Dear Senthuran A Black spirit memoir

Akwaeke Emezi

Book - 2021

"A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times-bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji, "a dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual self" (Esquire). "I want to write as if I am free," Akwaeke Emezi declares in the opening of this utterly original spiritual and creative memoir. In the novels Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, Emezi introduced the landscape of Nigerian childhood through the medium of fiction. Now, the award-winning author lifts the veil of invention to reveal the harrowing yet inspiring truths of their personal, spiritual, and artistic journey--from the social constraints of childhood in Aba, Nigeria, through a lifetime of discoveries ...involving sexuality, storytelling, and self, to their determination to carve their way through the thorny labyrinth of the publishing world. Interweaving candid, intimate letters to friends, lovers, and family, Emezi reveals the raw pain of their journey as a spirit in the human world, the perils of all-consuming love and intimacy, and the hard-earned reward of achieving both literary recognition and a peaceful, joyous home. Electrifying and radically honest, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes their fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of what it means to embody multiple spirits, to fight for survival, and to bend the world to one's will"--

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Riverhead Books 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Akwaeke Emezi (author)
Physical Description
232 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780593329191
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji, 2020) bears the weight of a special responsibility. As an ogbanje, a malevolent Igbo spirit born into a human body, the writer feels the need to break the cycle of reincarnation. In this high-voltage epistolary memoir written as a series of letters to friends, family, acquaintances, and role models, Emezi describes how removal of their uterus along with a double mastectomy lets them come to shaky terms with their complex identities. The fiery prose describes a difficult childhood in Nigeria, a fractured relationship with their parents, and the challenges of fitting into traditional societal roles. At times the red-hot intensity of their world can be a bit difficult to take in: "Dear Senthuran, The first time I met you, we sat in the cafe on Malcolm X that doesn't exist anymore and talked about eating people, carving them up in tender moments, swallowing their meat and gristle," Emezi writes. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable memoir by a writer who doesn't shy away from sharing their ambitions or their vulnerabilities.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) reflects on their spiritual and creative evolution in this gorgeous epistolary memoir. Among the cast of recipients they address are friends, family, an ex-lover, Toni Morrison, and Senthuran Varatharajah, their German translator, who inspired the work's form. Originally from Aba, Nigeria, Emezi identifies as ogbanje, an Igbo spirit that's also a god. They are "embodied but not human," an existential tension that governed their life as they traveled the globe in their 20s in search of home and themselves. Emezi eventually settled down in New Orleans in 2019, but their search for self continues in each letter as they shed old "masks," outgrow relationships, and undergo a hysterectomy to align their human body with their "spiritself." Emezi details the loneliness that comes with being "estranged from the indigenous Black realities" and is unwavering in their demand that readers meet them on their terms, even if they might be considered "too strange, too arrogant." Yet in consistently captivating prose, Emezi demonstrates that it is precisely this unyielding belief in themself that catapulted their career, clinching literary awards and six-figure book deals. Those interested in broadening their metaphysical understanding of the world would do well to pick up this spellbinding work. Agent: Krisi Murray, The Wylie Agency. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

With this first work of nonfiction, best-selling novelist Emezi writes an expressive memoir in letters, with an overlapping focus on spirit, divinity, and humanity. For Emezi, these epistolary essays--addressed to friends, family, and lovers, some close, some estranged--are an exercise in memory and a warning not to forget the past. Aspiring writers will appreciate the candid letters that document the writing process behind Emezi's Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, which make clear that the author's success was far from guaranteed. Poignant letters also recount Emezi's dysphoria and efforts to reshape their body to reflect their spirit. The author is at their best when delineating the difficulties of hypervisibility; of being at once seen and unseen as a queer disabled Black writer. The body, in all its forms, is a recurring subject here, and Emezi movingly contemplates a body's mental and physical limitations. What sets the book apart is that its letters span time and place, from the author's native Nigeria, to Malaysia, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and beyond, reflecting their life and search for freedom--including the moments when Emezi doesn't know what their freedom might look like. VERDICT A must for fans of Freshwater; readers new to Emezi's writing will find themselves drawn in by their way with words.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A unique, visceral memoir from the author of The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). How does a spirit child drawn from Nigerian tribal cosmology negotiate modern life? That's the metaphysical conundrum at the heart of this highly personal and unusual memoir. Emezi grew up in Aba, Nigeria, and identifies as ogbanje, an "Igbo spirit that's born to a human mother, a kind of trickster that dies unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again." In order to ameliorate their feelings of "flesh dysphoria" or "metaphysical dysphoria," the author underwent multiple surgeries, including breast reduction and a "hysterectomy with a bilateral salpingectomy." As Emezi writes, they chose "to mutate my body into something that would fit my spiritself." Structured as a series of far-ranging letters written to friends, lovers, exes, family members, and others, the narrative raises questions about the author's "embodied nonhuman" existence and Igbo conceptions of reality. While Emezi's personal and professional travels have taken them around the world--Trinidad, Berlin, Johannesburg, Vietnam, Tanzania, and homes in Brooklyn and New Orleans--this book is not a travelogue. Although conventional elements of memoir reoccur--a painful breakup, estrangement from family members, career ups and downs--the author presents them as manifestations of a deity's "deeply traumatic" embodiment as a human being. Emezi attributes much of their meteoric rise--multiple literary award wins and nominations, National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honoree, etc.--to the casting of the right spell. The author is crystal-clear in their focus on "writing for people like me, not for a white gaze," and seen through the prism of Igbo ontology, this adventurous life story is undoubtedly compelling. For some readers, getting past Emezi's "outrageously arrogant" demand "for attention, for glory, for worship" as a self-described "bratty deity" may require a leap of faith and a modicum of empathy, a merely human trait. Tribal spiritual beliefs meet contemporary literary acclaim in a powerful memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Nowhere | Dear Katherine It is the middle of June. The Black Sea is turquoise, stained by blooms of phytoplankton and polished with undulating mirrors, sunlight reflecting in ripples over the water. I stand on a tumble of rocks, holding an empty plastic water bottle and listening as the waves spit foam into the quiet of the morning. Seagulls wheel and yell against the sky. A magician I am falling in love with has asked me to bring him back a drop or two of the sea, this specific sea, the one I am close to. I meant to retrieve it-this seapiece-when I went swimming the other day, but I forgot. Instead I stood thigh deep in a cloud of green algae for an hour, my calves numb and my back burning. None of it made me feel as if I was anywhere. Perhaps it was the traveling, airports, and rough blue seats blurring into safety announcements, or the cities-white chocolate drizzled on a waffle at a picnic in Johannesburg, an Orthodox monk walking through a thunderstorm in Sofia, a little girl with afro-puffs selling homemade lemonade in Brooklyn. Maybe it was the homelessness-a terminated lease in Trinidad, too many guest rooms in too many countries. They say the word nomad like it has a rough glamour, but in my mouth it is jet-lagged, wearing a sheet mask with fifteen minutes left, a draped attempt to fix its dehydration. I don't even mind anymore. The state of my body matches that of my mind-floating, tripped, and suspended amid clouds, crashing down into borders, lonely. Nowhere seems real; all the people are constructs. I have stopped fighting detachment and started learning how to sink into it instead. Rumi suggests being dead to this world and alive only to God; in Sozopol, a former monk leans across a dinner table with bright stained-glass eyes and tells me about the types of nothingness in Buddhism. I tell him that my search for somewhere to be is really a search for self, and the only self I feel at home with is one that doesn't exist, not anymore, one that's been taken apart, whipped into dust. I tie back my hair, so it doesn't interfere with my eyes, and start climbing down toward the sea. My sneakers slide slowly over the wet rock and I drop my legs into crevices, press my palm against outcrops. The rest of the land grows higher and higher as I sink. The sea pulls. I could see how people would try to lose themselves in it, when the detachment gets too strong, when the urge to be nowhere becomes an action. I unscrew the cap from the bottle I'm carrying and crouch on a rock, dropping my hand and waiting for the surf to wash it full. I feel utterly alone. The water is clear inside the faint blue plastic. I should leave-I have buses and planes to catch-but this curve of nothing feels too right, so I sit there for a long time. I text the magician, tell him about the way the sun turns the rocks into cradles and clothes-racks. Perhaps, with time, if I waited here long enough, I could dissolve into foam and be withdrawn into something vaster than my immediate body. I want to be nothing, nowhere. The magician texts me back. I too am turquoise, he says, stained by phytoplankton. Fire | Dear Jahra Kerosene burns nearly everything. Growing up, our house was sometimes invaded by soldier ants, rivers of red, clacking bodies that ran over our windowsills and bit us with thoroughness. We soaked newspaper in kerosene to make torches and burnt the ants back, singeing our carpets and bathtubs. The price of petrol kept climbing, so we transferred all our cooking over to the small green kerosene stove and watched as the pots blackened. In the dry season, we raked dead leaves into a pile next to the borehole that didn't work, sprinkled some kerosene, and dropped a flame. I remember being amazed at how a little wetness could lead to such fire. My little sister and I danced around the blaze until we got called in and scolded for getting smoke in our hair. When you try to burn a person, it is cheaper to use kerosene instead of petrol. I spent my entire childhood in Aba, a commercial town in the south of Nigeria, where both my siblings were born. When I came back to the country after leaving for college, I knew from my first circling of the Lagos crowd that the location of my childhood could serve as ammunition against people who thought I didn't belong, that I wasn't Nigerian enough. No one argues with Aba. It was my best card-better even than being born in Umuahia, where my father and grandfather were born. It made me "authentic" in a way that was absolute; you couldn't question if someone who grew up in Aba was a "real" Nigerian, even though it didn't match what people assumed my background was. I looked and smelled too foreign, even down to my blood, so I must have grown up outside Nigeria or, at the very least, spent all my holidays abroad. The truth felt like a story. I wanted to tell them how we never had running water, how cockroach eggs gelled into the egg grooves of the fridge door, how the concrete over the soakaway broke and stayed open, the rancid smell becoming part of our air. We longed after green apples that were too expensive, three for a hundred naira swinging in a plastic bag, and we knew the intimate taste of ketchup smearing red on white bread, the cheap oiliness of margarine mixed into boiled rice, the accompanying shame. I didn't say any of this. I just smiled and listened to the jokes about how Aba people can make and sell a fake version of anything, even a glass of water. I grew up with piles of books to read, bought secondhand from the post office on Ikot-Ekpene Road or sent from our cousins in London or pulled from my parents' separate collections. While the town was burning from the riots, my sister and I believed in invisible fairies, pixies hiding in our backyard. We had cats spilling over our carpets, a dog with raw, bleeding ears, and several Barbie dolls sent from Saudi Arabia, where my mother had moved in 1996. I didn't know that I'd never live with her again. When our turkeys got fowl pox, we caught them and pinned them under our feet and learned that you could treat the pox with palm oil. When the dogs got maggots, we learned that applying careful pressure to the sore made them fall, white and wriggling, to the sand. We learned not to touch your mouth after handling bitterleaf, or touch your eyes after peeling yam, because the first ruins your tongue and the itch of the second can blind you. We mimicked the priests during Mass at CKC, whispering under our breath when we were meant to be silent. Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. On the drive home, we passed the familiar heap of decomposing bodies dumped outside the teaching hospital, their loss loud in the air. We played in the car. We stayed children. After a pickup truck shattered my sister's leg in 1995, my father forbade us to ride okadas, saying that the roads were too dangerous. I disobeyed often, leaning into the wind and raising my heels away from the burning exhaust so my slippers wouldn't melt. The first time I climbed on one, my best friend called out my name, distracting me, and I burned the inside of my leg on the metal. She made a face. "Look out for the exhaust pipe," she said. By the time I went to school the next day, my burn had bubbled up and split. I packed it with powder and two types of iodine, till it was ugly and crusted in purples and reds. Eventually it scarred flat, and I learned to climb onto motorcycles from the other side. After I burned my sister's left thigh, I learned that hot wounds always bubble reliably, whether you make them with metal or, in her case, water. We were all sitting to breakfast at the dining table one morning, the way my mother liked it when she was there, with the Milo and sugar and powdered milk and everything laid out. I reached over to grab the handle of the hot-water flask, but our brother hadn't screwed the top back on properly, so when the flask toppled over, it spilled a steaming river over my sister's school uniform, scalding her leg. She jumped up screaming and ran into the parlor, everyone rushing to her while I apologized frantically. I think they cracked a raw egg over the burn, viscous and yellow. It was the second time I'd seen the skin of her leg do unnatural things. The first was when the pickup had dragged her down Okigwe Road, but her skin had opened differently then, more intricately, chopped up by white bone screaming out of the pulpy red. My best friend's father fixed it. I learned that humans are meat. Bodies in the sun smell unbearable after a week because meat goes bad, but they smell even worse a week later. One evening, it rained while I was walking back home, and in the flooded water of Faulks Road, I learned that a dead body will float and even bob. I learned that brains were gray before I was eleven, from the tarmac of Brass Junction, from the cracked calabash of what was a person's head. We looked at it every day on our way to school, holding our breath as we drove through the junction and turned left on Aba-Owerri Road, heading toward Abayi. I learned that we can bear much more than we predict. When the armed robberies in Aba got too bad, to the point where you could report one to the police and they would just make sure to avoid the area, a team of young vigilantes formed in response. They called themselves the Bakassi Boys. Their headquarters were in Ariaria Market, and we often saw them as we returned from school, their vehicles whistling down the road. They dangled out of car windows and off bus roofs, waving machetes and guns streaming with red and yellow strips of cloth. They killed and burned thieves, hacking them with machetes, throwing a tire and that faithful kerosene over them, then leaving the corpses out as warnings and reminders. No one dared to remove the bodies until it was allowed. When I was fourteen, we went to Malaysia to see my grandparents, and I told one of my cousins about the Bakassi Boys. "That's terrible, that they're killing people," she said as we walked on the beach. I looked at her like she didn't make sense. Even our own state governor had allowed the killings-just like he allowed the riots in 2000 after the massacre of Igbos in Kaduna, after they stacked our dead in lorries and sent them back to us. Looking back, I think about how casual taking a life was, how young I must have been. I learned other things in Aba: that a mother you see once a year is a stranger, no matter how much you cry for her in the long months when she's gone. That if my father is a man who will wield a machete at the NEPA worker who came to check the meter, then I cannot tell him what our neighbor who took my sister to the hospital after the pickup accident did to me, because at twelve I am entirely too young for that kind of blood on my hands. They treated that neighbor like a hero; he called my sister his little wife for years. We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict. I told a friend some of this during a lunch in Lagos-not the parts about myself, just about the bodies and the curfews and the ritual kidnappings they called Otokoto and the time they burnt down the mosque and killed every Muslim person they could find, murdering three hundred Northerners in the two days after the lorries arrived with the bodies from Kaduna, when we got five days off from school and stayed at home and saw the ashes in front of the Customs House. I told her how a classmate had joked with me then that I should be careful. "You know you resemble a Northerner," he said. I told her about the rumors of a Muslim man who could pass for Igbo, and so when they came for him, he joined the mob and killed his own people to stay alive, to prove he was one of us. I told her about the woman next door, whose gateman was a shoemaker from the North, how she hid him and his five-year-old son in their boysquarters. When the child heard the noise in the street, he tried to run out to see what it was, but she caught him and beat him and sent him back. He was five. We shared an avocado tree with their compound. We were sitting in Freedom Park when I said these things, and my friend stared at me the whole time, horrified. "You're making that up," she said. "Are you serious?" "It was Aba in the nineties," I reminded her. "I thought everyone in Nigeria grew up like this." I hadn't expected her to be surprised. She was Nigerian too, after all, and older than me. Surely, she'd seen worse things. "No, everyone did not grow up like that!" She was agitated. "Why don't you write about this?" I shrugged because it was just death and Aba was just Aba. None of it had seemed worth writing about. I could hear how the stories sounded when I said them out loud, dark like old blood, like I was supposed to be traumatized, different, like something in me, perhaps my innocence, should've caught a whiff of kerosene and gone crackly and black, too, smoking away like suya edges. Except I felt like nothing had happened. In college, I had a friend from Serbia who wouldn't even talk about the things he'd seen. I had a girlfriend in New York who'd spent years of her childhood in the middle of the war in Liberia. We know that life churns on, bloody and normal, as sacrilegious as that sounds. After I wrote Freshwater, I had to reconcile with the fact that I'm not even human. What does that mean about how I see life, or, more important, death? I am thinking of the place I grew up in and the self that was formed there, the version of me who knows that a body is meat but also someone's child. I am thinking of how the darkness can live inside your memories, even as a town goes aflame twenty years ago. Excerpted from Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.