The spirits observe her pain with a mixture of She breaks mirrors and maims her arms with Self-destruction: unprotected sex, binge drinking, relationships with

Spurred on by godlike voices, Ada, too, gravitates toward Emezi has said that the legend of the ogbanje helped herĬomprehend why she was drawn to suicide (she has survived a suicideĪttempt) perhaps, she ventured to the literary Web site The Rumpus,ĭeath enthralled her because she has always had one foot in theĪfterlife. Non-chronological chapters, at times as a chorus and at times

These beings take turns narrating the short, In the book, a Nigerian baby, Ada, enters the world with a miasma of Insistent that the self, which is multiple, requires multiple frameworks “Freshwater” is wrought from that dissonance, Notes, is also “Nigerian,” “Black,” “trans,” and gender “non-binary.”īut it is startling to see those designations laid matter-of-factlyĪlongside a term of magic. We are all woven partially from labels, of course. Unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again.” Trickster.” Its goal “is to torment the human mother by dying Rooted-realities that include Emezi’s “identity . . . as an ogbanje.”Īn ogbanje, Emezi has explained is “an Igbo spirit that’s born into a human body, a kind of malevolent Photograph by Elizabeth WirijaĪ recent interview with the author Akwaeke Emezi, whose début novel is called “ Freshwater,” refers to certain autobiographical “realities” in which the book is Akwaeke Emezi’s début novel, “Freshwater,” pinpoints the nebulous pain of being imprisoned in a physical form.

Freshwater by emezi