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.