Sexuality Archives – Bookserry

I read Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi during a recent trip to Nigeria and needed time for the story and the magnitude of the message to sink in.

The novel is narrated by a collective she/they who live inside the “the marble room” of Ada’s mind. Ada is a young Nigerian woman who was born “with one foot on the other side.” She is human, but she belongs to the gods and is an ọgbanje.

In Igbo folklore, ọgbanje’s are “children who come and go.” They are believed to be evil spirits who constantly die and are reborn in subsequent children. Their presence will plague any family with pain and misfortune. Usually, ọgbanje’s die as children, but Ada is able to appease the gods through self-harm and goes on to attend the University of North Carolina.

We meet Asụghara, one of Ada’s multiple personalities, after a gruesome sexual assault; and later meet Saint Vincent, a male personality who is gentle and soft. Asụghara is a dominant female who believes that her role is to “move and take and save” Ada. At times this means sabotaging Ada’s medications and visits with her therapist.

As the story progresses, Ada ﬁnds it had to live with fractured selves, and eventually attempts suicide.

Ada’s journey is astonishing.

Throughout the book, I was rooting for Ada and at the same time anxious that Asụghara and Saint Vincent will overcome her.

The book is dark, mysterious, and haunting; and at the same time, it is soft, poetic, and humorous. The story explores Ada’s fragmented selves, identities that are based on the author’s experiences.

The best part about the novel is that the author tracked Ada’s life from birth to adulthood and merged Igbo folklore, Christianity, and Western medicine to tell a moving story about mental illness.

While reading this book, I had to take occasional breaks because I felt like I was in Ada’s world. In this novel, Akwaeke Emezi takes us into her world and raises important questions:

Why are Western schemas about mental illness how we deﬁne who is mentally ill?
What role did colonialism play in ensuring that Western science supersedes Igbo mythology and tradition?

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi crosses the boundaries of worlds and countries, both physical and spiritual, and challenges readers to explore their “other selves.”

This was a brilliant and beautifully written novel.

Visit our growing bookshelf.

Explore mental illness through Igbo mythology in Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma Took My Breath Away

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Decree for the 21st Century

Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose provides a striking account of life after loss. “What We Lose: A Support Guide” is the title of the pamphlet that the narrator, Thandie, receives after her mother’s death from cancer.

In What We Lose Clemmons tackles race, sexuality, friendship, loss, grief and, to some extent, migration. The book is carefully compiled with graphs, pictures, song lyrics, and blog posts to provide a rich account of the narrator’s struggles, realizations, and growth. When she proclaims that Black people are more likely to die of cancer compared to their White counterparts, she presents statistics to support this claim. She goes on to suggest that though Black women are more likely to die from cancer, their experiences are not the focus of dominant narratives and campaigns.

Despite Clemmons’ creative use of vignettes, however, What We Lose is at times jerky, and some thoughts are surprisingly incomplete. I wonder if these asides were done to support the primary narrative of loss and grief or if they were intended to stand alone. I am not sure.

Thandie’s take on South Africa, Oscar Pistorius (the South African Olympian who’s trial made international headlines because he murdered his girlfriend…thinking she was an intruder), and Winnie Mandela offered an interesting picture of post-Apartheid South Africa. One particular section that stands out is her musing on her racial identity.

“To my [South African] cousins and me, American blacks were the epitome of American cool. Blacks were the stars of rap videos, big-name comedians, and actors with their own television shows and world tours…
We worshipped them, and my cousins, especially, looked to the freedom that these stars represented as aspirational. It was a freedom synonymous with democracy, with political freedom—with America itself. It was rarefied, powerful.
But when I called myself black, my cousins looked at me askance.
They are what is called coloured in South Africa—mixed race—and my father is light-skinned black. I looked just like my relatives, but calling myself black was wrong to them.
Though American blacks were cool, South African blacks were ordinary, yet dangerous. It was something they didn’t want to be.”

Although Clemmons explored her mixed race and national identities, I wanted more. The death of her mother signified a loss of the very thing that connected her to her South African roots. The desire for belonging and her need to be tethered to something — from which an identity can be formulated — deserved a more in-depth exploration.

Hence the question, what is left when the thing that links us to our heritage is lost?

I believe this “thing” can be forgetting to speak a language, or forgetting cultural practices (dances, poems, etc.). What We Lose is an appropriate title as it can refer to the loss of something physical (a death) or a loss of a former home (migration). Still, some losses cannot be quantified or touched, only felt.

What We Lose is a fictional memoir at best. I have read very few books like it and celebrate its unique style.

I am looking forward to many more novels by this author.

Visit our growing bookshelf.

Explore mental illness through Igbo mythology in Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma Took My Breath Away

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Decree for the 21st Century

Explore mental illness through Igbo mythology in Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma Took My Breath Away

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Decree for the 21st Century

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