Akwaeke Emezi‘s Freshwater (2018) made a fair number of end of year lists, and deservedly so. It’s an inventive, compelling, and more than a little frightening novel that focuses on, depending on how you read it, a young woman struggling with mental health or a young woman possessed by a small variety of deities from her native Nigeria.
Your interest in the latter interpretation will largely determine your enjoyment of the book: as a novel exploring what it might mean to share your body with spirits, whose self-interest only occasionally overlaps with your own, Freshwater is a great read. It’s also not an easy one. There is sexual violence in the book, and, as a core idea for the narrative, a question of what is entailed in being used, in having little to no agency in what happens to your body.
For example, in order to shield the protagonist, a very promiscuous and sexually voracious spirit possesses her regularly. On the one hand, this prevents the protagonist from ever revisiting her rape; on the other, her body is in a very real sense not her own for nights on end.
One challenge for any book that delves into the supernatural is the author’s ability to keep the rules of those worlds consistent and understood, and Emezi does a very strong job of this, which means that, once you accept the general premise of what is happening, the rest hangs together.
The strongest parts of the book, for me, are when the spirits navigate their simultaneous disregard for the protagonist and their dependence on her in this strangely human world. They long both to return to the spirit world, but also to experience the human. It’s nicely done, and done without ever allowing you to lose your empathy for the protagonist herself.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
There is so much going on here that adds depth to the story, so much that touches themes of isolation and immigration and mental illness and the difficulty of navigating various structures of external power (bureaucracies in general, everyday racism, etc). I strive to, even in my totally fantasy based writing, to point towards other, larger themes as well, and I would do well to be as successful as Emezi is.