Writing the polyphonic African queer future: reflections on Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

Abstract

In reading Freshwater (2018), one cannot but confront the diversity of perspectives that Akwaeke Emezi deploys to usher their African queer protagonist into an African-oriented queer future. While there exists – or should exist – pluriversal notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, specific epistemologies produced by Eurocentric structures continue to govern these notions and drive liberational discourse. Drawing largely from Afro/Africanfuturism, Queer futurism, and cultural references drawn from African systems of thought, I argue that Emezi’s novel brings together modern technological intervention on the human body and Igbo cosmology to liberate the African queer body from Western dominant structures of knowledge and Africa’s cultural amnesia. I also argue that the futuristic perspectives deployed in Freshwater allows for the destabilizing of conventional knowledge at the level of language and imagery such that suppressed and new structures of consciousness are centered. This is shown through the emblematic figure of the deified African woman, the redemptive link between the female image and sacred python, the symbiosis between visual and non-visual components, and the polytheistic religious value of collaboration. I highlight, ultimately, that the intersection of technology and imagination for the goal of liberation, which critical futurism espouses, allows Emezi to regenerate the historiography of the Ogbanje without surrendering to the vocabulary of doom, misery and despair that frames their shortly lived human existence.

Keywords:

• Akwaeke Emezi
• queer literature
• Afrofuturism
• Ogbanje
• gender and sexuality

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of JALA, whose critical feedback has greatly improved this project.

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there is no competing interest to declare.

Notes

1 The idea of freedom technology, as developed in Isiah Lavender III’s Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement, means any kind of practical knowledge that helps Black people to control their actions and escape their downtrodden existence.

2 Critical fabulation as developed by Saidiya Hartman in “Venus in Two Acts” illustrates a narrative method that weaves present, past and future, and combines history and fiction with the purpose of transcending the narration of defeat as it relates to the lives of enslaved.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oluwadunni O. Talabi

Oluwadunni, O. Talabi is a Doctoral candidate in the North American and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies Department, University of Bremen, Germany. In the Spring of 2022, she was a visiting scholar at the African American Studies Department, Boston University, Massachusetts. She received her Master’s degree from Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster, Germany in 2017.