Akwaeke Emezi

Akwaeke Emezi (born 1987) is Nigerian-born writer and video artist of Igbo and Tamil descent.

Quotes

• I think multiple realities exist. Most colonised countries had their cosmology, their ontology, their metaphysics colonised too. They’ve been told that what was there before wasn’t real. My dad’s a pretty conservative Christian, but he’ll still get a pastor to come to the hospital [where he works as a doctor] because someone’s been working black magic. I say to him: “If you don’t believe in it, why is the pastor there?” He says: “You don’t need to believe in something for it to be real.”
  • On whether she believes in the spiritual world in “Akwaeke Emezi: ‘I’d read everything – even the cereal box’” in The Guardian (2018 Oct 20)

• …I read literally everything I could get my hands on – the shampoo bottle, the cereal box. My mom didn’t let us have books at the table or we’d all have read. We didn’t always have electricity, so I read by candlelight. I read really fast too. My parents realised I’d run out of things to read and were like: “We need to buy you way more books.”
  • On being a voracious reader as a child in “Akwaeke Emezi: ‘I’d read everything – even the cereal box’” in The Guardian (2018 Oct 20)

• …The novel is autobiographical, so I used my life as a chronological skeleton for the story, which meant revisiting a lot of things that were immensely painful. It was also a process of discovery – I had no outline for Freshwater, no idea how it was going to take shape, but it built itself as I was writing it.
  • On her work Freshwater in “AKWAEKE EMEZI | IN CONVERSATION” in Granta Magazine (2018 Oct 31)

• …Whenever you write something biographical, everyone in your family doesn’t share the same memory. So your version of the story is not necessarily their version of the story, and part of the flexibility in having it fictionalized is that there’s not really a need to adhere to the strict facts. Because everything is colored by memory, especially when you’re pulling from childhood memories. There’s a little bit of wiggle room. This is my story of these events, as I remember it, as I experienced it…
  • On including biographical details in “A SPIRIT BORN INTO A HUMAN BODY: TALKING WITH AKWAEKE EMEZI” in The Rumpus (2018 Feb 21)

The Death of Vivek Oji (2020)

• This was before Vivek, before the fire, before Chika would discover exactly how difficult it was to dig his own grave with the bones of his son.”
  • Chapter 2, Page 17

• There was nothing boiling in him, just a loud and clear exhale, a weight of peace wrapping around his heart.”
  • Chapter 2, Page 20

• Osita wished, much later, that he’d told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull, made Osita hard with desire. ‘Take it off,’ he snapped instead, his throat rough. ‘Put it back before they catch us.’”
  • Chapter 2, Pages 25-26

Freshwater(2018)

• Meanwhile, Ala continued to watch her child. After all, the Ada was her hatchling, her bloodthirsty little sun, covered in translucent scales.”

• (Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 45)
• Meanwhile, we were wrenched, dragged through the gates, across a river, and through the back door of the thin woman's womb, thrust into the rippling water and the small sleeping body floating within. It was time. When the fetus had been housed, we were allowed freedom, but it was going to be alone, no longer flesh within a house but a house itself, and we were the one meant to live in it... To be singled out and locked into the blurred consciousness of a little mind? We refused. It would be madness."

-- The We (chapter 1 paragraph 2)

External links

• Death of Vivek Oji
• Freshwater
• Freshwater