do you need to write in solitude?

  Emezi: A little bit of both. Again, it’s the parallel realities that are running in my head where, in some ways, I am very much about solitude. I don’t like writing around people or with people. I can’t even write in cafes because there are too many other people. I always have to write at home with no one else around. It’s very distracting for me. I just prefer being alone. But that’s usually for the first stage of writing. At some point I have to loop in people, because as much as writing might be a solitary act, revising certainly isn’t.

  At that point, I have to loop in friends who can act as readers for me and give me feedback, as I try to get what I’m trying to say to a more accurate place. I’m also very, very grateful for editors. Now, some of my work is skipping readers and just going straight to editors, which is a little more vulnerable for me, because, it means that editors are seeing a rougher version of my work than I would normally let them see. But again, I try to let go of that control thing. It’s all part of the lesson.

  Rumpus: I assume you’ve worked with editors who just don’t have the knowledge of some of the things you’re writing about, where you have to translate for them.

  Emezi: I’ve definitely had that experience. My thinking is, if I’m writing from a culture you have no experience with, you need to defer to me. But as a new writer—because I’ve only been a full-time professional writer for four years now—there’s this fear that everyone else knows what they’re doing more than you do. And there’s this urge to acquiesce to everything, because you are the editor, you’ve been in the industry longer, you know what you’re doing. But one thing I was fortunate to learn very early on was that you’re the only person responsible for your work. You are the advocate for it. It’s your job to protect it. It’s your job to say when it’s accurate or not. No one else’s years of experience can override your knowledge of your work, especially if the point of conflict is something from your culture.

  So, I run into it a lot when I use Nigerian English. Editors will try and correct it because they don’t understand what a certain thing means. For example, in Nigerian English if you’re talking about traditional clothes that people wear, colloquially you just call it traditional. Traditional becomes a noun, not an adjective. And that’s confusing for editors because they say, “Oh, you’re missing a word here. It’s meant to be traditional garb, traditional something.” And I say, “I’m not missing a word. It’s a noun.”

  I try to explain to people that Nigerian English is actually different from pidgin English. A lot of it just looks on the surface like it’s American or British English, but it’s not. So there are words that aren’t spelled any differently, they aren’t pronounced any differently, but they just occupy a different function. And if you’re not versed in that, you wouldn’t know that. So little corrections like that, I think I have to kind of be vigilant about.

  Sometimes I make compromises, but ones that are not necessarily for the benefits of a Western audience. I was once at a book talk with Chinelo Okparanta and Igoni Barrett, and they were talking about using Igbo in their books and translating and this assumption that if you do that, you’re translating for white people. And Chinelo pointed it out, “I’m translating for the millions of other Nigerians who don’t speak Igbo. Or the millions of other Africans who don’t speak Igbo. Why is your assumption that I’m doing it for white people? There are other people in the world who don’t know what this means.”

  So, if I can give a little more context in the writing, then that is valid. And sometimes there’s wiggle room. I don’t mind making little adjustments because, again, it’s a very big world and there are a lot of readers. But I also think writers have the right to opacity, if they so choose. It’s every writer’s choice how much you want to translate, or put in context. I did refuse italics and a glossary though.

  Rumpus: Yes, that’s a form of othering. I feel that when I’m reading a book written about and by an author from a culture that’s not mine, it’s my work as a reader is to keep up. We should all be smart enough to use context clues and not rely on italics or a glossary.

  Have you had to deal with any kind of categorization of your writing that you felt was limited?

  Emezi: It’s the power of realities. There are these categories that I exist in. I’m a writer. I’m Nigerian. I’m African. In my private reality, though, it’s just me. But I would never reject those categorizations because I think what most people push back against is being restricted to one.

  The only one I’ve been concerned about is being locked into a category of, “You’re an LGBT writer.” Because if you’re openly queer or openly trans, people expect you to become an activist, and that’s your thing. That’s what I’m weary about because I consider my existence to be activism enough. I’m alive! And I am choosing to disclose, or I’m choosing to be visible because I’m aware that it has political significance, where other people can say, “You are a Nigerian trans writer, who has a certain level of disability.” I don’t know any other one who occupies that space openly, and that kind of visibility is useful in terms of being able to find precedent for one’s existence in the world.

  And I know because when I first came out, I was online for so long trying to find other people who looked like me. When I first moved to Brooklyn, and I met queer Nigerians, it was huge for me because I didn’t know we existed. Which seems like, in retrospect, surprising, but at the time if you don’t see examples of people who occupy the same identity spaces as you, then how would you know they exist?

  Rumpus: If you weren’t writing, what would you be doing?

  Emezi: I might be working in websites and social media, because that’s what I was doing before I switched to writing. I got a degree from NYU in nonprofit management, and public policy, both of which are things I hated. But I had to get a grad degree because I had been in veterinary school before that and dropped out. My parents were like, you’re getting a graduate degree in something.

  Rumpus: Wait, did you say veterinary school?

  Emezi: That’s a whole other story that involves literally skinning cats and horses. [Laughs] But I graduated from NYU and ended up working in a nonprofit. My work actually had nothing to do with my degree whatsoever. At that point, I’d been on social media for several years. I knew how to run content management systems and basic HTML, but I was too lazy to actually learn how to code. I knew how to run templates, and I knew how to do some back-end stuff, but they had me running the back-end of a website there. So, I would probably end up doing social media management or something.

  Rumpus: What are you working on now? What’s next?

  Emezi: Oh! So many other books. I’m trying to get through a lot of books in advance. I wrote Freshwater in 2014 and 2015, and then in 2016, I was on a scholarship given by the Marland Foundation in London. And so I wrote my second novel in 2016. And then, I wrote the third novel last year. And I have a fourth one that I’m halfway through, that I actually want to finish before February, just because I’m an overachiever and I like the sound of saying that I finished four novels before my first one came out. Like, it sounds nice to me and it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, and also because I’m already halfway through it and I know what’s happening throughout the whole book, so.

  And my theory was, when Freshwater comes out, either it’s going to do not as good as I thought and I’m going to be depressed and I won’t feel like writing. Or, it’s going to do better than I thought, and I’m going to be busy and I’m not going to have time to write. Either way, it really seemed like my writing time was going to be cut down afterwards. And you see so many writers talking about how hard it is to get momentum on their sophomore book. So my theory was, I can just get it done beforehand and just have a shelf of manuscripts. That way I don’t have to worry about it.

  Rumpus: And just send them out!

  Emezi: Yes! Like, preloaded! So, I’ve been slow on it because I didn’t realize was that the business would start before the publication date. I started traveling before the book came out. That kind of threw a wrench in my overachieving plans. But, I’m still going to push through. The book I wrote last year, I wrote it in two months. So, I feel like I can get through half a book in possibly a couple of weeks. The caveat is that all first drafts are trash. I took two months, and I wrote trash, and I am accepting of that. But at least it’s complete trash.

  Rumpus: And now it can be polished.

  Emezi: Exactly. Now we can make something out of it. But you’ve got to finish it first before you do anything. So, I count the finishing always as an accomplishment.

  Rumpus: Do you read your reviews?

  Emezi: I read a lot of my reviews on Goodreads, just because I am always fascinated by how readers tune into books. And writers tell you not to do that, especially not the Goodreads ones, because those are just for readers. And that’s why I read them. Because I feel like when people expect you to be upset about reviews, they aren’t talking about how much ego plays into that. I’m working on dismantling ego in general, so I don’t really mind if someone takes away from the book something I never intended, because that really has nothing to do with me, or the book actually. It has to do with the person. Everyone’s reading it through the filter of their own experiences, and that’s something I have no control over. So, it shouldn’t really matter.

  And I think, also, what’s the alternative? If someone doesn’t like the book, then they should lie about it to spare someone else’s feelings? There’s this thing they say where, once you write the book, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to the readers. And if it belongs to the readers, they’re allowed to feel about it however they feel about it.

  Deesha Philyaw is the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Deesha's writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, dead housekeeping, and Apogee Journal; Essence, Ebony, and Bitch magazines; and various anthologies. She's a Fellow at the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and a Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People. Deesha is a two-time recipient of an Advancing the Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments. More from this author →

  Filed Under: Books, Deesha Philyaw, Rumpus Original

• Tor
  https://www.tor.com/2018/02/12/of-gods-and-men-freshwater-by-akwaeke-emezi/
  Word count: 1210

  QUOTED: "Freshwater is an exploration of gender, spirituality, faith, family, love, trauma, and truth. It is simultaneously an oral history of a young woman’s declining mental state, mind-meltingly gorgeous poetry, a folkloric fable of gods and monsters, and a literary tale of love and loss and life. For a debut novelist, Akwaeke Emezi has successfully pulled off what many longtime writers only dream of doing. It’s an astonishing, haunting, stunning piece of work."

  Of Gods and Men: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
  Alex Brown
  Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

  Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi’s harrowing yet beautiful novel, is the story of Ada, a young woman who believes herself to be inhabited by gods and versions of herself. She is ọgbanje, a concept from Igbo culture that means a child that is both coming and going, a kind of evil spirit that constantly dies and is reborn as a plague of bad luck to a family. But Ada doesn’t die in childhood, instead surviving through blood sacrifice and fracturing into multiple selves. As the years drag on, the psychic and physical stress of sharing a body with so many other beings each with their own contrasting demands, begins to take its toll. As Emezi peels back Ada’s layers, she exposes the culture clash between Indigenous beliefs and Western colonialism.

  Westerners who lack the context for ọgbanje are likely to offer an armchair diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, interpreting Asụghara and Saint Vincent as alternate personalities. And to be honest, that’s how I read Ada’s story at first, until the moment when We, what the ọgbanje call themselves, explain, “Earlier, when we said she went mad, we lied. She has always been sane. It’s just that she was contaminated with us, a godly parasite with many heads, roaring inside the marble room of her mind.” After that I decided to let the narrative take me where it wanted rather than insist upon a specific destination.
  Buy it Now

  Take, for example, cutting. From a viewpoint of Ada experiencing mental health crises, her acts are self-harm. She deliberately causes herself pain by cutting her arms and legs. This behavior is often used as a way of establishing control over the uncontrollable or internally managing pain inflicted by external sources. It’s a coping mechanism to dull intense emotional pain and stress (I say all that only as someone who has known several people who were/are cutters and the things they’ve relayed to me, not from personal experience). Given the terrible things Ada goes through, self-harm isn’t an unexpected reaction. Yet when viewed from Ada’s culture, cutting becomes an act of sacrifice to the gods inhabiting her body: “We had chosen the currency the Ada would pay us with back on the tar of Okigwe Road, in the maw of Añuli’s leg, and she paid it quickly. Once there was blood, we subsided, temporarily sated…we battered against the Ada’s marble mind until she fed us and that thick red offering sounded almost like our mother—slowly, slowly, nwere nwayọ, take it slowly.”

  Is Ada really inhabited by gods or are we witnessing mental illness via an unreliable narrator? Could it be both experiences layered on top of each other like parallel universes? Deciding if Ada’s story is reality or imagination—or if Freshwater itself plays more toward fantasy or fiction—misses the point. The whole book is liminal space upon liminal space, a threshold between the past and the future, truth and lies. The narrative is as non-traditional as it is non-linear; Emezi and Ada are not beholden to Western rules and systems. Even the very narrative structure plays into this. Although the story is about Ada, she only rarely narrates. Most of the chapters are first person POV of the ọgbanje or one of her alters as they endure living in and through Ada. They shift her context and physical body as they grow, learn, and take control. The question of mental illness or gods detracts from the truth of her lived experiences.

  Following the main plot like a shadow is a contemplation of spirituality. Although the god represented, Yshwa, is a major player in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, Freshwater is more interested in exploring spirituality than religion, particularly the intersection of the philosophies underlying Christianity and Odinani. Ada’s relationship with Yshwa mirrors in many ways her relationships with the other occupants of the marble room in her mind. But Yshwa doesn’t lay dormant while the other alters take control. He comes and goes as he sees fit, bringing words of wisdom and a frustrating refusal to offer Ada a helping hand. He is a god, a blend of West Africa and the West. Yshwa is less opaque than We, but also less fickle than Asụghara and Saint Vincent.

  Ada calls to Yshwa like a good Christian, prays and worships and honors his words. Yet he doesn’t respond like the Western interpretation of Jesus would, with a calling or vision or a plan. This Yshwa is immutable to prayer, for “he loves [humans] as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering.” He changes faces as frequently as a snake sheds its skin and knows the agonizing pain of being human. Perhaps that’s part of Ada’s attraction to him? That he has already been through what she’s still trapped in the middle of. That he is strong enough to resist in ways neither she nor the occupants of her mental marble room are.

  At 226 pages, I should’ve been able to breeze through Freshwater in an afternoon, two if I was feeling lazy. Instead, it took me nearly a week of consuming it in small portions. Racing through it felt disrespectful—To the gods? To Emezi? To literature itself?—for Freshwater is the kind of novel that deserves, no, demands immersion and focus. Every sentence left me reeling, every paragraph on the edge of my seat, and every chapter begging for more. I could’ve spent hundreds of pages more in Emezi’s lush creation.

  Freshwater is an exploration of gender, spirituality, faith, family, love, trauma, and truth. It is simultaneously an oral history of a young woman’s declining mental state, mind-meltingly gorgeous poetry, a folkloric fable of gods and monsters, and a literary tale of love and loss and life. For a debut novelist, Akwaeke Emezi has successfully pulled off what many longtime writers only dream of doing. It’s an astonishing, haunting, stunning piece of work. I hate how good it is and I love that I had the opportunity to read it.

  Freshwater is available from Grove Atlantic.

  Alex Brown is a YA librarian by day, local historian by night, pop culture critic/reviewer by passion, and QWoC all the time. Keep up with her every move on Twitter, check out her endless barrage of cute rat pics on Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on Tumblr.

• Bomb
  https://bombmagazine.org/articles/akwaeke-emezi/
  Word count: 2234

  QUOTED: "For some people this book is work. From the first page, I think it is very clear what kind of book this is going to be and this will turn some readers off. People filter understanding through their own reality. Quite honestly, it’s a book that is easier for people of color to understand because of their histories and different understandings of realities and the diasporic cultures that have relationships with spirituality. Maybe that is an unfair generalization to make."
  "I wrote Freshwater my first year in the MFA when I had moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York, which is super isolated. But because I have been journaling and documenting stuff since I was a child, I was able to just pull from my journals as archives for the book. I’ve written two other books since then. I tell the story the way the story wants to be told. I do what feels right for the story and coincidentally it works out craft-wise."

  Inhabiting Realities: An Interview with Novelist Akwaeke Emezi by Sasha Bonét

  The Freshwater author on the ogbanje, Igbo, rejecting gender binaries, and using private journals as creative archives.

  Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
  Mar 16, 2018

  Interview
  Literature

  Njideka Akunyili Crosby by Erica Ando
  Njideka Akunyili Crosby 01 Bomb 137
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  The cover of Akwaeke Emezi’s debut autobiographical novel, Freshwater (Grove Atlantic) features an illustration by ruby amanze of a two-headed snake. A creature of both scientific reality and the underworld, the serpent has been known through centuries-old mythology as an immortal creature that sheds to form new skin, reproducing itself, with the simultaneous ability to eat its own tail. The Ada, Freshwater’s protagonist, delineates from this slippery shape-shifting multiplicity. She is a plural individual or perhaps she is a singular collective, whose body is being occupied by an ogbanje spirit, an immortal “malevolent trickster” trapped inside the Ada that can destroy itself “only to come back in the human mother’s next child and do it all over again.” We follow the many selves through this network from the womb in Nigeria to adulthood in America. Each of these selves is complex, each of them true, all serving to ensure the protection of the Ada. The book is dedicated to those with one foot on the other side. Though one might not take it as a personal address, since we put much effort into creating labels that encourage the specificity of our singularity, by the last page you may find yourself cracked open on Emezi’s marble floor in mourning of the repressed selves that lie dormant within you.

  Sasha BonétMost humans navigate the world carrying and employing their many selves, and this book helps illuminate that experience. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando character, who was many things and genders, each of them true. We are all plural.

  Akwaeke Emezi For some people this book is work. From the first page, I think it is very clear what kind of book this is going to be and this will turn some readers off. People filter understanding through their own reality. Quite honestly, it’s a book that is easier for people of color to understand because of their histories and different understandings of realities and the diasporic cultures that have relationships with spirituality. Maybe that is an unfair generalization to make.

  SB Toni Morrison said this about her work too, that she represents how characters and things function in the black cosmology, and how she never asked Tolstoy to write about her, a little black girl from Ohio. When I read the first page of Freshwater I thought okay, this is getting really real really fast.

  AE I’ve been stalking my Goodreads reviews to see what people are thinking. (Laughter) The range of people’s experiences with the book is so wide. Some people abandoned it and some called it blasphemy. (Laughter)

  SB You sprinkled a bit of Igbo in the chapter titles that you chose not to translate. Other Igbo writers like Chinelo Okparanta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are known to fold the Igbo between English and readers can contextualize. I’m sure this was deliberate, no?

  AE Tope Folarin’s essay “Against Accessibility,” published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, challenges the idea that Africa always has to be super accessible to the west, a criterion that is not applied to white artists and writers. They don’t have to make things accessible and people don’t mind. I felt like translating some things and not other things. The epigraphs enhance the meaning of the text but you can still understand the book. It’s a bit of a nod to the fact that there are some things that should be a little closed and you can earn access by being resourceful and finding information.

  SB I first encountered ogbanje in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which was published over fifty years ago. I understood ogbanje to be an evil spirit but I didn’t feel this way in reading Freshwater. It seemed that the spirit was merely in conflict with the flesh in search of a way of being that could move in unison.

  AE This was a part of our indigenous belief system in Nigeria, and because we were colonized, we were taught not to talk about it. Christian missionaries declared everything that is a part of our traditional beliefs as evil and stigmatized.
  Akwaekeemezi Freshwater

  SB You published a deeply personal essay in The Cut where you spoke candidly about ogbanje, your hysterectomy, and your relationship to gender as a trans nonbinary person. Many Nigerian-based Twitter personalities objected to it. How do you interpret this response?

  AE Nigerians are transphobic for the most part. My work is about inhabiting realities that people don’t consider real or valid. People are going to push back against that in all kinds of ways. They consider their reality the center and anything else that deviates from that is a threat and so they will react in hostile ways to realities that are other than their own.

  SB Which is interesting because Igbo is a gender-neutral language which suggests that the ancestors had a broader idea of gender than we do now and that the concept of gender binaries is only newly constructed.

  AE Welcome to the dissonance that white people brought. (Laughter)

  SB Since Freshwater is an autobiographical novel, would you say you’ve been constructing this story subconsciously your entire life?

  AE I’ve been writing since I was five years old. In 2014 I left my job and went to an MFA program for a little bit and then left that, but it was my pivot into writing full-time. I wrote Freshwater my first year in the MFA when I had moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York, which is super isolated. But because I have been journaling and documenting stuff since I was a child, I was able to just pull from my journals as archives for the book. I’ve written two other books since then. I tell the story the way the story wants to be told. I do what feels right for the story and coincidentally it works out craft-wise. I feel like I risk sounding like a bit of an asshole because craft is very useful, but craft comes in for me while editing. The technical elements of it are horrible for me to introduce during the writing. I can’t write like that. That’s not creative.

  SB How did your family feel about being featured so prominently in the book? Your sister, who was captured alongside you in Vogue by Annie Leibowitz, is quite a successful photographer and she’s easily identifiable in Freshwater.

  AE I don’t think they care. I was blogging for many years before I wrote the book and they are quite used to that. It’s by far not the worst thing I’ve ever written about them and then shared with a bunch of strangers. I don’t know for sure. No one has said anything to me. It’s possible that they are having reactions and not telling me, which I am totally fine with. You made that decision for a reason, I trust your judgment.

  SB You mentioned that you are writing about the ogbanje experience from the post-colonial perspective, insinuating that there is a separation between historical traditions and how you experience these traditions in a contemporary context. As a young Nigerian writer, how did you tap into your authority to document your difference?

  AE I wouldn’t even say that there is a separation. I just think that you speak to what you know. I wasn’t there fity years ago, so I can’t speak to the traditions from that experience and a lot of people who try to police opinions on it weren’t there either. No one is an authority on anything. Because my work is about ogbanje, people act like I know everything that ever existed across the entire spectrum of time. I know my experience and so I speak for only my experience. I am not qualified to comment on a history that I wasn’t present for. The concept gets flattened when it’s not acknowledged as real. When asking someone about blackness and they separate the Blackness of the past from the Blackness of today. It’s too big a thing. I’m not an expert on Blackness. No one can speak on something that broad. There is a lot of complexity and I think that instead of searching for an objective authority, just realize that all we got is individual stories.

  SB Some find security in romanticizing what was and don’t want to make room for the ways that people are experiencing things now.

  AE Yes. And again I’d ask, how do you know what was? You’re basing this on stories. There is no textbook authority on ogbanje that anyone can rely on. This is my story.

  SB You were in the Jay-Z video for “4:44” directed by Arthur Jafa, and you are also producing your own visual work.

  AE It’s another way to tell stories. Just a different language. I have more flexibility in experimental video art.

  SB I had a similar feeling while reading your book as I did when engaging with your video art. You’re extracting something from yourself and employing words and spirituality and visuals to articulate something slippery. You use blood, and feathers and snakes and masks. This all feels like poetry. Every character feels like a fragment and then on the last page it all comes together. These fragments collectively create a wholeness that left me satiated even though the book concludes with no resolve.

  AE If you ask someone to make art about their life, they can do it indefinitely. I’m just using all the different mediums as containers. I’ve written an entire book about it and I’m still not done. I’ve made videos and I’m not done. After I wrote the essay for The Cut, I felt exhausted and bored with writing about it. I quit things I don’t like. People say this is failure, you shouldn’t quit. But I’m going to do something more awesome, so I’m not sure how I lose in any of this. (Laughter) Staying there would have been a failure, so it looks to me like a win. I am working on more videos about disembodiment and it helps. Even talking about it is a different form that is useful and can be more interactive.

  SB James Agee wrote a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and he goes to the cotton fields of Alabama and attempts to write about the brutality of their labor, their essence, their daily lives of suffering and malnourishment. He said that he wished he could collect fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth and blood and add this to the book, and even then it would still be a failure, that all the art is a failure because it can never accurately depict the human condition of suffering. Do you feel this in your attempts to articulate disembodiment?

  AE Not at all. I don’t feel failure. It’s not a feeling I engage with. Each attempt does exactly what I want it to do. It’s incomplete, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure. Each container is holding exactly as much as it can hold. The challenge is to find new containers.

  Sasha Bonét is a writer and visual storyteller living in New York City. She is currently at work on an essay collection about Black Womanhood.

  novels gender identity african literature mythology lgbt writing process igbo nigerian culture

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• Mythos
  https://mythosmag.com/interviewhome/39-akwaeke-emezi
  Word count: 3248

  Mythos Magazine
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  39: Akwaeke Emezi
  writer and video artist
  photos by Elena Mudd

  photos by Elena Mudd
  Akwaeke Emezi talks mutilation and gender-based violence, limitations of the queer community, pronouns, and girlhood as a genderless space.
  Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and artist based in liminal spaces. Born and raised in Nigeria, she received her MPA from New York University and was awarded a 2015 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. She won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including Granta. Freshwater is her debut novel.
  Elena Mudd is a Brooklyn-based photographer who explores the relationship between individual and social identity from a feminist (or humanistic) perspective. The intimate portrait, conceived as collaborative process with her subject, is her specialty. Her subjects range from family members to strangers she meets on the street. She works with film media, both 35mm and medium format, and with digital.
  This interview was conducted by Sophia Richards on February 14, 2018. Elena Mudd photographed Akwaeke in her Brooklyn apartment.

  SOPHIA: Tell me about your experience of girlhood, in whatever way you feel is appropriate.

  AKWAEKE: My sister and I always describe our childhood as very fairytale-like, which is completely inaccurate.

  SOPHIA: [laughs]

  AKWAEKE: We read a lot of Enid Blyton books. We read a lot of books about fairies and pixies and brownies and we generally believed in them. There’s an Enid Blyton series called The Faraway Tree about a tree that these kids have; a new land appears at the top periodically, so they get to climb up and visit it. My sister and I had a tree in our backyard, and we would imagine that it was The Faraway Tree and there were magical lands at the top. We had a whole world constructed around Barbie dolls, called Barbie Land. [laughs] It was a very elaborate world. It had a heaven. It had a hell. It had a purgatory.

  [both laugh]

  AKWAEKE: The Fairy Godmother had a daughter with thigh-high boots, who would kick you out [of heaven]. That was her sole purpose. [laughs] So it goes like, really in depth.

  With the publication of Freshwater, I’ve been talking a lot about alternate realities, and I completely forgot about this aspect. That's why I'm really good at doing this! It's because I spent an entire childhood living in these worlds. We grew up in Nigeria in a town called Aba in the 90s. Nigeria was still under a military dictatorship; we didn't transition into democracy until '99, when I was twelve. I wrote about it in a piece called “Sometimes the Fire Is Not Fire.” It talks about a childhood in which we're living in this bubble that our parents are keeping us in very deliberately. On the outside, the mosque in our town is getting burned down. There's a statewide curfew. There are riots. My sister was in a terrible accident. I was molested. But because of these worlds that were created, my sister and I can look back on our childhoods, and say, “It was a fairytale.”

  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-1955.jpg
  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-1962.jpg

  “In girlhood, there’s a certain kind of neutrality that you’re allowed. Once you hit puberty, you lose that neutrality.”

  SOPHIA: In your recent piece for New York Magazine's The Cut, "Transition," you call the gender that you were raised with “inaccurate,” and explain that you retrospectively understood it through the lens of dysphoria. Can you talk about that?

  AKWAEKE: A lot of it was just people believing, “You're a girl and you're supposed to wear these horrible little dresses,” that were just like...tulle and netting and itchy! They're all so itchy! [laughs] One thing I liked was that at least when I was at home, my sister and I just wore shorts and t-shirts. Now I don't hate dresses because they're functional and they're one piece and I'm lazy.

  [both laugh]

  AKWAEKE: I had really long hair growing up, and it got cut when I was ten and went to secondary school. That was upsetting because I really liked my hair, but once it was cut, people often mistook me for a boy. The recognition that I wasn’t a girl was a relief. We had a sports club that we would go swimming at every weekend, and women would stop me in changing rooms and ask me why I was wearing a girl's swimsuit simply because I had short hair. And it's not like short hair was an unusual thing. But I never minded, because they could tell I wasn’t a girl. So getting my hair cut was an interesting point of relief where the girlhood that I've been forced into kind of lifted off a bit.

  SOPHIA: Did that affect the way that you moved through the world?

  AKWAEKE: I did feel freer for a very short window of time. When I was a kid, I didn't like the things that girl-ness attached me to. But after puberty, I didn't mind it as much, because I realized that in girlhood, there’s a certain kind of neutrality that you're allowed. Once you hit puberty, you lose that neutrality. So it's weird, because I don't mind being referred to as a girl now. Or as a Black girl. I feel like “girl” means something very different than “woman."

  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-2029.jpg

  SOPHIA: Can you talk about that? And about going by both “she” and “they” despite not identifying as a woman?

  AKWAEKE: It's not so much about the pronouns. The reason why I'm flexible with them is because I don't think they matter. I could put “he” there and it wouldn't matter for me, either. I do like “they” because a lot of Freshwater is about being a plural individual. “They” is a pronoun that has that flexibility to be plural and singular. But I've been “she” for my whole life.

  It also depends on the context. If someone were writing an article about me and called me a Black girl, I would ask, “What do you mean by that?” Because that's their way of saying that I'm a Black woman [and staking my position in that conversation]. So it's not just a thing that people can use freely.

  So much about my gender hinges on the ability or lack thereof to reproduce. So for me, girlhood is a time when that ability is not there, because you haven't hit puberty. In the sense that girlhood is this pre-woman state, “girl” is actually gender neutral. It's ambiguous in a medical sense, because you have girls who hit puberty super early and are still girls. But for me, the texture of girlhood that I'm familiar with is pre-pubescent. That neutrality is what makes me comfortable with [the term “girl”] now.

  There are also forms of expression like “Girl, yes!” Or “Sis!” Or “Bruh!” And these have all become gender neutral. People can use any of those terms when they speak to me, and I understand that they’re not misgendering me.

  SOPHIA: When you first moved to Brooklyn, you wrote that you fell into a vibrant queer scene that showed you more ways to be than you’d ever known. Can you talk about what that was like, some of the things you witnessed, and how it changed the way you understood yourself?

  AKWAEKE: Yeah. I got to see all these other ways that people were presenting, and was exposed to a wider range of how you could dress and move through the world. But people always think of these spaces as free, and that’s not true. Even within the queer community, people are still very married to categories and boxes —specifically a lack of horizontal mobility between them.

  In my case, I used to dress very femme. When I was seventeen moved to the United States, people had to teach me how I was supposed to be a woman. I had no idea, because I had never really had to be one. Growing up in Nigeria, other than having to go to church, I really wasn't forced to dress any particular way. If I wasn't dressing up for church, I was walking around in my dad's button-up shirts from the '70s and cargo pants. My gender expression got policed a lot more once I came to the States —primarily by Black women who cared a lot for me, and who had embraced me as part of the community. But they were like, “You little bear! You don't know how to dress! Your fashion is terrible!”

  [both laugh]

  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-1979.jpg
  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-1984.jpg

  AKWAEKE: So they made me over. It wasn't until I came to Brooklyn and saw a wider range of gender expression that I was like, “Oh, I don't have to dress like this. What do I actually want to dress like?” And I kept going back to how I dressed when I was a child. I just want t-shirts and shorts. The funny thing was that once I started dressing like that, people started seeing me differently. Like, "Oh, so you're a stud. You're masculine of center. You're the aggressive one in any romantic situation.” And I was so confused because I am none of those things! [laughs] I was like, “No, I just dress like a boy. But I'm very girly?” So it was weird to have to fit my experience into the language of the queer community. At the time I was binding because I hadn't had my top surgery, and I kept talking about how much I looked forward to having surgery so I could start wearing dresses. And everyone was extra confused about it, because they were like, “Wait, most people have surgery to get a smaller chest so they can wear boy’s clothes.” But I was like, “No, I want to do that so I can switch between [gender-expressions] more comfortably.” It's been a really weird thing because people meet me in different places, in different contexts, in different seasons! So people who meet me in the summer think that I'm super femme!

  SOPHIA: [laughs]

  AKWAEKE: I'm wearing things with deep v-necks and just as little clothing as possible. Then people who meet me in the fall or the winter are meeting me when I'm wearing buttoned up men's shirts. But what's comfortable to wear when it's cold are men's shirts and long pants and boots. So depending on when they meet me, they have these very interesting perceptions of who I am. People have been so completely wrong guessing things about me based on my clothes. And then they get really weird when I switch into something else. They're like, “What's up? Why do you have long nails now?” And I'm like, “Because I figured out how to stop them from breaking…"

  [both laugh]

  AKWAEKE: I feel like they make my hands look longer, and I feel more graceful with them. But friends who met me when I hadn't figured out how to stop my nails from breaking, they're like “You're becoming more femme!” And I'm like, “I’m not doing anything!”

  [both laugh]

  AKWAEKE: Entering into the queer community was my first discovery of other ways of being, but even within that space, there are all these restrictions that felt uncomfortable for me at some points.

  “‘I’m in this relationship with a cishet man who wears nail polish. Omg we’re so queer.’”

  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-2035.jpg

  SOPHIA: Do you know Cathy Park Hong's essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde”?

  AKWAEKE: No.

  SOPHIA: She basically criticizes avant-garde poetics' trajectory towards some kind of non-identity, calling it the “luxurious opinion that anyone can be ‘post-identity’ and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.”

  But after reading your work which focuses on the plurality and slipperiness of metaphysical identity, what you’ve called “the kind of work you’d think only white writers get to make,” I feel like you might argue against that. Like, “I can be post-identity, too.” Or that you can kind of transcend that by prioritizing multiplicity.

  AKWAEKE: I don't think so. I think I kind of agree with her. I think it's about points of privilege. For me, it's layered. There's an outer layer of how I present to the world. It's not a flexible layer. In that layer, I am Black. In that layer, I am Nigerian. In that layer, I am trans. And these things affect my life. I don't get to drop those identities or shift around them because it doesn't matter. I could be like “I'm not Black,” and it means nothing, because everyone's still going to treat me like I am. So there isn't that flexibility in the outer layer.

  But for me, the internal layer is completely separate from the outer one. And that’s why it’s difficult when you’re asked questions like, “Do you consider yourself an African writer.” You’re put into a box, and people rightfully don’t want to be restricted to that box. But then you also have people who are African and who are writers who don’t consider themselves African writers. I understand why people try to move away from labels, and how people choose to deal with them is a personal decision.

  But there are people who have the privilege to play with their outer layer, and usually they are people who occupy a more privileged point of view. So you have like, heterosexual cisgendered people who are like, “I'm ‘queering’ this.” And that's where it's problematic, because you can go and play in that, and be like, “I'm in this relationship with a cishet man who wears nail polish. Omg we're so queer.” You're slumming it for a little bit in a marginalized space, but you still get to go back.

  It's a complicated thing to think on, because you never know if someone is being genuine. You can't tell someone's gender at all from looking at them. So it's hard to comment on it because you don't want to sound like you're policing someone's gender, but it's also disingenuous to act like there aren't people who take advantage of that uncertainty to get access to marginalized spaces, and resources which should go to marginalized people. I understand myself within the labels the world has fixed on me, but I also understand myself as separate from them.

  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-1945.jpg

  “Ok, I’m abnormal. And then what? What happens now? What if I’m a mutilated thing? Fine. I’m ok with that.”

  SOPHIA: People have had really strong reactions to Freshwater, where they haven’t anticipated its sort of…visceral severity, and find it to be very traumatic or violent. And you’ve responded to that, very emphatically, that situations of sexual assault, violence, or mutilation are not the primary site of trauma; the primary site of trauma is being embodied in the first place.

  In “Transition,” you wrote that you've come to think of mutilation as a shift from “wrongness to alignment.” By saying this, it seems very easy to be accused of collapsing the distinction between mutilation and gender-based violence in a dangerous way. I was wondering if you could talk about those things in conjunction, and what they mean to you.

  AKWAEKE: People have really strong reactions to me talking about mutilation. It was a surprise to me. I did get that reaction specifically around gender-based violence. Someone brought up FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), and women tortured in conflict. And I was like, “That's not what I'm talking about. That's a different category.”

  When people react like that, it seems like they’re really saying, “You don't have the right to reclaim the word ‘mutilation’ because people are being mutilated.” As a trans person, I am completely aware of the history between the word “mutilation” and gender confirmation surgeries. I’ve heard the hate in people’s voices when they yell that the thing I did to my body to save my life is mutilation. I don't really feel like anyone's qualified to say that you can't reclaim that word.

  It's a thing that happens with language over history. People use to slurs that are meant to hurt you, reject your normalcy, and declare that there's something wrong with you. What you're doing is unnatural. Like with “queer” or the N-word, some people have chosen to say, “What I am doing is natural.” But there’s different kinds of realities, right? In one reality you know you’re normal, you’re baseline, you’re ok. However, you still have the outside world, which does consider you deviant and will treat you as deviant and you will face the consequences of being deviant. So in that sense, you can be deviant and not deviant at the exact same time!

  For me, it's the same thing with mutilation. People will try to get caught up in the dictionary definition of the word, and I'm like, “No, do you understand what being trans means? Do you understand how people view gender-confirmation surgeries? Do you understand that there are still millions of people who see this as mutilation, and who will approach me and treat me like I've mutilated my body?” So why not lean into that wrongness? Ok, I'm abnormal. And then what? What happens now? What if I'm a mutilated thing? Fine. I'm ok with that.

  With the issue of applying this to violence against women…most of the time, people are not thinking of trans women when they invoke that category, when trans women are the women who receive the most violence for being women. Especially if you are a Black trans woman! Three of them have been killed this year alone! So that is gender-based violence. [View and support Unerased, Mic's database of transgender homicides from 2010 on.] So these borders that people are trying to impose on language and gender categories are way more porous than we allow them to be, I think.

  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-2005.jpg
  mythos-akwaekeemezie-elenamudd-2000.jpg

  SOPHIA: What do you believe that women need or can do for each other presently?

  AKWAEKE: I am very wary of prescriptive talk.

  [both laugh]

  AKWAEKE: Off the top of my head, protect Black trans women.

  If you enjoyed this interview and think the work we do is important, please consider donating to Mythos, and most importantly, share the magazine with the women in your life. That’s why we do what we do, and it’s 100% free.

• American Booksellers Association
  http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-akwaeke-emezi-103432
  Word count: 910

  An Indies Introduce Q&A With Akwaeke Emezi
  Posted on Wednesday, Feb 28, 2018
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  Freshwater by Akwaeke EmeziAkwaeke Emezi is the author of Freshwater (Grove Press), an Indies Introduce Winter/Spring 2018 selection and a February 2018 Indie Next List pick.

  “In Nigeria, it’s believed that spirits can be trapped in the body of a single person at birth, here in the flesh but ‘streaming’ out and into the ‘other’ world. Such is the reality of Ada, born of flesh-and-blood parents, yet displaying chaotic behavior even as a baby,” said Linda Bond of Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane, Washington, who served on the panel that selected Emezi’s novel for the Indies Introduce program. “This is a disturbing debut from the mind of a bright star in the firmament of writers. Read this and have your mind reshaped. You’ll never forget Ada and her story.”

  Emezi, who grew up in Nigeria, is a video artist as well as a writer, and holds a master’s in public administration degree from New York University. Her experimental short film UDUDEAGU won the Audience Award for Best Short Experimental at the 2014 BlackStar Film Festival, and her video art in her project The Unblinding earned her a Global Arts Fund grant in 2017. Her writing has appeared in Granta, on Vogue.com, and in The Fader’s “Best Culture Writing of 2015,” among other publications.

  Here, Emezi and Bond discuss the author’s debut.

  Linda Bond: You chose a unique topic on which to center Freshwater. In your acknowledgements, you mention a friend — Enuma Okoro — who encouraged you by saying, “Oh, you have to write the spiritual book first!” In addition to providing a great story, did you have a particular reason for choosing this topic to write about in your debut?
  Akwaeke Emezi, author of Freshwater
  Photo by Elizabeth Wirija

  Akwaeke Emezi: Enuma and I met at the 2014 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Brown University, and in one of the opening speeches, someone — I can’t quite recall who — said, “You only get one first book, one first impression.” I had other stories I could’ve written for my first book, but they were all the safe options. Freshwater was terrifying and I deal with fear by running toward it, so I knew if I was going to make a first impression, it wouldn’t be by running away and playing safe.

  LB: Although this is a novel, there are indications that the content is partially autobiographical, or at least drawn from your own knowledge of Nigerian spirituality. Have you thought about what some people may think about you as a result of this book?

  AE: I honestly hadn’t considered it seriously before now. What people think is an aspect of their own reality; there’s no need for me to internalize it and bring it into mine.

  LB: Over the last half century in the West, there has been a growing interest in the religions and spiritual belief systems of other cultures. Do you see Freshwater as something to be included in that body of metaphysical work?

  AE: I’m not sure. I could see it being categorized as that, but there’s also this pattern of work by African or Black writers being considered representative of the entire culture, a responsibility that white writers don’t experience in the same way. I’m also learning that once a book is released into the world, people will place it as they like, often regardless of what you as the author say, and that’s something I’m accepting as beyond my control.

  LB: There are many ways Freshwater could be interpreted. Do you have any comments about this potentially wide range of responses to your work?

  AE: I think it represents a variety of lenses that come with multiple realities inhabited by multiple readers. Everyone has their own center, you know? I’ve made a point of unequivocally stating that Freshwater is a story centered in Igbo reality, but not every reader can or wants to step away from their center and accept the center of the story. What’s that thing they say? Once a book is out, it belongs to the readers, not the author? Something like that.

  LB: Will you follow your debut with additional books on this topic, or have you chosen a different road for your next project?

  AE: Ah, no. My literary projects after Freshwater are fiction, but I get to veer away from the autobiographical, which is a welcome relief. I do more work around being an ogbanje in my video art, though. My first YA novel, Pet, is coming out next year from Make Me a World, Christopher Myers’ imprint in partnership with Knopf Books for Young Readers, and that has speculative elements that I’m quite excited about.

  Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (Grove Press, 9780802127358, Hardcover Fiction, $24) On Sale Date: 2/13/2017.

  Find out more about the author at akwaeke.com.

  ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.

• Vox
  https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/13/17087206/freshwater-akwaeke-emezi-review
  Word count: 775

  Freshwater is an electric debut novel from a major new talent
  Akwaeke Emezi’s first book is steeped in Igbo cosmology.
  By Constance Grady@constancegrady Mar 13, 2018, 10:10am EDT
  Share
  Grove Press

  Reading Freshwater, the extraordinary debut novel from Akwaeke Emezi, feels like watching the beginning of something big: The book is so shivery, so electric, that the first coherent thought you can put together as you read is that you’re watching a major new talent beginning to carve out a space for herself.

  Rating

  Steeped in Igbo cosmology, Freshwater tells the story of Ada, a young girl who is ogbanje: She houses a spirit in her body, and she was born only to torture her mother by dying. But Ada does not die. She grows up and goes away to college in the US, and over time the ogbanje in her mind — an incoherent cloud of malevolent glee that refers to itself as we and narrates much of the novel — becomes stronger and stronger. It drives Ada to act out against those around her, to scream in uncontrollable rages, to cut herself: “First duty, feed your gods,” it instructs her. “If they live (like we do) inside your body, find a way, get creative, show them the red of your faith, of your flesh; quiet the voices with the lullaby of the altar. It’s not as if you can escape us — where would you run to?”

  Eventually, after Ada is sexually assaulted by her boyfriend, parts of the ogbanje split off into their own personalities. Ada names the dominant one Asụghara. She is female and feeds off sex and rage, and she considers Ada “mine: mine to move and take and save.” The other personality is male, and “gentle and soft as a ghost.” Ada names him St. Vincent and only rarely takes him out walking.

  Emezi has written at the Cut about her gender dysphoria and how she experiences herself as ogbanje. Her surgeries — breast reduction and a hysterectomy — are, she writes, “a bridge across realities, a movement from being assigned female to assigning myself as ogbanje; a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.” For Ada, the ogbanje manifest not only as gender dysphoria — although Ada, too, gets a breast reduction at the ogbanje’s insistence — but as suicidal ideation. Ogbanje are born to die, and Asụghara in particular wants Ada to die with her.

  But Freshwater, ultimately, is not a book about giving in to one’s demons, but about living with them. It’s about finding a home within liminal spaces — between genders, between life and death, between god and human — and finding a way to play within them.

  And Emezi’s voice is enormously playful, playing with the rhythms of sentences and the conflicting and contrasting voices in Ada’s head. Most striking of all is the “we” voice of the ogbanje, which skitters frenetically across the page, all id and godlike grandeur: It’s just alien enough to sound like a foreign presence in a human being’s head, but human enough that its resonances linger.

  Beyond all her verbal pyrotechnics, Emezi’s ability to literalize the experience of a fragmented identity is astonishing: It’s affecting without venturing into pathos, and hopeful without becoming saccharine. And she’s just getting started. One of the most exciting things about this book is imagining what Emezi will bring us next.
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• The Star
  https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2018/02/23/akwaeke-emezis-debut-novel-freshwater-stunning-disorienting.html
  Word count: 1112

  QUOTED: "Emezi has not only made a rich contribution to Igbo mythology, she has crafted a novel so unique and fresh, it feels as if the medium has been reinvented."

  Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater ‘stunning, disorienting’

  Radical, innovative narrative tells powerful story of a broken woman through myth
  Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, Grove Press, 240 pages, $34.95.
  Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, Grove Press, 240 pages, $34.95. (Grove Press)
  By Safa JinjeSpecial to the Star
  Fri., Feb. 23, 2018

  Freshwater - Akwaeke Emezi

  Akwaeke Emezi is a name you will want to remember, because surely it is one you will be hearing again and again.

  Her debut novel, Freshwater is a stunning and disorienting story about a broken woman trying to overcome the pain of her human life while straddling “the other side.” It interweaves Igbo religious myth with a story of overcoming mental illness — floating between the corporeal and metaphysical. Ada, the main character, is a bridge between life and death, embodied by ogbanje — evil spirits that are blamed for the havoc in human life.

  Emizi, a young Nigerian author, won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa for her story “Who is Like God.” She also worked with the editor and acclaimed author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos. The experience has clearly helped her to carve out a unique voice that won’t easily be forgotten

  When Ada’s father prays for a daughter, his plea is not only answered, he and his wife get much more than they bargained for. “Humans often pray and forget what their mouths can do, forget that every ear is listening, that when you direct your longing to the gods, they can take that personally,” the ogbanje tell us. And so Ada is born a disturbed and inconsolable child and grows into an extremely troubled woman. Yet she can’t help herself. From the onset, we are told Ada is the true child of the python, Ala, the highest god in the Igbo pantheon, whose womb holds the underworld. It is Ala who answers Ada’s father’s prayer even though she isn’t the Christian God he knelt to.

  Next, Ada’s relationship with her human mother, Saachi, becomes strained — the ogbanje create a wedge between mother and daughter, preying on Saachi’s weakness, depression and anxiety, until she reaches a breaking point and leaves her family to work in Saudi Arabia. “. . . this is how you break a child,” the ogbanje rejoice. “. . . Step one, take the mother away.”

  Ada is pushed to the brink as the ogbanje spur a destructive streak of self-harm and cutting. These spirits consider themselves to be gods, therefore they cannot deign to care about the physical limitations of Ada’s skin and bones. “The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin,” the ogbanje say.

  The introspective novel truly takes shape when the ogbanje, a collective “we,” are overwhelmed by one amongst them, Asughara. This “beastself” emerges to the forefront to protect Ada when she becomes a victim of sexual violence. Asughara is single-mindedly hedonistic and cavalier, wearing Ada’s skin as if it’s patent leather as she steers her towards devastation: “the whole point of my existence was to run wild and tear whoever fell into my mouth into pieces.”

  Asughara, like the other ogbanje, doesn’t worry about consequences or remorse — those human frailties are Ada’s alone. Yet, those frailties are often pushed to the margins of the novel, Ada’s voice being the one that’s drowned out by the ogbanje who share and occasionally control her body. As a result, we might expect these concerns not to weigh too heavily. But that’s not the case — she is so lonely that she outwardly spirals. “Without us you’re nothing . . . We’re the buffer between you and madness, we’re not the madness,” Asughara tells Ada.
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  The ogbanje are ruthless, yet they repeatedly remind readers that, while they may be ruthless, humans are the ones actually inflicting pain and they are merely protecting Ada. It isn’t until the very end that we truly understand the weight of these words and how much the ogbanje manipulate Ada’s mind to protect her from sexual abuses she suffers at the hands of boys and men.

  Freshwater is unlike any novel I have ever read. Its shape-shifting perspective is radical and innovative, twisting the narrative voices like the bones of a python. While these voices slither smoothly across the page, the story can feel jerky at times. The complex world within Ada requires a lot of explanation, and the story languishes during these protracted moments, especially when the drama outside Ada is rushed. But perhaps this is intentional: if Ada is fading away from her own life, then we are seeing firsthand how it floats past her. “It was an unusual incarnation, to be a child of Ala as well as an ogbanje, to be mothered by the god who owns life yet pulled toward death.”

  Freshwater is an unusual story. Emezi has not only made a rich contribution to Igbo mythology, she has crafted a novel so unique and fresh, it feels as if the medium has been reinvented.

  Safa Jinje is a writer and editor living in Toronto. You can follow her on Twitter: @SafaJinje

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