Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater is unlike any other novel that has come before it. Similar to Teresa Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, an autobiographical account of a Native American woman’s experience of trauma and bipolar disorder, she is building her own canon. In this essay, Akwaeke says she “very much wanted to find precedent” but couldn’t because her “main character’s life and experiences weren’t centred on her being African, or black, or immigrant – those were negligible, secondary.” She couldn’t find African fiction that was interested in a woman who had several selves. So, she wrote Freshwater without a precedent to lean on.
A writer with Igbo and Tamil lineage, Akwaeke has crafted her debut novel, Freshwater, as the story of a young woman, attending university in Virginia, USA, who has multiple fractured selves that compete for dominance. The narrative is steeped in Igbo folklore about ogbanje – children who are born with one foot in the real world and one foot in the spirit realm because of a mishap at the gates between inception and life. These children are believed to be inhabited with multiple amoral or evil voices that bring misfortune to the child’s life and the lives of those around the child. They exist between gender binaries, without committing to a fixed place on the spectrum. The ogbanje at the heart of this novel, Ada, is born in southern Nigeria to a mother with roots in India and a father who grew up in Nigeria. She is conceived after her father prays for a daughter to follow the birth of his first child who was a boy called Chima.
“This is how you break a child”
Ada’s story is told from her time before the birth, when she is a child pulsating in her mother’s womb, and the voices are not yet trapped in her body. That the voices feel as imprisoned by flesh as Ada does by them is brought home again and again throughout the book. The pre-birth and early childhood timeline allow a rare glimpse into the foundation for mental illness. Ada’s mother, Saachi, falls into a web of anxiety when Ada is young.
Akwaeke writes, “Every day for a month…Saachi would put Anuli down…then lie on the sofa and cover herself with Chima’s akwete blanket, all the way over her head, making a dark cave. The anxiety curled up on her chest like a cat and purred through her bones.” The spirits orchestrate a new job for Ada’s mother overseas. When she leaves, Ada’s troubled behaviour which includes violence and verbal aggression intensifies. As the spirits put it, “this is how you break a child, you know. Step one, take the mother away.”
The absence of her mother, a negligent father, and siblings with whom Ada has a turbulent equation exacerbate her condition. The reader is never given a diagnosis. From time to time, Ada quells the voices inside her long enough to attend a session of therapy before the voices punish and overpower her again. It is hinted that she may have a personality disorder, though this isn’t confirmed. It’s not that the novel isn’t interested in psychiatry. The self-harm, the talking back to her voices, and the compulsive sex take centerstage as the severity of her condition means that help eludes her.
Many voices, one body
The narrators of the story include the different voices (each of whom has a distinct personality and need for which Ada becomes a vessel), the collective voice of the spirits, and Ada herself. The spirits answer only to Ala, a female deity in Igbo tradition who represents fertility and morality. These contradictory impulses and beliefs clamour for space in Ada’s mind, with a voice going dormant for some time to resume control at a later moment. Moments of trauma birth new voices who shield Ada from the memory or take her away from the harmful situation. But they also choose to isolate her when it serves their purpose of bringing chaos to the human world.
As Ada grows into a young adult, she discovers that she feels no physical desire. It is only when she allows one of her voices to take over that part of her is able to enjoy sexual intimacy. The unequal power relations between the sexes, and the uncomfortable line between casual sex and developing feelings pose new mental health challenges for an already unstable Ada. Freshwater shines a light on the way university can be a particularly trying time for someone with mental illness.
Will she get better (and what does that mean?)
Freshwater scales in intensity like a song. The reader gets to know Ada as the spirits get to know her, as Ada gets to know herself. The necessary tension that arises between the various voices and Ada offers a plot unlike one we’ve seen before – will Ada get better? What even does getting better look like? In a novel that lasts less than two hundred pages, those questions alone are enough to keep the reader turning pages.
There are moments where being trapped in Ada’s mind can feel like claustrophobic reading. Some of Ada’s voices are less interesting than others. The novel performs best when she is responding to her relationships with her friends, her family, and her sexual partners. The tensions of the external world allow the reader to understand Ada’s condition in a much more nuanced way than when she is alone with her voices. It shows how traditional coping mechanisms fail Ada – her friends, her marriage, even her books. The only friend who understands Ada’s many selves is a Dominican girl called Malena for whom “it was normal…to be mounted and then left by saints, gods, spirits.”
Ada’s story is a reminder that the mind is an apparatus viewed differently in different cultures. Freshwater allows for an alternative perspective on mental illness based on Igbo spirituality.
It is distinct from the canon of mental illness literature that has come before it. It isn’t set in a sanitorium or in a darkened room that the ill person never leaves or along an arc of recovery or suicide. It follows her mind as she moves between Virginia, New York, and Lagos, inhabiting different relationships by planting her various selves in the situations they are best suited for. The novel isn’t fatalistic, but it does highlight that being mentally ill involves a long journey without easy recourse. In an uncomfortable and captivating novel, Akwaeke has opened the door to representing and seeing mental illness in a whole new way.
Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi, Faber & Faber