Freshwater

“To be singled out and locked into the blurred consciousness of a little mind? We refused. It would be madness.”

                    Excerpt from Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

 

First off, I just want to declare that Akwaeke Emezi is a literary genius. I started reading Freshwater at the beginning of my journey through African literature. I pulled an all-nighter to finish the e-book but for some reason, I felt I had not given the book the attention it truly deserved. So the next week, I ordered the paperback and in less than 2 weeks, I had read Freshwater a total of 5 times. 

I just couldn’t get enough of it. 

 

Freshwater is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Akwaeke Emezi in 2018. It centers the life of Ada, a child of Ala (the Igbo earth goddess) who is also an ogbanje. Ada’s struggle with normal life as a non-human ogbanje with many selves is narrated throughout the book mostly by her others and a few times by herself.

 

Freshwater crosses all lines of normalcy and can be overwhelming to a reader who goes in blind or close-minded. I have never read anything like it. It goes into dark themes such as rape, self-mutilation, depression, and sexual violence. It also sheds new light on spirituality and what we might define as mental illness but is in this case a sectioning of different selves and what it means to be inhabited by spirits. The prose, however, left me breathless countlessly and the plot was so compelling that I fell head over heels in love.

 

Another thing that drew me time after time to this book was Emezi’s ability to write in that perfect balance between poetry and prose. Their wordplay was simply mind-blowing and is ultimately what makes the book so gripping and bewildering.

 

Freshwater defies categorization and as a debut novel? I am simply in awe of Emezi.