“I stood at the border. Stood at the edge, and claimed it as central…and let the rest of the world move over to where I was” - Toni Morrison

These words first came to author Akwaeke Emezi during their MFA at Syracuse University. In Dear Senthuran, they recount the moment, writing, “The elderspirit of you leapt into my head the day Professor Mayes played a VHS tape from her archive of an interview you gave after you won the Nobel Prize.” Like a spell, Morrison’s words affirmed their practice of refusal and animate the artistry we see today where Igbo ontology is front and centre.

By now, most people know who Akwaeke Emezi is. Be it from their social media following, past lives as a blogger or for their awe-inspiring work ethic, having written six books in five genres over the last four years. I first read Emezi in The Cut on gender transitioning surgery and their journey to feeling at home in a body that reflects the nature of their spirit as an ogbanje. They write, “It had been five years since I figured out I was transgender, after falling into a vibrant queer scene in Brooklyn that showed me so many more ways to be than I’d ever known.” This line gave me language to describe what community had done for me during my formative years as a baby queer, and in some ways, describes the relationship I have with Emezi’s work now. Witnessing an African non-binary writer move through the world on their own terms reminds me that there are many ways of being and if there isn’t space yet, there will be. 

Emezi burst into the literary scene expanding on the aforementioned essay with autobiographical fiction Freshwater (2018), setting up a world for the rest of their work to exist in. To engage with Emezi’s work, and by extension their being, one must be ready to leave what they think they know at the door and step into a set of expansive imaginings.

Their latest offering, Dear Senthuran is an epistolary memoir about two things: moving as spirit first and moving through publishing. Each chapter is a letter to an artist in Emezi’s life, and the connective tissue between them and these named recipients is often love. “You know my friend Anne, who's mentioned in the book says all the time showing up is 100% of the work and the best way I think that you can show love to someone is to show up for them...Sometimes showing up isn't even comfortable for other people. You know, there's times where I think people think that love means that you look away, and you ignore certain things, and you like brush it under the carpet, especially in our family dynamics...but a lot of the times that's not showing up, that's absence. That's like, I'm going to pretend this thing is not happening,” they tell me. “I'm going to be complicit in a lie, to make people comfortable but sometimes being genuinely loved is not comfortable.” 

Showing up is a core part of Emezi’s memoir. We trace their path in publishing and the literary world through the people they’ve journeyed alongside. “I see the letters as I'm citing these people. A lot of the time you know, people are doing all these interviews, and they're coming up with all these ideas and they don't cite the people in their lives who got them there. We don't think in vacuums, we think in community, we come up with this stuff in community and the letters were my way of saying these are the people I'm thinking with,” they share. These people not only live in the pages of Dear Senthuran, but are artists in their own right including cultural curator and historian Kathleen Bomani, cross-genre writer Katherine Agyemaa Agard and her mother Marguerite and titular recipient, Senthuran Varatharajah — their friend and translator of Freshwater into German.

When Emezi and I meet, we spend a lot of time talking about community, joy, gardening, and the links between all three. In 2019, they bought their home, lovingly named Shiny the Godhouse, in New Orleans. Glimpses of how the house came to be appear in Dear Senthuran, namely how Emezi’s goal to be able to support themselves through their work motivated their consistent and diligent writing practice. In Shiny, Emezi lives with their cat, Güs PonPon and a growing home farm they tend to, Emmeline The Garden. Lately, with the hectic world of touring and travelling on pause due to the global coronavirus pandemic, they’ve been thinking about redefining opulence. “What does it look like to be able to grow food? What does it look like to be able to grow food that's like indigenous to West Africa, but grow it in New Orleans, because the climates can be similar. I’m finding joy in giant, smaller things like that, which are really quite large, depending on how you look at it,” they say. Emezi introduces me to ‘seed libraries’, a form of preserving seeds that are important to specific groups of people. They’ve been developing a seed library of their own by using the cuttings from other Nigerian gardeners in the South (Houston specifically). Furthermore, when they went back home to Nigeria last Christmas, a contact in agriculture was able to help their own burgeoning collection of West African seeds that has allowed them to grow hibiscus and yam in Louisiana.

"I'm always scared. Like, always, because it's never comfortable."

Again, so much of Emezi’s work is forging a way for themselves in spite of human-imposed limitations. Where do they find this courage, I ask. “You know, there's this scene in one of the Marvel movies where they're talking to Bruce Banner and they're like, ‘Okay, you have to turn into the Hulk now so think of something that makes you angry.’ And he turns around, and he's like, ‘Oh, the secret is, I'm always angry.’ And honestly, I think, you know, I'm always scared. Like, always, because it's never comfortable. It's actually, especially this year, has been really, really s****y and I think people have maybe an idealized version of what it is to have high visibility in the world. And, you know, face your work and do all of that, and, you know, be successful in that sense but for me, because facing my work means that I have to continue — like I wrote in Dear Senthuran- I have to continue unfolding, I have to become, you know, bigger and brighter and at some point it stops being about you. Like I think at this point, I’ve reconciled with the fact that my public persona is not me. It's just a symbol that is doing very specific work and it has elements of me…” they answer, touching on the compromises that fame and access bring about. It’s a tricky line for ‘breakout’ authors, one that Emezi is still learning to navigate and candidly so, often reflecting through their writing as they’ve done in Dear Senthuran.

What’s next for Emezi? In 2019, FX Productions purchased the rights to develop a series based on their debut novel Freshwater. Previously a video artist, this is not Emezi’s first try at the screen and they will be writing and executive producing the story based on their own life experiences with director Tamara P. Carter. In their own time, they’ve been reading romance novels — currently The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, which follows an autistic woman’s foray into the world of dating. “Seeing how they navigate interpersonal relationships, and also having that comfort of knowing that at the end of this book, everything is going to be okay is something that I desperately need now, because everything in the world is not okay. So when I'm reading, I'm reading for an escape. I'm not trying to read to see the world replicated. Because I'm like, that's just adding insult on top of injury. Like, we're already suffering, why would I want to read more suffering? I want to read something better and romance gets that,” they tell me.

Fittingly, Emezi’s most-recently announced novel is their entry into the romance genre, You Made A Fool Of Death With Your Beauty (Summer 2022). Their creative thresholds keep on expanding and expanding, and with it, so do our imaginations of what is possible.

Akwaeke Emezi will be appearing in AMAKA Books on Instagram Live on Thursday, September 30th, 7pm BST. Don't miss it!