The spirits in Ada’s head are initially dormant, but are each awakened by traumatic experiences. The narrative follows Ada and the beings in her head through her childhood in Nigeria to her time in college in the USA. The story is told from the point of view of the gods who are trapped inside Ada’s body – the entwined Smoke and Shadow and the ravenous Asughara – and Ada as Ada only takes control of the narrative at specific points in the story.

She is the daughter of the snake god Ala, and has multiple gods imprisoned in her human flesh. Unbeknownst to her human parents, Ada is ọgbanje– a vengeful spirit born to torment human parents by continually dying and being reborn, but she lives and survies into adulthood. Emezi’s captivating and unique narrative voice makes the story utterly compelling even through its darkest moments.įreshwater tells the story of Ada, who is born in Umuahia, Nigeria. As such it is an intense read, but a thoroughly rewarding one. The novel is as formally ambitious as it is unflinching in its exploration of sex, abuse, attempted suicide, and mental illness. Emezi’s debut novel is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale like no other, one that defies genre boundaries and assumptions as easily as it disrupts Western ideas around identity, spirituality, and gender. As such, I knew I was in for an interesting and unusual read, but I was not prepared for just how intense, powerful, and original Freshwater is. I am my others we are one and we are many.”įreshwater (2018) by Igbo and Tamil author Akwaeke Emezi just won this year’s Otherwise Award and was the first book nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction written by a nonbinary author. I am here and not here, real and not real, energy pushed into skin and bone. Ọgbanje are as liminal as is possible – spirit and human, both and neither. For that one, though, the secret was in the situation. “It was difficult to accept not being human but still being contained in a human body.

Freshwater akwaeke emezi