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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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.
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