BIPOC Book #41: "Freshwater"

In "Freshwater," the main character must reckon with the fact that she is both human and inhuman. Photo credit: Patrick Perkins on Unsplash.

By Anya Shukla

I started an internship this week, and now I’m super tired and have absolutely no will to do anything. So my reading comprehension has taken a bit of a tumble. Apologies if this review feels shorter and/or less… coherent than my previous pieces.

Honestly, not sure how I can ever work a 9-5 job (and also have hobbies) if this feels like such a struggle right now. How does adulting work??

TW: rape, sexual assault.

---

Review: Ever since birth, it was clear that Ada was different. The main character in Akwaeke Emezi’s “Freshwater,” Ada has auditory hallucinations and struggles with mental health issues throughout her childhood. As she grows up and moves to the United States, she begins to hear more and more voices. These “demons” define her actions for the next part of her life—and actually narrate the majority of her story.

A forward-thinking, novel book, “Freshwater” explores the connection between Igbo spirituality and Western tradition. Despite its uniqueness, the narrative style prevents a reader from fully connecting with the characters. My Rating: 4/5.

What I Loved: Although I have my criticisms (see below), I enjoyed the narrative style. The multiple perspectives add a new texture to the book, a new way of viewing the main character. Hearing directly from Ada’s auditory hallucinations helped me better understand her motivations. (Also, the perspectives are super distinct, which I appreciated as a reader! Each voice feels like their own person.)

Through demons like Asughara*, who emerges after a young boy rapes Ada, I can see the impacts of severe trauma on Ada’s mental health and wellbeing. To cope with the pain of her assault, Ada allows Asughara to take over during sexual encounters—essentially, she disassociates. “Ada wasn’t there anymore,” Asughara says. “There was only me. I expanded and filled up the walls, filling it up and blocking her completely… no matter how hard he pushed into her body, he could definitely never touch her” (pg. 112).

In an interview at the back of “Freshwater,” Emezi writes that they “couldn’t find my own world when I looked for it in books, and though I found other worlds—the ones I’ve lived in, pretended in, moved through—it felt different, but not enough” (pg. 364). They wrote “Freshwater” to create and share their world with readers. The book takes on a semi-autobiographical tone: Emezi draws connections between demon-like spirits and gender dysphoria in their personal life, and these connections echo throughout in “Freshwater.” Like Ada, Emezi sees themselves as “objange” (evil spirits from Igbo culture) and must navigate their in-between-ness.

Through "Freshwater," Emezi also validates non-Western traditions. “It was difficult for me to consider an Igbo spiritual world equally, if not more valid. The legacy of colonialism had always taught us that such a world wasn’t real, that it was nothing but juju and superstition,” Emezi notes in The Cut. In “Freshwater,” Emezi takes that world and legitimizes it, mixing Igbo spirituality with a Western setting.

Especially for marginalized individuals, there is a power in writing and owning your story, one that hasn’t been read before. I hope that “Freshwater” helps others know that someone else out there shares their experiences and struggles, that there is power in cultural traditions, that they can create their own worlds. ​

What I Didn’t Love: I can’t really put my finger on what I didn’t enjoy.

There was definitely a lot of trauma to take in and hold, which is always difficult for me to process. But I think the narration is what threw me: on the one hand, I enjoyed the narrative style and multiple perspectives; on the other, the narrators disconnected me from the main character and the struggles she faced. Ada’s experiences are all filtered through her demons’ eyes: “the trick, I had realized, was to get Ada to pretend that none of this was happening,” says Asughara (pg. 276).

As I mentioned above, I feel like Emezi saw these kinds of incidents as commentary on disassociation. But because of the distance created by the narration, I didn’t really feel for Ada.

A Quote I Would Like On Goodreads: “It is only a fool who does not know that freedom is paid for in old clotted blood, in fresh reapings of it, in renewed scarifications” (pg. 67-68). ​

Up next: "There There” by Tommy Orange.