Freshwater, an Autobiographical Novel

Autobiographical Novel

A new autobiographical Nigerian novel called Freshwater is making news. It’s already out in the US and I’m eager to read it. I saw a note about it in Ainehi Edoro’s blog and then learned more from Africa in Words.

According to that blog, the author Akwaeke Emezi is Nigerian and Tamil. She has received several scholarships and prizes for her short stories and other works, but her name was new to me. This is her first novel.

Ada – an Igbo name meaning daughter – is the protoganist of Freshwater. The article about the book says that as the story unfolds, the reader learns that Ada has lived before. In fact she experiences multiple lives within herself.

An Igbo person will recognize her as obanje.

I’ve usually thought of obanje as a child who keeps dying and reappearing, torturing the parents. Achebe wrote about obanje in Things Fall Apart. The wife of the main character gives birth to many children before one finally lives past childhood, or as the story would have it, “agrees to stay.”

Reviews of Freshwater, Most Positive

Several Amazon reviewers say the book is wonderful and amazing, while another says she was so confused she didn’t finish it! I’m really curious!

I can imagine it requires the reader to let go of the expectation of a straight plot line.

Author and Sister

The author and her sister were featured in Vogue in February. Annie Leibowitz photographed them for a story called “5 Families Who Are Changing the World as We Know It.”

Chloe Schama wrote the accompanying piece about the sisters. Akwaeke’s sister Yagazie is a photographer. She bears scars from an accident when she was six years old. She is currently working on “a series of photographs of people from African communities that presents scars less as a result of violence and more as a testament to lived experience.”

Schama says, “Through different forms, the sisters see themselves as part of a larger endeavor to break with norms and tradition.” About the book Freshwater, Schama says it is, “a stunning debut novel, a beguiling book that skips from Nigeria to Virginia to Brooklyn, drawing from Igbo tradition and the author’s own autobiography.”

Half-Caste — an Acceptable Term?

If you read my memoir you may remember a story about the term half-caste.

In the early 1980s I was working with two or three other Nigerwives to plan a program. We wanted some of our children to talk about their experience of growing up with parents from two different cultures.

I retell the story a little differently in my new book (which is still not quite done). Here’s what I say:

We thought about questions to ask the children. Which children would be willing to speak was a question we discussed, and which mothers would encourage their children to take part.

Then we thought about a title for the panel. “Lessons from Our Children” seemed right, but how to describe the children? Mixed-race was wrong—many children had two Black parents. Double nationality was too cumbersome. Besides, a few parents had not given their children passports from the mother’s country.

Someone said, “‘Half-caste’ is what I’ve heard children called. But it sounds so hateful and demeaning.”

“Let’s get the children together and ask them what they call themselves,” Barbara suggested. We divided up the task of contacting the mothers whose children we hoped would participate. We were able to gather five children two weeks later for a last planning session before we needed to get our publicity together.

“We’ve been debating what name to give you as a group,” I said to the participants. “We want to announce the title of the panel as ‘Lessons from Our . . . Children.’ How do you describe yourselves?”

They did not hesitate. “We’re half-castes,” they said proudly.

My editor asked if this is still a respectable word in Nigeria for bicultural children. I don’t know the answer.

I emailed my own children but haven’t heard back. I’m sure one of my children was a panelist – it might have been Beth!

I posted the question on Facebook yesterday evening.

A few people answered and two had questions. I answered one question and planned to go back later. But now I can’t find the post or the replies! Any suggestions on how to find “old” posts?

I hope you will have a comment! If for some reason the “Comments” doesn’t work, you can send an email and I can copy your comment into the right place! (It doesn’t seem to work for my sister.)

I wonder if Akwaeke Emezi and her sister would call themselves half-castes?