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.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Freshwater”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This novel discusses sexual assault, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and domestic abuse. The guide also quotes stigmatizing language about mental illness.
Chapter 1 begins with an epigraph that introduces the idea of reincarnation—that each person has lived many lives before this body, has lived many lives in this body, and will live many lives when they leave this body. After the epigraph, each chapter begins with a bolded word that tells the reader from whose perspective the chapter is written. The first begins with “We,” who are revealed to be spirits within the main character whom they call “the Ada.”
“We” communicates that they were dormant in their body, believing that their human mother, Saachi, was their mother until their real mother visited them by embodying a python. Saachi is small and thin, with light brown skin and dark brown eyes, and she is from Melaka in Malaysia. They also introduce Saul, their body’s father, who met their mother in London but later moved their family back to his home in Umuahia, Nigeria. When Saachi was pregnant, the spirits were free to roam back and forth between worlds when they were bored of one. They refer to the morning of the Ada’s birth as “the day we died and were born” (16). The Ada is born on Saachi’s sixth push on the sixth day of the sixth month. Once the baby is out in the world, the spirits are trapped within it. Whether accidentally or maliciously, the gods left open the gates between their worlds, so rather than the spirits being completely locked within the girl as they should be, they are trapped within her but also distinct from her—they are “we” and she is “her,” a fat baby with black, wet hair. “We,” the gods’ “children,” the “ọgbanje,” stay asleep for the first few years, watching the Ada be a loud, violent, beautiful child.
Saachi notices the differences between this child and her first son, Chima, and puts a pottu (bindi) on her forehead in an attempt to repel evil. The spirits see Saul as ignorant but give him credit for naming his child something appropriate—something that means “God answered”—because he had prayed for a girl. During Ada’s baptism, the ogbanje focus on water, noting that it is all connected and always comes from the mouth of a python in the form of freshwater. They go on to explain the sacred nature of pythons: that they are the chosen form of the god Ala, who is the earth, the mother, and the ultimate judge. Her children, the spirits, are not intended for human hands. They are meant to be controlled by the gods.
Saachi, Ala, and the spirits all believe that the Ada is theirs. In her childhood, Ada plays with the neighbors, she yells, she wriggles on the floor like a snake, and she gets injured as children do. They explain the time that their mother appears as a snake when the Ada is potty training. When Ada screams, Saul cuts up the python with a machete, inadvertently making the mother Ala leave the world and not return.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 begins with an epigraph about the python and with the pronoun “We.” The ogbanje explain that there is an oath that binds these spirits to the world called “Iyi-uwa,” which turns into a real object that humans can destroy. Destroying it would sever the ogbanje’s ties to the other world. However, the ogbanje want to go home to their brothersisters to whom they made a vow, so they hide the object in the Ada’s womb and bones so that if the humans want to destroy them, they will have to destroy Ada, too. In her early life, the ogbanje’s habitation makes Ada have bad dreams. In time, she learns to recognize that the dreams are fake—she builds a bridge for herself to get out of the dreams.
For the first time, Ada’s spirits truly awaken one night at a celebration that she attends with her friend, Lisa. There is music playing, people dancing, and dust swirling. The ceremony invited spirits, so the spirits naturally recognize those within the Ada and speak to them. Ada would look back on this night as one of the happiest moments of her childhood because the ogbanje were awake in both her world and their world, so they experienced this harmony for the first time. The spirits wonder whether the Ada still would have gone “mad” if not for them, but they do not take responsibility for the fact that they are there. They explain that “they” just put a god into a body, not specifying who “they” are.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
When the spirits first awoke, they were new and young, but they are quickly forced to sharpen by some traumatic events. They explain that their brothersisters on the other side want them to return, so they proceed to try to break the Ada. The first step in this process is to hurt the Ada’s little sister, Añuli. She is hit by a truck as she tries to dart across the street. The event is bloody and tragic. When her sister is in the hospital, the Ada refuses to visit because she blames herself for the accident. The spirits’ brothersisters enjoy that because for humans, love and closeness can keep them in this world longer. To the brothersisters, the ogbanje are things with debts who need to return, not inhabitants of a human who needs to live. Afterward, the Ada succeeds mostly in protecting her sister, but the ogbanje admit in hindsight that their one oversight was to protect her sister from them. This accident makes their whole family think of death, and the spirits describe the Ada’s life as a “placeholder” or an “interlude” on Earth.
The ogbanje explain that Saachi’s anxiety throughout this time is overwhelming. Other women in the neighborhood help her, but Saul is obstinate, and at one point she checks herself into a hospital for two nights. She endures years of this, but when Añuli needs plastic surgery on her leg after an accident back in Malaysia, Saachi is offered a job in Saudi Arabia on her way back from the trip. With Saul still ignorant and prideful and financially unstable, Saachi accepts the job and leaves her children with their father. The ọgbanje’s brothersisters take credit for driving Saachi away from her family. While trying to break the Ada, they also give Saachi her freedom at the price of her family. Years pass, and Saul never cares, so Saachi never moves back home.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
The ogbanje explain the concept of the gates. They say that all “madnesses” can be attributed to these gates that birth things and then close. If they do not close, things begin to go wrong, but the gods don’t care because it does not affect them. The ogbanje reflect on their birthing, explaining how other ogbanje have fared in their world when the bodies and spirits either mesh or reject each other. They speak about bodies like they are objects to be used, and they ponder about why their mother chose to answer Saul’s prayer for a daughter instead of an infinite number of other prayers. They wonder: Was it random? Was it to prove her power? Was it to teach them a lesson?
The ogbanje explain that after they woke up that day while Ada danced, they couldn’t leave her because she was so sad and lonely. Her mother had left her and she clung to anyone she could find, so she started praying to Christ with the logic of a child, asking him to hold her because she is a child and he loves all of his children. The ogbanje know that the man she prays to is named Yshwa, but they also know that, while he was once a human, he is ultimately a god who enjoys suffering. Yshwa had endured the pain of being human and did not want to do it all again, which is why he does not hold children like Ada. The spirits resent him because they are still trapped in a body and he is not. In her loneliness, the Ada begins believing in wild things, like talking to animals and existing in different worlds in her head, and the ọgbanje encourage this because it helps them to grow stronger.
The ogbanje explain one of the first times that the Ada uses her body as an altar by drawing blood. While in college in America, she encounters a puddle of blood in the hallway, and her desire for more is almost uncontrollable. The ogbanje explain that the Ada has been feeding their bloodthirst for years. They call the red of blood the “mother color” and explain that the Ada is not “mad,” but she is inhabited by hungry, bitter gods. The ọgbanje justify their actions, saying that none of this is easy for them; they are being pulled by the other side and are fulfilling an oath. Ada names them “Smoke” and “Shadow,” giving them even more power through her belief and their names. This is their second birth.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
The ogbanje begin to explain their unique experience within Ada. They should have been fully ogbanje, carrying out their oath to their brothersisters, but instead they feel close to Ada and protective of her, and they doubt that they could draw a line to show the separation between themselves and her.
The ọgbanje reflect on how Ada comes to be in America. Saachi wants her daughter to go to college, so she sends her to a small, quiet school in Virginia. Ada is 16, two years younger than most students in her year, and most comments from other students involve her age or her origin. The ogbanje and the Ada both feel deeply lonely. The ogbanje acknowledge that this is inevitable—that children grow up and move around and begin their lives—but still, their hunger cannot be satiated, and they struggle to see the importance in human happenings, like jobs, love, and education. They feel insulted to be in this body in the first place. In order to make sense of her own emotions and the ogbanje’s hunger, the Ada begins to cut herself.
Ada has fleeting feelings toward people, crushes, and interests throughout her time in college. She meets Malena, a Dominican girl who is also the daughter of gods. The ogbanje jump back and forth in time, introducing characters and explaining their fates and then backtracking to the current moment. At this point, the Ada does not drink, smoke, or have sex, and she is loyal to Christ as evidenced by the cross necklace she always wears.
Ada falls into a relationship with an Eritrean boy who lived in Denmark named Soren. Because of his loveless childhood, he is hurt, angry, and traumatized. He begins asserting himself in small ways, like ordering her not to eat her plate of eggs, and Ada is at first unfazed. She is fully committed to abstinence, is uninterested in sex, and refuses all of Soren’s advances. Eventually, Soren rapes her. The chapter ends as the Ada begins to remember these instances from which she had dissociated until then. An unspecified “She” arrives in her body—a third birth.
Part 1 Analysis
Part 1 contains exposition about Ada, Smoke, and Shadow. It builds their internal world and external world, focusing on both their relationship with each other as well as their collective relationship to other places, people, events. For the entirety of Part 1, Emezi writes from the perspective of Smoke and Shadow, the two spirits that have inhabited the Ada since before she was born. Pronouns play an important role throughout the book. The pronoun “We,” written in bold at the beginning of each chapter, emphasizes the multiplicity within Ada. Multiplicity: Refusal of the Binary is fundamental to the narrative, and Emezi uses the first-person plural throughout Part 1 to establish a world in which multiple beings within the same body can experience singular events. In addition, first-person plural is inherently genderless, so while Smoke and Shadow refer to Ada as “She,” they both transcend the gender binary. Their brothersisters also transcend this binary. They are their siblings without gender and their family without rank. Emezi highlights further grammatical detail since the ogbanje refer to Ada as “the Ada” throughout the entire book. Adding the article “the” to Ada’s name emphasizes the force with which they see her enter the world. In addition, it implies that she is a singular being, above other humans who only have their names.
As characters, Smoke and Shadow have completely different motivations from Ada. They want to feel free and be released from the human body to return to their world to fulfill their oath to their brothersisters. Nevertheless, they feel some allegiance to Ada, which is partially how they know that something is not right in their habitation of her body. This feeling also characterizes the ọgbanje with a sense of humanity. They feel betrayed, confused, excited, hungry, and hopeless. At occasionally overlapping times, Ada also feels these emotions. While they attempt to keep their distance from Ada’s experiences and emotions, they respect Saachi, thanking the gods that they chose “responsible” people to protect Ada (19). However, they feel ownership over Ada, saying that “[t]he Ada belonged to us and Ala and Saachi” (22). This sentence describes the conflict of the novel—several beings think that Ada belongs to them, and none of them think that she should belong to herself.
Part 1 is filled with foreshadowing. As Saachi gives birth to Ada, the ọgbanje provide three numbers: Her birth takes six pushes, and she is born on the sixth day of the sixth month. The number 666 has long been associated with satanic origins, suggesting the evils to come. The ọgbanje call the birth “this abomination of the fleshly'' and repeatedly describe Ada’s childhood eyes as “wet” and “black” (17-18). Emezi’s diction emphasizes how displeased the ọgbanje are with their participation in this event, building suspense regarding how they will react to their fate. The imagery throughout Part 1 further hints at horrible events that are to come—when Ada sees a python, her father “hack[s] [it] to bits,” killing Ala, who “dissolves amid broken scales and pieces of flesh,” and returns with his “hand wrapped in bloody metal” (24). This violent scene wherein Ada’s father murders the physical manifestation of Ala, the mother of all men, represents a greater conflict between humans and spiritual beings. Emezi explores the way humans react with fear and violence to ideas that may help them, laying the foundation for the theme of Spiritual Connection Versus Western Medicine. In many ways, this is how Ada reacts to spiritual manifestations for most of the novel. They spark fear in her rather than comfort and surrender. This story of the python ends with the ogbanje saying that Saul “ha[s] no idea what he ha[s] done” (24), implying that his actions will have a long-lasting, dark effect on his daughter.
Introduced in this part, the python returns as a symbol throughout the novel that explores the fearful relationship between the spiritual and the human. First, Saul names Ada what he says means “precious” but really means “the egg of a python” (24). Ala is a python, the source of all freshwater, and, naturally, the child of Ala is the egg of a python. The ogbanje explain that the python used to be widely seen as a sacred symbol—a manifestation of the god Ala, who is “the earth herself, the judge and mother, the giver of law” (21). In Part 1, the python, a creature that to most humans represents a certain death, is actually inhabited by Ala, the giver of all life. This paradox suggests the ignorance of humans and hints at Ada’s denial of her lineage of gods. For many years, it seems easier for Ada to hack the python to bits rather than see herself in it. However, eventually, she recognizes that she is the python, portraying a connection between the spiritual and the human.
Later, the ogbanje speak directly to the reader, saying, “It’s not as if you can escape us—where could you run to?” (48). By using second-person pronouns with a rhetorical question, Emezi creates an immersive experience for the reader by breaking the boundaries between the story world and the reader’s world. The rhetorical question adds a sense of horror in that the implied answer is that there is no place to run. Ada is trapped within them forever, also contributing to the sense of approaching doom. The ogbanje tell their story in a casual tone, slipping in phrases like “you see” and parentheses used to communicate asides as if telling a story to a friend. This demonstrates the flippancy with which the ogbanje view Ada’s life.
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