After Oji allows his hair to grow past his shoulders and abandons his parents’ dream that he’ll attend university in America, some of his relatives become convinced that he’s “sick”, or possessed by a demon.Įmezi has a gift for prose that is often as visceral, tender and heartbreaking as what it describes.
At this stage, his father’s fearful insistence on dismissing the mark as mere coincidence seems full of foreboding. This spiritual conjoining will become significant later in the novel, when Oji tells his friends that they can “refer to him as either she or he, that he was both”. We learn that Oji was born on the same day as his grandmother’s death, with a scar like a “soft starfish” on his foot that matched hers. He is alive, then dead, then alive again, sometimes all in the same paragraph, setting up a framework in which his posthumous narration makes perfect sense. One minute we’re with Oji in childhood, playing with his mother’s jewellery, “placing one of the necklaces against his sternum, over his silver chain, clipping his ears with the earrings … so beautiful he made the air around him dull”, the next we’re once again in the burned-down market. “They burned down the market the day Vivek Oji died,” it begins, interspersing recollections of Oji from friends and family with snippets of his own testimony from beyond the grave. Their new novel occupies a similar spiritual plane. A kwaeke Emezi’s Women’s prize-longlisted debut Freshwater was narrated by the multiple selves inhabiting a young Nigerian woman who was born with “one foot on the other side”.
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