Books: Freshwater

‘How do you survive when they place a god inside your body? … It should be no surprise that her skin would split or her mind would break.’

There exists within the Igbo, Yoruba, and Urhobo communities of Southern Nigeria the cultural belief in the Ogbanje.¹ In its simplest description, the Ogbanje are spiritual entities that enter a child on the day of its birth. The child will hear the voice of the Ogbanje internally; the spirit will make obscure and relentless demands that are often damaging to the body, and if the requests are not met the Ogbanje will threaten to die, taking the child’s life with it.² Ogbanje children live in perpetual conflict with the self; part-human, part-spirit: ‘... half of [their] loyalty is to the human lineage of [their] birth; the other half remains committed, even if unconsciously committed, to the capricious world of spiritual forces.’³

For the Ogbanje child, life is a ceaseless war.

Within Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater, the Ogbanje spirits are our narrators as they invade the mind, body, and life of a young girl named Ada. Akin to the torture of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, tied to a chair, eyes prised open, we watch powerless as Ada endures the harshest of realities, as the voices in her head, with no moral compass, imprison her within her own mind, and force her direction through life.

Freshwater, however, is in no way an exploitative text. Emezi has produced a novel that explores the depths of abusive relationships, both with others and the self; challenges conservative views on personal identity within a society where many are focused on retaining a binary perception of gender and appearance; and most potently demands a re-evaluation of what it means to suffer from mental illness.

To delineate between ‘good’ and ‘poor’ mental health is not easy to do without falling into cliché, and via the use of differing Ogbanje voices and perspectives, each with varying pains, pleasures, and motives, Emezi is able to present an original discussion on the complexity of the human mind, our internal voices, and the depth of our emotions: ‘It was too late for the Ada to do anything except try to keep up with us [Ogbanje], try not to be doomed in the liminal fluid we swam in.’

As a reader of Freshwater you will become Ada, attempting to stay afloat in a torrential current. But on making it to the end, you will have experienced a unique and incredibly important novel; an analysis and examination of mental illness, perceptions of mental illness, spirituality, misogyny, identity, isolation, exploitation, abuse, and much more.

Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019, Freshwater is a wholly original, challenging, and harrowing text; one that you will not forget.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2020