We look at our worlds through a limited range of lenses, and making this book meant choosing a different center to tell the story from, a different lens to look through. I wrote Freshwater as an analysis of sorts-the ogbanje figuring out what it is, ascribing legibility to itself. The series was created over seven years and details the ogbanje’s progression from unawareness to clarity around its nature as an embodied spirit. So, THE UNBLINDING is an autobiographical series about an ogbanje, which is an Igbo spirit born into human form with the express intention of traumatizing its loved ones by dying unexpectedly. What is Freshwater’s role as the second of three self-portraits in your project The Unblinding? That emptiness feels peaceful, so perhaps home is peace. It’s an exercise in deconstructing one’s self towards nothingness, it’s understanding how to be here and not here at the same time. For me, home is a reality rooted in a void, so to speak. Writing Freshwater helped me process the fact that my desire for belonging was never going to be fulfilled in the ways I’d imagined it would-finding a seaside bungalow to live in, finding the right country that would feel like home. Honestly, home exists in a nowhere kind of space for me. Ms. talked to Emezi about her commitment to Igbo ontology and truth-telling, metaphors versus alternate realities and the ogbanje.

Her debut novel, Freshwater, which comes out tomorrow, is the second of three self-portraits in THE UNBLINDING.Īn articulation of “the ogbanje figuring out what it is, ascribing legibility to itself,” Freshwater explores spiritual embodiment and fragmentation of self-and it works to reverse the tide of hegemony’s historical amnesia. Emezi’s work pushes against the outer limits of what we collectively understand as reality-and, importantly, pushes back on colonialism. Currently engrossed in THE UNBLINDING-a seven-year long project Emezi describes as “an autobiographical series about an ogbanje, which is an Igbo spirit born into human form with the express intention of traumatizing its loved ones by dying unexpectedly”-Emezi makes work that is, most notably, transgressive.

possessing the ability to “come and go.”īorn in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigera, Akwaeke Emezi is a self-described Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. Ogbanje (noun): An embodied spirit passing as human, who transitions rapidly between birth and death, i.e.

Akwaeke emezi freshwater