[00:05:12] Host: It's the you and the not you all at the same time.

[00:05:14] Akwaeke: Exactly. It's layered on top or it's intermingle. It's all mixed up basically. The Unblinding is this project I've been working on for about seven years where I was playing with this idea of what does it look like to be an ogbanje in a contemporary context? The most popular example of an ogbanje is in Chinua Achebe's book, Things Fall Apart, where the main character's daughter is one, and they go through all these rituals and all these things trying to sever her from the rest of her ogbanje cohort. With ogbanje, it's always a group of them, but the group exists in the spirit world. They come out one by one and get born into a human form. In that book, when they're talking about this girl who's an ogbanje, they're not particularly talking about her as a human being who's possessed by a spirit. They're just like, no, she's an ogbanje. In order for her to try and live a normal human life, we have to separate her from those spirit siblings. We have to break her connection to the spiritual world so that she can be present and she can live a life of a normal human length, and she won't die early, and all these other things, but that book is set in colonial times, and there aren't that many accounts of ogbanje that really occur in a contemporary context.

With The Unblinding, the project, and with Freshwater, which is part of that project, I wanted to show what it would be like if you have an ogbanje who's in a contemporary context, who's on social media and goes to the States for college, and what does that look like in this context? That, I think, is what Freshwater really tries to do, is to tell this story in this timeline, have it be a part of the present instead of a part of the past, and see what that looks like from a spirit perspective versus a human perspective.

[00:07:29] Host: You do that beautifully. You transfer from the ogbanje. Then there's also the-- what do you call it? The beast self, Asughara, which is separate from the ogbanje but the same, which I know, again, I'm not doing this justice of describing, and all present within Ada, your main character. You tell it from all these wonderful perspectives as Asughara is able to take her over where the others just sit inside and observe her life.

[00:08:13] Akwaeke: I think you described it pretty well, actually. Asughara is separate, but she's also part of this larger plural spirit. The way that I've been describing this individual that is Ada plus all her extras is I've been seeing them as a singular collective or as a plural individual.

[00:08:37] Host: I love that.

[00:08:37] Akwaeke: Early in the book, there's the scene of Ada's birth where the spirit gets merged with her body. I realized when talking to another artist friend a couple of weeks ago, that in my head, that's just what happens with all births, that the moment of birth is when the spirit merges with body, and that's when a person exists. The narrator tries to explain it a little bit in the beginning saying that normally when this happens, it's seamless and the spirit and the human become one entity, but in this case with the Ada, it's not so seamless.

What you end up with is a plural entity. Out of that plural self, depending on situation or depending on need, more distinct selves precipitate out of that. Asughara is created during a moment of intense trauma for the Ada. The thing that's interesting is that I felt like a couple of readers read the book and some people get the impression that Ada is powerless or that because she's not the one narrating that she doesn't have a lot of power in the story, but really she's the one who creates all these selves.

Every time that a distinct self comes, she's the one who names it. She's the one who describes it. She's the one who creates it. Really she has the most power because she's choosing to hand over the reins to Asughara. I think the problem then becomes Asughara gets a little carried away and it's hard to take control back once you've freely given it away in the first place. Your description of Asughara being separate yet part of that larger self is completely accurate in that sense.

[00:10:34] Host: This is a very personal story to you as well. I know that you've been identified by others as an ogbanje. I'm still messing up the word.

[00:10:50] Akwaeke: Not by others, just by myself.

[00:10:52] Host: By yourself. In writing this personal journey, in being so forthcoming, was there ever a fear of, I don't know if I should let these secrets out. I don't know if I should let-- not just the secrets of your life, but of the inner workings of this spiritual self as well.

[00:11:22] Akwaeke: It was absolutely terrifying. [laughs] I had several emotional breakdowns while writing the book, because I was like, this seems like a very drastic thing to do, and especially when it's centered in a reality that's not mainstream. It's one thing to come out and choose an identity that is commonly accepted. If I had chosen to say, I'm writing a book about dissociative identity disorder, then everyone would be like, "OMG, so brave. Representation." When you center it in a reality that's outside of Western reality, and you're centering it in a reality that has a lot of stigma attached to it, even back home in Nigeria, there's so much stigma attached to it, which is really a result of being colonized. Even before that, the ogbanje in Igbo culture is generally considered to be evil. It's one of those things where it's like there's this loss of connection with history. I'm not sure if it's always been considered evil or if it started to be considered evil when we got colonized and then it was like, everything from your traditional religion is evil, so there you go. It's one of those things where I'm like, I don't know and I may never know. Sorry, you were going to say something.

[00:12:52] Host: No. That's the scourge of Christianity, is turning everything into paganism. Anything that is exactly not of the light, is the dark.

[00:13:05] Akwaeke: Is the dark. It was terrifying to write it because it's choosing to center in this reality. It's choosing to self-identify as something that is quite stigmatized. In places where it's even considered real at all, it's stigmatized. In most other places, it's just not considered real whatsoever. It's considered make-believe. Wanting to tell the story and say, no, this is not make-believe, this is real, and this is a valid reality. The only reason why most people don't consider it's a valid reality is again, colonialism.

Then, because it's also intensely personal at the same time, I think that's why I chose to have it be a novel, so I could try and get some distance from it and write it more freely as a story, rather than if I had written it as a memoir, and then it would've felt even more close to the bone than it already is, which is hard to imagine. Even in talking about the book after its publication, I'm still a little nervous to say that, yes, this is what it is. This is true. I started making--

[00:14:33] Host: You have to keep the little distance of this is fiction-ish.

[00:14:38] Akwaeke: Sometimes, I do. On the other hand, one of the reasons why I wrote Freshwater was that I spoke to a bunch of people. I went back home before I wrote it, because I was really nervous about writing something that was based in Igbo traditional religion. It's not something I was raised with. It's not something that anyone encourages you to dabble in. Again, that stigma kicks in. I went back home before I wrote the book to talk to people and just get some reassurance that it was okay to immerse myself in this world. Along the way, I met a lot of other people who were not that much older than me.

I talked to them about this reality that was in my head, because that's the other vulnerable part, is laying out everything that's been happening in my head. One of my friends recently read the book and she texted me, and she said, "I love the conversations between the different selves." I told her, those are journal entries from about 10 years ago, transcribed nearly verbatim. I'm like, I didn't even have to make those up. Those actually happened.

In that kind of vulnerability in telling people, this is what happens inside my head, that's actually not the part that's fictionalized. When I spoke about it just casually in conversation, I met several other people who had all these different realities in their head, and they couldn't talk about it publicly either because they would either be seen as crazy from a science perspective, or from a religious perspective possessed by a demon. There was no option that wasn't pathological in some sense, and there was no option that wasn't going to make you feel like crap about yourself.

[00:16:20] Host: I was going to say-

[00:16:21] Akwaeke: They why they didn't just tell anyone.

[00:16:22] Host: -that in Western traditions, we don't have a way of dealing. It seems like this has given almost a freedom or an understanding of what is happening as you're going through these changes and discoveries, and challenges. It gives an understanding, which I think a lot of us in the West, when things happen and when you are like, why am I doing this? Or what is going on? What is the drive behind this? Why am I asking these things?

Why am I here in this place with this person and this doesn't feel like me or what I would choose? This isn't the life that I thought I would live. We don't have an answer. I think what we tend to lean to is, I must be crazy, or I must be-- there must be something wrong. Reading this book is like, maybe there is something else that I don't even-- a thing that I have no connection to, that is there and present, and working the gears and the wheels of the human body in this moment or in that moment.

[00:17:40] Akwaeke: Yes. I think it's just other ways of being, just giving the option of other ways of being that are beyond what we are taught, because what we're taught is quite limited. I think for me, my favorite responses to Freshwater have been people who felt affirmed by it. I've had readers who said, "I'm not crazy. What you're talking about. Finally, this makes sense. I haven't found a way of being that makes sense until this."

For that reason, as much as I could have just passed the book off as fiction entirely, it was important to me to leave that autobiographical factor there because I need readers like that to know that it's not fiction. I need them to know that it's based in something real, so that they know that their realities are valid too, because they're who I wrote the book for, so that they can see reflections of ways of being that aren't just limited to what's in their head, and they can know that somebody else has a reality that's different or has a reality that is multiple in this case.

That's the point of the book, really, the point of Freshwater is to try and help people who are already existing in these other realities have representation for them so they can know that they're not crazy, or they can have other ways of being that aren't crushing them into the box of crazy, or crushing them into the box of you're possessed by a demon and you need an exorcism, which happens quite a lot actually.

[00:19:16] Host: It's seeking medical treatment or taking pills to calm the voices.

[00:19:24] Akwaeke: Here's the other thing about that that's interesting, is that I don't mean for it to be a replacement for mental health stuff, which I think, again, is another thing about binaries where we think, it's one or the other. Instead of thinking it can be both at the same time. In Ada's case, she definitely has mental health stuff going on. She's suicidal. For example, that's a big one. She has a lot of depression. She has a lot of anxiety. The only difference really is that those things are not at the root of it. At the root of it, the problem is that she's embodied and she's walking around in flesh, and she's an ogbanje.

They're not really supposed to be alive for that long. That manifests as depression or anxiety, or trauma results in a split self. Mental health strategies, for example, are very useful for treating that. It's very useful to know, this is how I handle my depression. Knowing how to handle things like that is not entirely the same as knowing what caused it. For me, I'm very careful to not be like, I'm saying that mental illness doesn't exist at all and should go untreated. It's like, no. You can be exhibiting these symptoms, you can treat them however you want to treat them. It's just that for some people, what's causing those symptoms is different, or the cause of it may lie outside the Western reality.

[00:20:59] Host: Understanding.

[00:21:00] Akwaeke: Yes, exactly. Even if strategies to help do exist within a Western reality. It's like the two realities are not mutually exclusive. They can exist together.

[00:21:09] Host: It's the thing that I don't know if we will ever understand of what consciousness is, what the idea of a soul is. The ghost in the shell. Like I said, the driver of the machine. That doesn't matter how much dissecting of brains or microscopic understanding of neurons, I don't think it's something that you can ever understand or explain. It's just things that we give words to like ogbanje or past lives, or connections to angels, or whatever it is based on whatever the reality you know of. That's how we we deal with it and understand it, or try to understand it.

[00:22:07] Akwaeke: I think a large part of how we try to understand it is through stories. Through accounts. There's a lot of potential to learn from stories and accounts that are centered in other realities, that are centered in other cultures. One of the books that was super important to me before in working towards writing Freshwater is this book called Of Water and Spirit by Malidoma Somé. He's from, I believe, Burkina Faso, and writes about the spiritual reality of his people and growing up in it, and being initiated into it, and just moving through these realities.

That's written just a straight memoir, but that was one of the books where I read it. He's the one who even introduced this concept of different realities and idea of how colonialism basically came and replaced an indigenous reality with an outside one. That, for me, just blew my whole world open, where I was like, oh my goodness, you're right. This is just a different reality. From then I was like, what could my reality look like if I chose not to center it in a Western one? Then that led to Freshwater.

[00:23:33] Host: That's interesting. Because even Ada, and I'm sure yourself, had this longing and clinging to the Christian traditions. I believe that came from her mother, correct? The church and--

[00:23:51] Akwaeke: Yes, she was raised in the church.

[00:23:53] Host: Seeking Jesus and seeking this be with me. He appears, Yeshua appears, but as an observer. I thought that that was fascinating too, that it's there, but it's not necessarily the help that you need at this moment.

[00:24:15] Akwaeke: [chuckles] Yes. That is an excellent way of putting it. I think that's what she realizes at some point. I think she realizes it through Asughara who's the version of her that is able to have anger towards the Christ for not showing up, for not answering prayers, for not doing anything really.

[00:24:40] Host: “You're supposed to be-- you were promised to do all these things for me. That's what I've been taught my whole life. Where are you?” I'd love to know. When did storytelling become an important tool for you? Not to hear them, but to share them?

[00:25:03] Akwaeke: Very young. I started writing stories when I was five, when I could write basically. Because I loved reading so much and I wanted to mimic it. I wanted to mimic the books by writing my own. I grew up very close to my younger sister. We're still very close now. When we were little, we played a lot and it had such an immense impact on our imaginations. We read a lot of books that were by Enid Blyton, a lot of books out of a British childhood, because colonialism, really, around the world. We got them from my aunt. My mom would bring them in when she traveled to London.

We grew up really believing in magic, especially that very kind of British magic where it's like, there are fairies in the flowers and in the leaves. We had a lot of Barbie dolls. We constructed a very elaborate world called Barbieland that we maintained for years. We played inside it. We had all these stories that came up inside it. When my brother decided we were too old to play with dolls, we would go to bed early so we could tell stories to each other and it would be like we would just build a story back and forth with each other, and build characters, and build dialogue.

It was only recently that I realized that what we did was to just-- we just did a lot of world-building as children. Our imaginations literally constructed these alternate realities that we maintained and we developed, and we practiced every day because it was a fun place to be. It was a place where there was magic and lands that you could enter in and out of. I think that really shaped a lot of my storytelling now where if you spent your entire life exercising your imagination and building worlds, and building other realities, you get pretty okay at it. Like anything else, it's just practice.

[00:27:19] Host: When did you discover that this is what you wanted to do? This is the life choice.

[00:27:29] Akwaeke: In 2013 actually, so not too long ago. I was working at a nonprofit in New York and I had a lot of other friends who were artists. I was running several blogs. One of them was my writing blog where I would put up short fiction or free verse, or whatever, because I'd kept writing throughout all my different careers. My artist friends read this blog and they said, "You should really be doing something with this. You're actually pretty good at it." I started tentatively applying to different things. I would send my stories out for submission.

They were terrible because I actually didn't know how to write a story. I knew how to write prose poetry pretty well, but I didn't know how to structure a story. Then I kept working at it because I was submitting to things on a regular basis. Sometimes I would submit and I would get feedback, and then I would try to fix whatever was wrong with the work and send it out again. Then in 2014 I had my first proper short story published in the UK. Then I got into an MFA program that year. I quit my nonprofit job and left Brooklyn, and went to my MFA program.

Which was terrifying for me because I was leaving all my friends and I was taking a gamble, I guess, on my writing. It was a fully funded program, so that worked out. Who did I talk to? I had asked Teju Cole for advice. I told him I got in and I didn't know what to do because we knew each other from around Brooklyn. He was like, "Look, they're paying you to write for three years." He's like, "So go write"

[laughter]

I was like, you can't really argue with that. You can't really argue with someone paying you to write. I ended up only staying there for a year and a half. I dropped out and I got a scholarship that paid me more money to write a book for a year. That's just how it happened. I think I was really lucky because I was able to go at it full-time because I had funding to do that. I had funding the first year in my MFA. That's when I wrote Freshwater. Then I had this scholarship called The Miles Moreland Scholarship. It's for African writers. They funded me for the whole of 2016. I wrote my second novel in that year. I sold Freshwater in that year as well. I've been able to cobble together a sustainable career out of that.

[00:30:22] Host: How did that process go as far as getting Freshwater out? I know I've read that you sent it out a lot of places and were concerned about the responses. What was that like when you actually-- when it clicked, when it happened, when you found out, this is going to be made?

[00:30:48] Akwaeke: It was at once exciting, but also I didn't get a very large advance, so I was really bummed about that.

[laughter]

I was actually really sad the day that I got the deal because it was one of those things where I kept thinking, maybe if I had written a more conventional story. At that point, I was really worried about being able to literally make a living from writing. I thought maybe if I had written a different kind of story, I would've got more money. It's hard not to take things like that personally at first because you feel like it's a monetary value being assigned to your work, and people are saying, "This is what it's worth." You're like, that's it, that's all you think it's worth?

[00:31:38] Host: Here's some change. Yes.

[00:31:41] Akwaeke: That's the transition from-- I think that moment is transitioning into a more business zone of the writing, and you can't take business personally. It's a first book. There are all these factors that go into it that have nothing to do with you as a person or your talent as a writer. At that point, it was also great because I have a really great editor.

I had an editor who really took time with the work and engaged with it thoughtfully. I think that that, not just for our first book, but especially for this book in particular, because it is so much the way that it is, it really needed an editor who could do that. Also, everything comes back the other way around, on the other end with royalties, or so I'm told by my other writer friends who have done this so muck longer than I have.

[00:32:49] Host: Absolutely, and it's been what, two weeks now. This is still the beginning, you're just wading into the water.

[00:32:58] Akwaeke: Yes. It's hard to think of it that way, but you're totally right. It feels like it's been out for much longer because people got advanced copies, but it really has been only two weeks.

[00:33:10] Host: Do you ever feel, as a self-identified ogbanje, do you ever feel that the other takes over when you write?

[00:33:22] Akwaeke: That is a good question. Not so much. I feel like I just go very much into a story. Again, it's the thing, that practice from childhood of building characters and building stories, the advantage of that is that it's very easy to slip between identities. It's very easy to slip into a character, and come up with a backstory and a personality. All that stuff is stuff I've been doing since I was probably 6 years old, is coming up with characters who had different personalities. Doing that work with my sister throughout our childhood carries over to my storytelling now.

Which is why I love writing books in particular because they're longer. I can stay in that world for longer and I can build it into a bigger thing than I could with a short story. For me, it's very much about being immersed in the story. It's like traveling, you get to-- It's similar to the effect you have when you're reading work that transports you, where you get moved into the story. I'm able to do that while writing, is get transported into the story and just stay there and build people. I've written two other manuscripts since Freshwater. It's much more fun to write them than it was to write Freshwater because they are purely fiction.

[00:34:59] Host: Right. There's a wider separation between you and the work.

[00:35:02] Akwaeke: Exactly. There's separation between me and work. There's no restrictions. I can build whatever and whoever I want, and I just find that to be immensely fun.

[00:35:12] Host: I also want to talk a little bit, I know you're releasing the third part of The Unblinding. There's going to be the video elements. How does that differ in producing these videos? How does that differ for you as an artist from writing, the creative endeavor, that connection to the world-building?

[00:35:36] Akwaeke: When I started working in video, I actually wanted to work in narrative video at first. I wanted to make short films because I wanted to take a short story and control the visuals for it. I soon found out that it was a lot of work that I didn't particularly enjoy doing with narrative arts particularly. It was easier to do it when writing. It was this thing of, I'm also one of those people who if I'm not immediately very good at something, I usually don't like to continue doing it.

[laughter]

At that point I was like, I'm much better at writing stories than making short films, so I might as well just keep doing the one that I'm good at. What I found out, I made an experimental one that was more free form. It didn't have to really follow the strict narrative thing of, you have to have a plot, and the characters have to make sense. I found that that was a lot easier for me to do, and I enjoyed it a lot more. The short film screened in 13 countries.

I was like, this is what I like to do with video, is let go of the structure that I would use in a short story or a book, and do something that's more visceral, that's more just creating moving images that represents the feel of something without having to adhere to narrative structure. For me, that's been the difference where with books and with short stories, there's very much that structure. It has to make sense with plot.

I don't mind doing that with writing, but when I'm working in visuals, it's just in a completely different way. It's not as formulaic. It's not as structured, or if the structure is there, it's not about structure as plot. It's about structure as, you're trying to communicate this feeling and you're using images and sounds. As long as it accurately communicates the feeling you're trying to communicate, you're good.

[00:38:04] Host: You're succeeding. I love it. Akwaeke, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. The book is phenomenal.

[00:38:11] Akwaeke: Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

[00:38:13] Host: Congratulations on all the early praise. I know that that's just going to continue. Freshwater, everybody, please go and check it out. It is incredible. Thank you. I think that that's it.

[00:38:27] Akwaeke: Thank you.

[laughter]

This is excellent.

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[00:38:32] Host: This has been The How The Why with Jon-Barrett Ingels. The show has produced by Kevin Staniec and yours truly, with production assistance by Sarah Becker. The How The Why theme music was composed and performed by Dan Wrecker. Please consider supporting 1888 in our mission. Become an 1888 advocate by purchasing our books, participating in our programs, and pledging today. For more information, visit 1888.center. That's 1888.center. I want to remind you all to keep making art. Thank you.

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