“Transition” by Akwaeke Emezi

 Akwaeke Emezi

Akwaeke Emezi is part of a small but growing number of transgender Nigerian writers whose unique perspective and the rapidly growing audience for their novels have garnered them international literary acclaim. Emezi identifies as transgender and as an ogbanje. Transgender people do not identify with the gender assigned to them.  They refer to themselves as “they” rather than “he” or “she” to recognize their gender identity. Emezi is also an ogbanje which refers to an Igbo cosmological idea of a spirit who is born to die, and who usually takes a human form for only a short period of time.
Emezi published their first book, an autobiographical novel entitled Freshwater, in 2018. Since then, they have published three additional novels: The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), and two Young Adult novels, Pet (2019) and Bitter (2022). Emezi also published a memoir entitled Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir in 2021, and a book of poetry titled Content Warning: Everything in 2022. Another novel, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, appeared in April 2022. Emezi has also published various essays during this time.
Emezi’s books have been translated into several languages and both Freshwater and You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty are being produced for television by FX and Amazon respectively. Emezi’s writing has won the Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction, the Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award), the Ilube Nommo Award, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa

"Transition”

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/law/documents/Transition.pdf

Comment

           Being a transgender person, Akwaeke Emeze explains in “Transition” the personal journey she had to undergo in a quest for identity, from the discovery of the gender dysphoria, to the surgery, the lack of understanding to the assimilation of ogbanje.
          The author starts the narration in an aseptic scientific language as if dehumanizing the whole process by describing the surgery in the first paragraph with the words: “The robot was called a da Vinci. It was delicate, precise, inserted through my navel to slice my uterus and fallopian tubes into small unimportant pieces, which were then suctioned out of my body.” With such an impersonal language we get the idea that the whole process was so painful that, by taking distance, it would be more bearable, as it were not human.
          All through the work, Emeze explains in striking detail the numerous operations she went through and how painful all of them were, not only in terms of physical pain but also in psychological terms. Transgender persons are not even understood in Western societies, so, even less in African societies, where there is a perception that queer sexualities are an invention of Western modernity and that they do not have a place in indigenous ways of being human.
          An ọgbanje is a term in Igbo for what was thought to be an evil spirit that would deliberately plague a family with misfortune. Emezi situates queer identities within Igbo concept by establishing a connection between the notion of the ogbanje and queerness. In the author’s words: “The possibility that I was an ogbanje occurred to me around the same time I realized I was trans, but it took me a while to collide the two worlds”. However, Emezi uses the ogbanje concept to show that human life is interconnecteted with, and depends on, the existence of other lives in the universe, since humans are, according to the author, both natural and spiritual beings to the limits by suggesting that it is possible to live both a genderless (spiritual) and gendered (natural) life.
           Summarizing, Emezi’s Transition, in my opinion, places queer identities within African culture as well as denounces cultural misconceptions that portray queer sexualities as both inhuman and abnormal.