45 pages • 1 hour read
Akwaeke EmeziFreshwater
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Akwaeke Emezi
The author, Akwaeke Emezi, has said that this story is very close to an autobiography. Akwaeke shares many characteristics with the main character, Ada, including their nationality, experience with multiplicity, gender dysphoria, and ọgbanje. Emezi is a nonbinary writer who has undergone gender-affirming surgery like Ada. This is their first novel. They said that after writing, they experienced much more clarity about their place in this world. They were the first openly trans person nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. When nominated again later in their career, they were asked to provide their “sex as defined by law,” and they withdrew their novel (Flood, Alison. “Akwaeke Emezi Shuns Women’s Prize Over Request for Details of Sex as Defined ‘by Law.’” The Guardian, 5 Oct. 2020).
Through this kind of novel—semi-autobiographical but also rooted in imagination—Emezi explores their lifelong experiences outside of the judgment of systems like Western science and the gender binary. To write this book, they interviewed their mother and sister, traveled to Nigeria, and extensively researched ogbanje. Their trans and ogbanje identities are inextricable in that both do not fit into the Western view of science. Each identity exists on a spectrum that is not a binary. By writing a story based on their life, Emezi explores the bridge between worlds, their own reality, and their view of themself as influenced by Igbo culture, life experience, and family.
Cultural Context: Igbo Language and Beliefs
Vital to this narrative are Igbo language and concepts of spirituality that manifest in the life of the main character, Ada. Throughout the book, Emezi uses Igbo language to express certain concepts and then translates them into English. The ogbanje themselves use Igbo interjections like “sha” to downplay a situation and phrases like “no wahala,” meaning “no problem.”
Most chapters in Freshwater are written from the perspective of ogbanje, which are evil spirits that inhabit a person and aim to torture their mother in endless cycles. Ogbanje are believed to intervene in the cycle of human ancestry. If an ogbanje reproduces, they will continue the cycle of the evil spirits inhabiting humans, so they are not supposed to reproduce. They represent a piece of another reality present in this world—spirits from another world inhabiting vessels in this one. When present, they look like a human and act like a human, so it is nearly impossible to tell where they are.
Ogbanje are part of a larger collective. They leave their kin when entering a body and return to them when the body dies based on an oath they made. The oath turns into an object. They can only die by a human’s hand if the parents can find the iyi-uda, their oath to return to their brothersisters, and destroy it. In the novel, by sewing their iyi-uda into Ada’s womb and bones, the ogbanje ensure that for someone to destroy them, they would have to also destroy Ada.
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By Akwaeke Emezi
