“Ada, a young Nigerian woman who from infancy has been inhabited by ogbanje (Igbo metaphysical spirits), narrates her own coming-of-age across the choral first-person plural We of the ogbanje themselves.”
What's in this book
- Akwaeke Emezi's 2018 debut — a young Nigerian woman is inhabited by Igbo ogbanje spirits who narrate her coming-of-age
- Structurally ambitious first-person plural Igbo-metaphysical literary debut
- 240 pages of sustained first-person-plural ogbanje narration across two-and-a-half decades of Ada's life
- Nigerian childhood, Virginia liberal-arts college, post-college New York arc
- Emezi audiobook (author-narrated) is the definitive audio production
- For readers of The Death of Vivek Oji, Half of a Yellow Sun, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and post-modern African literary fiction
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Freshwater is Akwaeke Emezi's 2018 debut novel, the structurally ambitious first-person plural Igbo-metaphysical literary novel that established Emezi's broader American literary readership. The structural premise is Ada, a young Nigerian woman who from infancy has been inhabited by ogbanje (Igbo metaphysical-cosmological spirits who reside within human bodies across multiple parallel lives), narrated across the choral first-person-plural We of the ogbanje spirits themselves across the broader arc of Ada's coming-of-age. The novel runs across approximately the first two-and-a-half decades of Ada's life (Nigerian childhood, undergraduate years at a small Virginia liberal-arts college, post-college New York life), with the operational ogbanje-We narration across the entire arc providing the structural metaphysical scaffolding that the broader contemporary American literary fiction on Igbo cosmological material has not historically committed to at this depth.
Emezi's structural method is the sustained first-person-plural ogbanje narration across the entire novel, with the broader Ada-biographical material providing the structural setting that the ogbanje-We chapters interpret across the broader Igbo cosmological framework. The novel reads in the patient post-modern Nigerian-American literary register that distinguishes Emezi's project from the broader contemporary Nigerian-American literary tradition (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, the broader post-Chinua-Achebe American-Nigerian literary lineage). The post-Virginia New York chapters across the back half carry the structural emotional weight that the ogbanje-We narration depends on; the Asughara chapter midway through the novel (in which the dominant ogbanje voice Asughara takes over the broader Ada interior across an entire chapter-section) is one of the structural masterstrokes of the novel and the moment that established the broader Emezi structural-prose argument that the entire novel has been preparing. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of Igbo metaphysical cosmology can be deployed across contemporary literary fiction in ways the broader contemporary American literary tradition has not historically committed to) is made through the texture of the ogbanje-We construction rather than through any direct argument.
Recommended as required contemporary Nigerian-American literary fiction reading, as the right Emezi entry point alongside The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), and for fans of Akwaeke Emezi's broader catalog and contemporary post-modern African-and-African-diaspora literary fiction. Compare to Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), and contemporary American literary fiction on metaphysical cosmology. The Emezi audiobook (author-narrated) is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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