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.
Themes
The Lifelong Impact of Trauma
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses sexual assault, self-harm, suicide, domestic abuse, and mental illness.
Throughout the novel, Ada experiences trauma. When she is young, she is molested, abused, and neglected. She watches her sister get hit by a truck. In college, she is raped. Then, inhabited by ogbanje who gain more control, her body is used for their pleasure and exploration.
The impact of these events manifests through the ogbanje. It is during the sexual assault that Asughara is born, and when Ada’s family fails to protect her as a child, Smoke and Shadow are forced to step in. They begin to separate selves so that Ada does not have to live in her body with the knowledge of what happened to her. They create so many selves, all separate from one another, in order to forget, but the issue becomes that she no longer knows what is real and what is not. The question of “Who was the real Ada?” goes unanswered for much of the novel (199), but to answer it would be to relive those memories. This central conflict therefore suggests that trauma disrupts the sense of self and leaves one vulnerable to the control of others.
When Ada finds real happiness in her relationship with Ewan, this is what dissolves it all. Her past selves are locked up within her so deeply that even she cannot access them, and so she cannot give herself to Ewan. Because of what Soren did to her, she cannot inhabit her own body during sex. The one time that she does, she sobs to Asughara to make sure it never happens again. As Ada says to Asughara, “What kind of wife can’t make love to her husband?” (165). The fact that her search for identity is again given in a question reinforces her struggles with her sense of self. Asughara, even more emotionally removed, only calls sex “fucking” because she cannot bear to feel the pain that would come with vulnerability. Emezi presents the loss of pleasure and human connection as another significant impact of trauma.
Slowly, Ada learns how to live in her body and keep track of her experiences. She tattoos her skin to “remind herself of her past versions” (199), referencing the recurring idea of shedding old skin, which illustrates the slow process of healing from trauma. The pain suffices to satisfy the ogbanje’s hunger, so Ada is able to stop cutting herself. Even after the priest in Nigeria sees her truly and she knows what she must do, she is distraught after living without these truths for so long.
The trauma that she experiences leaves marks, physically, mentally, and spiritually, but at the end of the novel when Ada begins to come into herself as a child of gods, there is an acceptance and a fearlessness that Ada finds through Ala. She begins to appreciate life as a circle, with the process of death and resurrection as part of the process, including all of the pain.
Spiritual Connection Versus Western Medicine
Several times in this novel, Western science comes into contact with spirits, at times working for the same result. They are most often at odds, one side pulling Ada and one side pulling the ogbanje, so that they must struggle for power against each other. Ada’s human ties to family, science, and love threaten to drag her away from herself, but in the end, she is forced to acknowledge that she is in fact a god in human flesh.
Emezi presents a balance of the supposedly dichotomous concepts throughout the novel. The brothersisters of the ogbanje take credit for pushing away Saachi in Ada’s youth, but the reason that Saachi left was to get plastic surgery to help her daughter’s mangled leg after being hit by a truck. Both medical need and spiritual forces push Saachi away from their family, making it easier for the ogbanje to isolate Ada. In the same way, when Ada begins to explore gender reconstructive surgery, both Western medicine and spiritual guidance are required for her to reach this end. The ogbanje say that “[t]he girl belong[s] to [them],” yet Ada has to go to therapy to get permission for this surgery, and Ada’s human mother took care of her in her recovery (182). This suggests that these concepts need not always be dichotomous and that a balance can be found for human benefit.
Nevertheless, these competing forces manifest in the ongoing struggle between Ada herself and the ogbanje within her. They have their own oaths and desires to fulfill—they want to go home, back to the other side, and back to their brothersisters, but that means death for Ada. Asughara attempts to kill Ada using pills, the ultimate symbol of Western medicine, and the other ogbanje say that Asughara is a fool because “none of [them] die like this” (176). Asughara is lured by a death promised by medicine, but she forgets that Ala controls Ada’s death anyway, suggesting the limitations of Western medicine compared to spiritual connection.
Ada and the ogbanje clash most obviously in the idea of mental illness versus spiritual difference. When Ada can no longer live with Asughara in her mind, she goes to therapy and researches multiple personality disorder while Asughara sits by, judging and brooding over her attempt for explanations beyond the spiritual and angry that “[the ogbanje] [are] not enough” (135). In the end, rather than trying to control or dispel them through Western medicine, Ada goes home to Nigeria and speaks to historians and religious figures and learns the spiritual truth of her life. They advise her to go deeper, so she seeks her mother, Ala, and feels freer in her own body. When she accepts the limitations of Western medicine and the power of spiritual connection, the fear dissolves and she assumes her place as a god rather than a human.
Multiplicity: Refusal of the Binary
Multiplicity is demonstrated within Ada’s own mind, where ogbanje spirits converse, experiment, dream, and idle within her, all exerting their desires in their own ways. Ada is far from alone in her brain.
Emezi explores multiplicity through the idea of gender. The ogbanje have brothersisters who wait for them to return home; rather than being neither brother nor sister, they are both brother and sister. Emezi implies that, together, they mean more than either “brother” or “sister” does alone. The ogbanje themselves like to explore gender expression, as evidenced by Saint Vincent. As a child, Ada floats between being a boy and a girl because people can see her as both. After puberty, she can no longer explore in this way, but later in life, she explores her gender by getting a breast reduction. Even then, Ada does not rush to another end of a binary; she explores further to find what makes her feel comfortable, blending gendered attributes in clothing and hair to reach her own peace.
Emezi also explores the idea of being in two worlds at once. When she is young, Ada struggles to be in reality because she has “one foot on the other side” (35). She is constantly being pulled in two directions—life and death. Moreover, the gates that brought the ogbanje into Ada remain open rather than sending her fully in either place. Because of the issue with the gates, Ada is fated to live her life as a bridge between worlds. Even in the end, Ada does not choose between them. She proudly lives as a god in a human body, emphasizing the possibilities of embracing multiplicity and rejecting binary thinking.
Multitudes are found in each character, even the ogbanje who are meant to be evil spirits inhabiting a child to torture their mother. They try to stay cold toward Ada and the world, but they cry and feel shame, sadness, pain, and pride. Ada herself is home to gods with these complex emotions and desires; she is home to multitudes. After spending her whole life trying to be herself without them, she finally accepts them as a part of her, living in multiplicity.
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By Akwaeke Emezi
