The Audacity of Literature — a review of Akwaeke Emezi’s ‘Freshwater’
Adams Adeosun
Art is subjective: a cliché, one that is reaffirmed when sixteen readers gather over drinks to discuss Akwaeke Emezi’s debut autobiographical novel. We relate. We postulate. We ask hard questions, answer them and then ask some more. The first of them: where do we draw the line between autobiography and fiction?
Akwaeke is a fave around here. We know her, mostly from Twitter and Instagram, but also from her shorter works. We know the cold facts. She is biracial, has two siblings and is gender non-binary. When she said she is Ogbanje, we believed her. Although in the finicky recesses of our minds, we wondered what the fuck that meant. Then came Freshwater, like the horn missing from the horse that didn’t quite fit, and now we know it is a unicorn.
The Ogbanje has an impressive manifestation in Nigerian literature — surpassed only by the representation of twins. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart comes to mind. Dizzy Angel dazzles too. But Akwaeke delivers a fresh take. She pitches her tent leagues away from the normative. Freshwater is a lot of ‘fuck yous’: to empirical knowledge, to Christianity, to the conventions of life and literature. The prose is easy on the brain, the story hard to reconcile with our living actualities; even harder is classification. But you can’t blame us for trying. Put it on the human preoccupation of pinning everything down.
There is the argument — against originality — that there is no new art. The present is predated by history. It is in this way that Freshwater is implicated by Diana Evans’ 26a, and to a lesser extent by Toni Morrison’s Beloved. These books straddle the flesh and the spirit and deal with identity on different pedestals. Where 26a shears a birth into telepathic twins, the life of one growing into the polarity of the other following a rape attempt that leaves her traumatised for the rest of her short life, Freshwater binds several distinct personalities into a collective and shoves it inside one chubby girl who drifts between her many selves. The activation of new selves bookmarks the stages of her life, the plot drifting with her.
Freshwater opens with a traditional charge, granting the oft-suppressed African mysticism precedence over the very colonial empirical knowledge. A birth, a naming and an encounter with gods — meet Yshwa, simply ‘the Christ.’ Then meet Ala, ‘the earth herself, the judge and mother, the giver of law’ — and a series of awakening and we know that Akwaeke does not intend to make us feel comfortable. But then, we witness a migration to Virginia and like everything that encounters America, the mystical is shunted to the mundane.
The length of the Ada’s sexuality clips at crushes. Sex holds no promises for her. But she falls for Soren, a storm of a person, who abuses her. Different people have different responses to sexual assault, you know. The Ada is Ogbanje and she deals with her abuse as one. The heralding of Asughara, who is everything that the Ada is not: bold, cold and she wants you to learn that, “I can fuck you or I can fuck you up.” Asughara is the antithesis of the Ada. It is important to resist the temptation to compress this story into a simplistic psychological terminology. That is disrespectful. Our protagonist is Ogbanje and this is not an illness to be straightened out with psychotherapists and SSRIs. We realise this when the Ada walks into therapy with her many selves and walks out no less diminished.
We stay with the sex life of Asughara, watch her go viral and fuck everyone before they fuck her. The Ada shrinks in these moments of wildness. She is sectioned off, leaving her expressive alter ego to deal with the intricacies of intimacy. But how far can a person run from their own body? There is always an aftermath, call it Consequence. What else do we call the Ada’s failed marriage to the great love of her life?
Freshwater is a litany of insane characters, making their entry at obscene angles and dropping off much the same way. We could say it is an exercise in how crazy people can get but then we remember it is autobiographical — and ours is a mad world anyway. The mystical is reintroduced with the character Malena who tosses her hat in the ring for the Ada on behalf of a Dominican god. Things don’t work that way though. A journey overseas does not turn the daughter of Ala into Santa Marta’s. The concept of origin is aggressive — “We came from somewhere — everything does” — in the end, we always return home. The Ada’s homecoming is a thong in the road. Hers, like every true homecoming, begins with resignation. She alters her body to fit the in-between where she is a permanent resident — a cross between feminine and masculine. First step, she comes home to herself.
The novel leaves with us a desire to return with the author to her origin. To re-read everything she has written, to assemble the smaller pieces of the puzzle in a quest to find all the subtleties they contain. Like that time when the Ada lay on a dorm bed with Soren and they chorus a song that has followed her from her troubled childhood. We wonder what the point is but on that sequence we’ll defer judgement to Teju Cole — “In any narrative, there is the material that moves the story forward. But the storyteller also includes objects or events that hint at a pattern of signification swirling above the surface, part of the story’s logic but just out of reach” — because honestly, this one is out of our reach. We suspect that, for Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater is catharsis.
Language chauffeurs spirituality. At the heart of language is the metaphor and in this, Akwaeke is fluent. The prose of Freshwater is fluid, certain passages almost read like incantations — “…show them the red of your faith, of your flesh; quiet the voices with the lullaby of the altar” — (although there are also those metaphors we think of as formulaic) and this is the locus. When we remember Freshwater, it will be in these associations: An unusual bildungsroman. A narrative assault. A problematic novel. But most of all, the audacity of literature abetted by culture.
But before all that, sixteen readers gather at a table to discuss Akwaeke Emezi’s debut. We criticize and empathize. We peruse the text for answers and ask other questions. The last of them: What’s the next thing coming through this gate?
About the author: Adams Adeosun’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Litro Magazine, Catapult magazine, Transition magazine, and a scattering of others. He participated in Goethe-Institut’s Literary Exchange workshops and was shortlisted for the Awele Creative Trust Awards in 2018.
