akwaeke emeziKonto zweryfikowane

Another excerpt from the memoir ‘Fire/Dear Jahra’ is currently up at @lithub! Originally published as ‘Sometimes The Fire Is Not Fire’ on Olisa, this was one of my very first nonfiction pieces so it was dope to edit it for this book #DearSenthuranhttps://twitter.com/lithub/status/1404453994718797836?s=20 …

With only Black journalists, actually.https://twitter.com/scalawagmag/status/1404434196798443524 …

Facts on facts on facts.https://twitter.com/NotNikyatu/status/1404414241696845830 …

I’m also interested in how writing spiritfirst in an industry that doesn’t really reckon with spirit places my work, but I know eye will always place it where it belongs, centered in spirit. My job is to hold that center, and as Morrison said, wait for the world to move over.

But I *am* going to chime in, especially when I see people framing their subjective experiences of the work as something objective. I want us to question how our own centers affect our engagement with the work, and what power dynamics might lie in that.

It says ‘a Black spirit memoir’ right on the cover, fam. For the record, I think these are all conversations around the work, and as the creator, I’m going to chime in. There is no perfect way to read. You can take whatever works for you from a book, that’s the point of them.

This applies to DEAR SENTHURAN as well. It’s so easy for people to cherry-pick what they want to and then describe the book as *primarily* that. Emphasizing my surgeries, for example, which just seems sensationalist to me.

You cannot separate white supremacy/colonialism/etc from reading a text centered in Igbo ontology, about an entity specific to Igbo reality, and then describing it as something else, without thinking about why you can’t hold the indigenous center and what you might be erasing.

Readers can take whatever they want from the book, as usual, but let’s be real about which texts get their centers acknowledged and respected, and which centers get shuffled around to make the work more palatable.

These things can be present in the book without being the center. The center is spirit. The center is not human.

It’s frustrating because a lot of people read FW, then read my essay in the Cut, and decided that the center of the book must be nonbinary identity. Which to me, is just another flavor of when people tried to shift the center over to mental illness.

A note on Freshwater—it is *not* a book about nonbinary/trans identity through an Igbo lens, ffs. It is not about gender whatsoever and framing it as that is trying to force it over to a human/Western center. It is about embodiment as an ogbanje.