45 pages • 1 hour read
Akwaeke EmeziFreshwater
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Ada
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses sexual assault.
Ada is the protagonist of the story, yet Emezi only provides her first-person perspective three times throughout the book. Her words are few, but she is the body in which all of the relayed experience takes place. At the book’s outset, Ada is a helpless, lonely child. The ogbanje within her barely acknowledge her personhood, and Asughara does so even less when she arrives. Eventually, Ada pushes back against the total control of Asughara. She grasps onto Christ, Yshwa, for her entire life, even though he leaves her on her own sometimes. She spends time in the marble walls of her mind with these ogbanje, who become something like her friends and then even closer. Throughout the book, the python represents Ada’s true self. She is sacred and holy, but she is terrified of herself.
Throughout the book, her control over her own body evolves. As a child, she shows tendencies different from others: yelling, screaming, violence, and power. The ogbanje wake up when she is raped repeatedly in college by a man who claims to love her. In that moment, a singular first-person spirit, Asughara, is born. Asughara operates through her, embodying her when she has sex so that Ada does not have to relive her trauma. Ada endures sexual assault on several occasions through her childhood and young adulthood. Emezi connects this implicitly to the fact that Ada did not consent to Asughara (who controlled her body) having sex with men, especially those who were cruel and violent. Later, Leshi brings her back into control in her own body. Her character development from controlled to in control manifests in her embodied representation.
Through Ada, Emezi explores the connections and discords between the human and spiritual world. Ada marries Ewan, whom she meets in college. However, she is unable to fully surrender to him because of her multiplicity, so their marriage eventually dissolves. In Chapter 19, Ada writes a letter to Yshwa in which she confesses what she really wants, all of which are human traits: to rest and to be left alone with Yshwa to pray and to love. Later, rather than fighting the ogbanje and trying to win, she surrenders to them. The book ends with a unity between Ada and her spirits. She says that she “look[s] at them and it [is] the same as looking at [herself]” (208). She acknowledges her role as a child of a god rather than a human with ancestry and lineage. She prays to Ala, and she is no longer afraid.
Asughara
Asughara is born when Ada is raped in college by a boy who says that he loves her. She arises to protect Ada so that Ada does not have to confront her trauma. Asughara’s presence hence signifies The Lifelong Impact of Trauma. Asughara stays, vowing never to leave Ada alone in sex again. She is fierce, violent, brazen, and careless. She wants to control, have sex, and inflict and receive pain, regardless of what Ada wants. She desires human feelings and experiences, but she rejects human pain and consequences.
In the chapters written from Asughara’s perspective, she tries to convince both the reader and herself that she is doing the right thing. While she claims not to care about the feelings of useless human beings, she believes that she is protecting Ada, proving to herself that she does care about Ada’s feelings. However, she struggles to face Yshwa and receive love from him because she knows deep down that she is not helping Ada. The clash between her characteristically casual tone and her imploring rhetorical questions conveys her cognitive dissonance. When she has a confrontation with her brothersisters in which they express disappointment, she expresses anger, then confusion, and then regret. She cries like a human. The pain pushes her to try to convince Ada to kill herself, but she ultimately fails. At this point, she is tired and steps back.
Eventually, Asughara expresses her resentment toward humans for forcing her to be cruel, which Ada acknowledges as real pain and offers her love. Asughara listens to Yshwa teach love and softens a little, signaling her character development. She still steps up to help Ada, but she becomes tired of lying to herself and Ada. Once the priest sees them all for who they are, she struggles to find enough anger to fuel her. As she always has, she reminds Ada that the ogbanje are not her enemy but the thing standing between her and her enemy, reflecting the image of Ada wearing a “mask” during sex when Asughara is in control. Asughara is fiercely loyal to Ada, or tries to be, but also manipulates her to keep her weak and controllable because she enjoys cruelty. Asughara has more allegiance to Ada and more love for humanity than she wants to admit. As Ada becomes more powerful, Asughara still steps forward but no longer controls her, representing healing from trauma.
Saachi
Saachi is Ada’s mother, a constant human figure throughout the book. She is relentless, and many of the spirits have empathy for her as the mother of a godlike figure, unable to truly help because it is so far beyond her control. When her children are young, Saachi takes a job in Saudi Arabia, leaving her children with her husband. The ọgbanje credit their brothersisters for making this happen in order to isolate and break Ada, but they also acknowledge that, in many ways, it gave Saachi freedom. She leaves Saul, her indifferent and careless husband, and she remains present in her children’s lives throughout their adult years. She picks up the phone and tries her best to intervene when she deems necessary. After expressing discontent over Ada’s gender-affirming surgery, she helps Ada to recover, offering her unconditional love. Despite her powerlessness, she develops as a character through her relationship with Ada.
Saachi eats many mangoes while pregnant. Mangoes, also referred to later in Ada’s letter to Yshwa, symbolize peace and simplicity. Saachi was dealt an impossible hand by the gods, but she rises at nearly every occasion. In the final chapter, they say that “Saachi [is] different, she [is] a selected human” (208). In the same way that Ada was chosen, Saachi was chosen to be her mother, drawing a comparison between her and the Virgin Mary. While the stated goal of the ogbanje is to torture the child’s mother in perpetuity unless they can figure out how to destroy the spirit, the ogbanje show sympathy for Saachi, even saying that Ada belongs to her as well as them.
Saachi’s role in Ada’s life is always available but not always present. She moves to the US to be closer to her children, she gives Saul lots of chances, and she always picks up the phone. She sees changes in Ada before Ada herself sees them. In the novel, Saachi is the closest a human can come to being respected by the gods.
Saint Vincent
Saint Vincent arrives later in the novel. He is different from the other ogbanje in that he is gentle, not controlling. He is quiet and holy with long fingers and appears to Ada in her dreams. He represents a compassionate side of the ogbanje and often assumes the role of comforting them in the marble room. He drives Ada toward exploring her gender expression and sexuality, trying binders, dating women, and getting breast reduction surgery. He represents the novel’s ideas about Multiplicity: Refusal of the Binary. His hungers are vastly different from Asughara’s in that they build and simmer before they are big enough to act upon.
He creates a dream body that has a penis and experiments with having sex with the body in the marble rooms of her mind. Reinforcing his refusal of binary ideas, he is pure, but he wants to explore. When he arrives, Ada is not surprised because she had been feeling a presence that seemed like him for a long time—the desire to be able to be both boy and girl and quietly explore.
For Asughara, he symbolizes the importance of telling no one about the ogbanje. When Ada tries to describe him in relation to her sexuality and gets rejected by a friend, Asughara uses the feeling of embarrassment and shame to force Ada never to talk about him again.
Saint Vincent often acts as an arbiter inside the marble room of her mind, hugging Ada and talking her down. He mediates, telling Asughara that “she didn’t mean it like that” when Ada stands up against her (137). He is therefore an integral part of the novel’s exploration of healing from trauma.
Saint Vincent is holier than the others, especially as compared to Asughara, as evidenced by his name including the word “Saint.” He balances the hot rage of Asughara and the passivity of Ada. His desires are gentler and more productive, and when he gets what he wants, he is satisfied in a way that Asughara is not. He is ready to be a part of something bigger than just himself, so he more easily meshes with the others in Ada’s mind.
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