ogbanje (they/them) 
DEAR SENTHURAN, THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI, PET, FRESHWATER, CW: EVERYTHING (2022), YOU MADE A FOOL OF DEATH WITH YOUR BEAUTY (2022)
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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.
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.
These things can be present in the book without being the center. The center is spirit. The center is not human.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okay so do we read it with gender pronouns in mind? Or we just read it like a normal book?
Your writing, this book, is so beautiful. I think it’s incredibly important for readers to tap into something much deeper to appreciate spirit-led writing.
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