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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.