Akwaeke Emezi’s oeuvre is quickly becoming as expansive as their own life, which they explain as existing in ‘overlapping realities’ or ‘liminal spaces’. First came the blisteringly raw and beautiful debut novel Freshwater, then Pet, their story for young adults, and last year was blessed with their New York Times best-selling novel, The Death of Vivek Oji. Through each of these works of fiction the reader can feel the writer reveal their own heart, their own pain and their own embodiments in order to craft stories that travel from the before and after lives to fantastical lands and spiritual plains. Now though, Emezi moves into yet more unflinchingly personal territory with Dear Senthuran: A Black spirit memoir. Comprised of letters addressed to family and friends, the new book gives us an even greater insight into what it has taken them to shape their own place in this world, ready for the next. At once magical, visceral and healing, here we share an excerpt of this essential work.

Nowhere | Dear Katherine

It is the middle of June.
The Black Sea is turquoise, stained by blooms of phytoplank-
ton and polished with undulating mirrors, sunlight reflecting in
ripples over the water. I stand on a tumble of rocks, holding an
empty plastic water bottle and listening as the waves spit foam
into the quiet of the morning. Seagulls wheel and yell against the
sky. A magician I am falling in love with has asked me to bring
him back a drop or two of the sea, this specific sea, the one I am
close to. I meant to retrieve it— this seapiece— when I went swim-
ming the other day, but I forgot. Instead I stood thigh deep in a
cloud of green algae for an hour, my calves numb and my back
burning. None of it made me feel as if I was anywhere.
Perhaps it was the traveling, airports, and rough blue seats
blurring into safety announcements, or the cities— white choco-
late drizzled on a waffle at a picnic in Johannesburg, an Orthodox
monk walking through a thunderstorm in Sofia, a little girl with
afro- puffs selling homemade lemonade in Brooklyn. Maybe it was
the homelessness— a terminated lease in Trinidad, too many
guest rooms in too many countries. They say the word nomad like
it has a rough glamour, but in my mouth it is jet-lagged, wearing a
sheet mask with fifteen minutes left, a draped attempt to fix its
dehydration.
I don’t even mind anymore.
The state of my body matches that of my mind— floating,
tripped, and suspended amid clouds, crashing down into borders,
lonely. Nowhere seems real; all the people are constructs. I have
stopped fighting detachment and started learning how to sink into
it instead. Rumi suggests being dead to this world and alive only to
God; in Sozopol, a former monk leans across a dinner table with
bright stained-g lass eyes and tells me about the types of nothing-
ness in Buddhism. I tell him that my search for somewhere to be
is really a search for self, and the only self I feel at home with is
one that doesn’t exist, not anymore, one that’s been taken apart,
whipped into dust.
I tie back my hair, so it doesn’t interfere with my eyes, and start
climbing down toward the sea. My sneakers slide slowly over the
wet rock and I drop my legs into crevices, press my palm against
outcrops. The rest of the land grows higher and higher as I sink.
The sea pulls. I could see how people would try to lose themselves
in it, when the detachment gets too strong, when the urge to be
nowhere becomes an action. I unscrew the cap from the bottle I’m
carrying and crouch on a rock, dropping my hand and waiting for
the surf to wash it full. I feel utterly alone. The water is clear inside
the faint blue plastic. I should leave— I have buses and planes to
catch— but this curve of nothing feels too right, so I sit there for a
long time.
I text the magician, tell him about the way the sun turns the
rocks into cradles and clothes-racks. Perhaps, with time, if I
waited here long enough, I could dissolve into foam and be with-
drawn into something vaster than my immediate body.
I want to be nothing, nowhere.
The magician texts me back. I too am turquoise, he says, stained
by phytoplankton.

Dear Senthuran: A Black spirit memoir by Akwaeke Emezi is published by Faber (£14.99 hardback)

Read our 2018 interview with Akweake Emezi about Freshwater here.

Published on 10/07/2021