Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

WOW! This book is just incredible. WOW! In the last two years, I have started to read more non-fiction than fiction but one doesn't forget their first love and this book reminded me why. While non-fiction just opens your mind to a wealth of knowledge, it's fiction that opens your mind to worlds unchartered. Freshwater gifts us with the unlocking of our imaginations and the tickling of the underbelly of our spirituality. In this review, I will just be including excerpts and quotes from the book that knocked at my bones and send reverberations to the recesses of my being.  

'There is a method to this. First harvest the heart and weaken the neck. Make the human mother leave. This, they knew, is how you break a child'

'It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn't even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.' 

'Do people need to see you for you to be who you are?'

'You will always be in the process of change because every time you get born into a basilisk, that basilisk consumes itself so you can be born into another basilisk'

'Do not hang your heart on me'

'Let me tell you the truth about men like that- they want soft moons. They want women with just enough crescent to provide a sufficient edge, tender little slivers of light that they can bring home to their mothers'

'We understood what was necessary- humans often fail at listening, as if their stubbornness will convince the truth to change, as if they have that kind of power'

'But I loved him and that made him more human than human to me. Love is transformative in that way. Like small gods, it can bring out the prophet in you. You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters, possible only if you believe, if you really, really believe. So in loving Ewan, he somehow became a god. I don't mean that in a good way- he made me suffer but I still cast idols in his name, as people have done for their gods for Millenia. It didn't end there. When the years accumulated and exposed Ewan's cracks, I covered them in gold and bronze. That's what you do for the idols you make'

' When I think of them and the love I hold for them, it unfurls into a greater love. My chest multiplies with it. I even want to hold the faces of my friends and tell them I love them. I don't feel trapped or anchored, which is really strange, Yshwa. I stop being afraid of relocations and I can move wherever I want because I know that I will be loved constantly across all space. And even if it fades with them, it will bloom again. We are all conduits. It moves through us, freely'

'Honestly, Yshwa, I just want to rest. Let me find a place where even if I'm alone, I can sit on my veranda and look at a mango tree and we can just talk. You will be the words in my mouth and the ones that fall from my fingers; you will be the one to whom I direct my longing'

As I look at the tattoos of the author on the cover of the book and read the final chapters of the book, I wonder where the author's story ends and where it begins for the characters in the book.  

Swallow by Sefi Atta

Swallow follows the life of a stuck-in-between-a-hard-place-and-a-rock-woman (Tolani) whose survival in the city is in the hands of an employer who exploits his position. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one of the components of the physiological needs is homeostasis which is the tendency of a system to maintain internal stability or a state of psychological equilibrium. Tension in humans can be a driving force and push humans to excel but if that tension is excessive then it can become debilitating. This book explores the extremes of tension and how human beings react differently to that tension.

LOVE AND FREEDOM

'I preferred your father's way. He appreciated me enough to leave me alone and I could do almost anything I wanted'

I've recently learnt a lot particularly regarding love and how it works with freedom and not against it. Our inclination, when it comes to love is to move towards co-dependence, we romanticise it, think 'when he cries, I taste salt' vibes. Co-dependence is not sustainable and it usually results in dysfunction. A lot of men I've spoken to speak of how marriage is an institution and within the context of marriage, there is not a lot of freedom for him to still be able to do the things he used to love doing. There is a general negative attitude towards marriage and yet many a man succumb to it. Perhaps there are ultimatums or perhaps there is the male-mother-need aspect that the MGTOW men talk a lot about or even just a general case of FOMO. In this book, there are ultimatums which just don't end well, do they ever? The quote above is from Tolani's mother who expresses an alternative to the general love-and-unfreedom coupling where there is room in a relationship for people to still be themselves fully and still also be able to explore their personal interests. If someone falls in love with your full-of-life-ness, what kind of love wants to tame that? The very thing that made you fall for the person in the first place is the thing that comes to die in the name of love and marriage? I prefer the alternative and I owe that largely to Bell Hooks' All About Love. Tolani's father, for the most part, was able to exercise that freedom until he succumbed to the societal pressures of a man needing to keep his wife in check. The thing with freedom is that it really is an indispensable part of a fully lived experience, it brings joy and is catalytic to self actualisation.

CHANCE

'My father told me once, "You are not special. There are many like you in this world. Do not consider your good fortune a blessing or their bad fortune a curse. It could easily be the other way around" '

The truth is the family you were born into, the socio-economic status you were born into, the race or country you were born into are arbitrary in as much as that you really had no say into where you landed as a baby. You landed where you landed. Tolani's father was speaking particularly to that, warning her to not become arrogant as though to be born into a house of good fortune was where she rightly belonged and where she would always be. In Rowan Hooper's Super Human he speaks of the equanimous farmer who is a man who goes through a series of good fortune followed by misfortune (Law of Undulation) which is part of being human and he reacts with the same attitude to every single event. Being equanimous teaches us to handle feats with humility and defeats with understanding and so much of our happiness is not in the hands of things external to us.

MORALITY

'Morality was an easy friend to part with, yet so hard to avoid thereafter'

'The prospect of misfortune was more than enough threat, and it was around us, killing people, turning them into prostitutes, making them sick, hungry, crazy, and I was not special'

Robert Sapolsky from the University of Stanford says that decisions we think are led by morality or rationality are usually made as a result of affect. Our bodies react to stimuli in a certain way before our pre-frontal cortex gets to cognitively process that stimuli. I think that for most of us, morality does not come before self preservation particularly when it comes to death. Our morality will bend for our survival. Tolani goes through a moral journey where she, due to the tension mentioned earlier, begins to bend and really considers doing things she thought she never would. They say 'blessed are those who bend, for they shall never be broken', does this apply to morality as well?

PRAGMATISM

'Vroom! You should have seen the old woman who was sitting on her chair with a chewing stick in her mouth. Vroom! Instead of spitting, she swallowed. Vroom! She slapped her chest. Vroom! She fell off her stool'

LOL! This was the reaction by an elderly neighbour witnessing Tolani's mother riding a Vespa. Riding a Vespa was just not done by women and not by women who were married because somehow riding a Vespa disrespects your husband. When Tolani's mother was first learning to ride the Vespa, her complaint was who would design a Vespa without consideration for women who had to wear a wrapper which kept getting stuck in the Vespa. Tolani's mother was very practical and she says how she would wear pants if she could. Even though she had freedom, her freedom was impeded because it was constricted to a certain radius; bigger than for most but there nonetheless. What I appreciated about Tolani's mother was that she understood that certain advancements required her to be practical. A wrapper was just not practical for a Vespa. In one of Bell Hooks' essays, she mentions how enslaved women who worked on plantations would still go to the fields in dresses and skirts even though it would have been easier for them to wear pants. There are freedoms others take away from us and there are also freedoms that we take from ourselves.  

I'm going to wrap up this post with a quote that hit home from the book about the nature of death, the disguises it wears, the frequency of its visits, its whim, its softness or hardness, its persuasiveness or its force depending on the colour of your skin.

'Frowning, laughing, crying, smiling, there was no normal way to react to the news that people died unnecessary deaths, avoidable deaths, ridiculous deaths, African deaths.'

Letting go

At first
It’s the tension of ‘I hope he doesn’t come back’ on the one side and ‘I hope he comes back’ on the
other side pulling in polar directions at equal measure
Relentless, taut, tight, tense
An equilibrium allowing you to function
Barely

Then
There comes a time of disorientating panic
When you feel the scales tipping right off the fulcrum of your sanity
When you start anticipating the snap
Where you feel the muscles of your hand preparing
For the impending phone call from your phone
For the ‘I am sorry’ ‘please forgive me’ ‘I need you’

But then
You somehow manage to live the ache away by just continuing
Relief and desperation have swopped places by daybreak
You pulled through by chanting resistance and courage into yourself
‘I am sorry’ ‘please forgive me’
For all the time you stayed longer than you should have
For all the time you didn’t show yourself compassion
For all the time you allowed his unkindness to poison you against you

‘I need you’
A note to self

Un-Loving

Remember how when you encountered me for the first time
Your tongue instinctively touched the roof of your mouth
And found it in want
You were absolutely parched

You drank of me
The cup did not pass your lips
You filled yourself
Soaked me up in your entirety
Grew gills

And now you wonder why
Try as you may to relegate me, in fickleness, to past
You cannot evaporate me off your skin
Distil me from your quintessence
Siphon me out your blood
Cry me out, for heaven’s sake
I became your most quiet need
And now you are drowning in the deluge of my absence


Hydrate.

Your Children's Eyes

It has become a trend in black communities where a man will have a relationship with a woman for a long time, more than 5 years. Then the couple breaks up and the man is married 5 months later to the complete surprise of the woman who he was with. In my opinion, I don't think the man gets away as cleanly as he makes out, which is how I got to write Your Children's Eyes.  

I see how your children have sad eyes

Could that be because you parted with pieces of yourself in procreation before you had healed?

Like how a lamb spreads bitterness to it's meat when it sees the knife to end it's life

You thought your heartbreak was contained and covered with a shotgun marriage and marital consequences

And even though your face wouldn't betray you as you fulfil your new roles

Thoughts of the her of past have spread bitterness through your blood

And even when relatives quibble over which features belong to which lineage

No one owns your children's eyes

No one can quite place them

You, however, know whose eyes they belong to

The heartbreak you just did not want to deal with

And which now you have to face 

To build a home

After one of those peaceful evenings without strife

Where your chest knows my name and rises and falls my weary head to it

And sleep comes Sunday morning easy

And our mouth's in O's because that is the last syllable of both our names

Then we both are wrenched out of sleep when we hear the crack

From the balcony we both see a line running from one side of the apartment to the other

We seek and find relief in each other's eyes

We thought the earth had cracked right open and threw us on either side

Separated eternally

But we called the landlord and forgot all about it

When we should have seen it for what it was

That homes are built to contract and expand

We were built too co-dependently close together

And there was not enough room for either of us to grow, to breathe

You exploded

I imploded

We called time

Cracks in rental homes are other people's problem