Freshwater

Her writing was rather amazing at the sentence level, and I really appreciated and respected the craft and art of what she created and how she constructed the different voices, but I didn't really like it in the general sense. The only part I enjoyed reading was the narrative with the Ada and Ewan, because it was the most traditional story, not fractured or fragmented. However, I won't forget this book and will welcome chances to discuss it and keep thinking about it. After this, I'm definitely interested in reading her upcoming YA book.

3.5 stars. Beautiful, poetic prose. Interesting concept and insights. Not much plot.

Beautiful and evocative book. Since I don't speak Igbo, if found listening to it to be particularly powerful (I have a hard enough time reading in English).

This was a wild ride and I'm still not entirely sure what I read, it was good though. Emezi's prose is raw and real while also having a dreamlike quality so I would absolutely recommend this book even if it was just for that aspect.

For the ace/sex-repulsed in the room: there's a lot of sex here and you can't avoid it without missing chunks of the story (it's not what I would call erotica though), the writing style didn't make it feel as icky as something that sex heavy normally would for me.

I have no words, it's a piece of art
it is a short book but let me tell you, it doesn't take away the amount of emotions and strength of the content inside

“If we were trapped in a body, then we would do bodily things.”

On Ada's birth the gates are left open, and evil spirits - Ọgbanje - flow in. From early on the Ada is many, a mass of brothersisters, children of Ala, the goddess of earth, who shield her and split her to protect her from her own memories. But only when she encounters strong physical trauma, the many crystallise and a personality emerges that learns to take possession of Ada's body. The new self is aggressive yet protective, loves Ada, but also sets out to violently damage her and those she loves.

A spiritual and dark take on split personality disorder, that I liked more than I originally thought I would. I especially loved the ambiguous push-and-pull dynamics of how the spirits simultaneously want to protect and harm Ada, how Ada asks for their help but also wants them gone. Trigger warnings, there are many turbulent and painful images of them going wild within and with her body.

More of a 3.5 than a 3 for me.

Freshwater is an incredibly creative debut novel with beautiful prose. We follow Ada's life from the womb to adulthood, a vessel for gods who are unable to leave her body and immerge as new personalities after Ada undergoes traumatic experiences.

I enjoyed the overall themes of the book, but what I found difficult was the storytelling and how the reader learns about Ada. There was a lot of jumping around and new context to past versions of Ada that we don't find out until much later, which feels kind of bad as a reader. Why is the author withholding important character progression from Ada's childhood until the last few chapters? There's no payoff in doing that, and it just feels like new information comes out of nowhere without any warning.

We also don't really learn much about Ada herself, only how she lives through others (mostly men) and how her alters/gods within her (Asughara and Saint Vincent) push her to self harm and pursue sexual opportunities. It became difficult to keep up with all the characters she was interacting with and really could have focused more on the few more impactful characters in Ada's story to drive more character development. There are only so many sexcapades you can read about until they all start blending together into a depressing blob of sweat and shame (for Ada at least).

It felt a lot more shallow than I was hoping, I guess. I was expecting some more mysticism, more about Ada's “real mother” (the snake), more ways the gods effected her than just causing her to harm herself or sleep with people. We don't learn much about Ada's studies, career, friendships, detailed world-travels, or daily interactions and how they're affected by her condition.

There were some really outstanding moments in the book and a lot of very confusing, bland, or unresolved moments too. What shines in this book is the prose and the themes.

Emezi is a phenomenal story teller who enchants me with their writing. This book's approach reminds me of a memoir and I suspect plot driven readers will not like this one.

We are all made up of many

What does it mean to be made up of many? How do we reconcile the multitudes that live within us, that many selves that make up our self?

In Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi takes the metaphorical struggle of being made up of “a village full of faces and a compound full of bones” and makes it literal: Emezi shows us what it would it would mean to come to terms with having so many different spirits living within us by telling us the story of Ada, an ogbanje, a girl who houses spirits.

I have housed spirits. I have had to come to terms with multitudes. When I was younger, my bipolar disorder manifested itself in schizoaffective symptoms: I heard voices, was swayed into action by the many who lived inside me. It was a scary time, one that took a lot of care—and medication and therapy—to help me understand that I could listen to myself instead of them.

But what if, instead of silencing the many, I learned to embrace them? What if, like Ada, I came to terms that there were spirits inside me that made me who I am, and that was okay; that the presence of multitudes didn't make me any less of an individual?

This is the joy in reading Freshwater: the novel is a journey in learning to understand that we are all fractured selves, that we are all made up of the many. Our journey to that understanding can be a tumultuous one—and Akwaeke Emezi creates poetry out of that tumult as we are guided through Ada's story—but it is also one that culminates in solace and self-awareness.

Perhaps we are all ogbanje in our own ways, and we just don't have the mythology, the words, to help us express who we really are.

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)