Most of the times it gets translated as a spirit that’s born into a human body. The Rumpus: In your artist statement, you write about Freshwater as part of a multidisciplinary series depicting your progression as an ogbanje, “from unawareness to clarity.” How would you describe ogbanje, and why it’s central to your work?Īkwaeke Emezi: It’s a bit of a difficult term to describe, just because it’s not an English term. In this interview, Emezi talks about Freshwater, her public and private identities, and deciding when to translate culture for readers. Rooted in Emezi’s realities, Freshwater is part of The Unblinding, a multi-year, multidisciplinary series of self-portraits that also includes Emezi’s paintings and videos. When Ada goes to America for college, these selves gain power after a traumatic event, and Ada’s life takes a dangerous turn. With “one foot on the other side,” she experiences a fractured self. An unusual child, she’s prone to violent bouts of anger and grief. When the story opens, Ada is an infant in southern Nigeria. The essay chronicles the surgeries Emezi underwent to transition, procedures she calls “a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature.” Those realities include her identity as a non-binary trans person and as an ogbanje.īut the definition also applies to Ada, the main character in Emezi’s stunning debut novel Freshwater, released this month.

Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist Akwaeke Emezi offers this definition in a recent essay for New York’s The Cut. An ogbanje is an Igbo spirit that’s born into a human body, a kind of malevolent trickster, whose goal is to torment the human mother by dying unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again.

Freshwater by akwaeke emezi