Course:Akwaeke Emezi
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater felt like reading lightning. Their prose roils, tumbles, moves. They work across genres, including nonfiction and YA, and last year released their first book of poetry, Content Warning: Everything. They pull out emotion through consonance and assonance, the contrast of spareness with effluence, religious challenges, and punctuation that imparts a specific type of personal speech, such as a confession or incantation.
Their prose and poetry is free of essential gender, meaning that there are no emotional or physical gender bounds for their characters. Emezi applies the beauty lens, which most writers/poets use for women, to what white cishetero patriarchal society refuses to find beauty in: men and aspects of the body/nature that are considered insignificant or gross or ugly, like scars. Instead, we experience gender in Emezi’s work by the power roles it enforces. It lies in choices and actions.
In What If Jesus Was My Big Brother, they imagine a visit from a warm brother who would bring camaraderie and comfort and sardines:
we eat it for a week, soft and
oily like our hearts.
[…]
our parents leave us steel voicemails about duty.
neither of us returns their calls.
Emezi’s narratives often include protagonists/narrators who are not cis males and experience various kinds of gendered and queerphobic violence. Their storytelling is less concerned with the perpetrators, and more centered in the self going forward, who contends with anger, the shedding of old skin, and the growing of new skin. While not discounting characters’ theft and loss, they turn the narrative’s focus in a direction of agency. Below is an excerpt from Content Warning: Everything, with the content warning that it includes implied sexual violence:
is it sacrilegious to say i
would rather be savaged again than lied to i rose from my death that followed
what wars have been fought on me what hauntings i carry in the blaze of
unspeakable light look at me though tears of blood through the healing flesh
fall on your knees beautify me canonize me mark me full of blasphemy give me
an army for what the fire has made of me you have been seeking wonders in
all the wrong places now here, gaze upon me! i am the fucking miracle
Being able to see a fiction world that is close to the world I experience is a powerful source of permission for my work to live in this world as well. And Emezi does not stop with gender. Their narrators are often multi-spirited and non-human, pushing at the very boundaries of skin. They do not classify this as speculative; they seize it as the reality they know and deserve.