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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY EMEZI, AK. | 31330009037957 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | B EMEZI | 32114002645225 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | B/EMEZI | 33934004408465 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | BIO EMEZI | 32117002079592 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | BIOG/EMEZI | 31480011484828 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | BIO/EMEZI, A. | 31482002983438 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groton Public Library | BIO EMEZI | 37003701854516 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/EMEZI A | 31479007471047 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | B EMEZI, A. | 31481005539528 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | BIOGRAPHY EMEZI A | 32128003989176 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | BIO EMEZI | 31478010188283 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | BIOGRAPHY EMEZI, A. | 31550002472824 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | MEMOIR / LITERARY / EMEZI | 32132003262147 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | B EMEZI | 31990004970872 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | BIOGRAPHY EMEZI | 32136003484387 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
FEATURED ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE AS A 2021 NEXT GENERATION LEADER
"A once-in-a-generation voice." - Vulture
"One of our greatest living writers." - Shondaland
A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times bestselling author, "a dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual self" ( Esquire )
In three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal.
Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes Emezi's fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) reflects on their spiritual and creative evolution in this gorgeous epistolary memoir. Among the cast of recipients they address are friends, family, an ex-lover, Toni Morrison, and Senthuran Varatharajah, their German translator, who inspired the work's form. Originally from Aba, Nigeria, Emezi identifies as ogbanje, an Igbo spirit that's also a god. They are "embodied but not human," an existential tension that governed their life as they traveled the globe in their 20s in search of home and themselves. Emezi eventually settled down in New Orleans in 2019, but their search for self continues in each letter as they shed old "masks," outgrow relationships, and undergo a hysterectomy to align their human body with their "spiritself." Emezi details the loneliness that comes with being "estranged from the indigenous Black realities" and is unwavering in their demand that readers meet them on their terms, even if they might be considered "too strange, too arrogant." Yet in consistently captivating prose, Emezi demonstrates that it is precisely this unyielding belief in themself that catapulted their career, clinching literary awards and six-figure book deals. Those interested in broadening their metaphysical understanding of the world would do well to pick up this spellbinding work. Agent: Krisi Murray, The Wylie Agency. (June)
Guardian Review
Akwaeke Emezi has been enjoying a moment in the literary limelight since the publication of their first novel, Freshwater, in 2018. The book received excellent reviews and was nominated for many literary prizes, some of which it won. It was followed in 2019 by Pet, a YA novel about a transgender teenager; the next year The Death of Vivek Oji went straight on to the New York Times bestseller list. This year, Emezi's memoir, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, has been released. They make other writers who manage to squeak out a book once every three or four years look like slackers. How do they do it, where do they get the time? Especially since they often seem to be on social media arguing with other writers (see the recent row with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), former friends or literary prize organisers. Emezi clearly knows the value of high-profile social media fights: they get people talking about you. Dear Senthuran reads in part like a series of continuing fights, all carefully curated and presented to readers in book form. It is written in short, punchy chapters, which bear all the characteristics of tweets: brief, sharp, audacious and controversial. There are fights with their father, mother, professors and classmates, their ex-husband, friends, lovers ... A chapter in which the author documents a breakup with a former lover is narrated almost entirely in boxing imagery: "Do you think throwing me in the ring was less an attempt on my life than if you had held me down with one hand and beat me senseless with the other, till my cheekbones cracked, till my eyes swelled shut, till my lips split and teeth fell out, blood over your skinned knuckles, over and over, until I was limp in your grasp like the corpse you've imagined me to be?" Dear Senthuran is written in epistolary style, each chapter addressed to an acquaintance - Senthuran is a friend, a writer and translator. There's a chapter, "Dear June", addressed to their mother, and another to Jesus, who they call Yshwa and recognise as an "older brother", because Emezi sees themself as "a god". Not in a metaphorical sense, literally a god. The whole book could be described as the author's battle to be recognised for who they are. And who are they? An embodied spirit, an ogbanje. Ogbanje, in Igbo ontology, are spirit children who are born only to die over and over in an endless cycle, plaguing their human parents with misfortune and heartbreak. It is a belief prevalent among the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria, and also the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria, whose name for it is abiku. This was a traditional, pre-scientific society's attempt to explain natural phenomena through myth - children born with sickle-cell anaemia, a hereditary disease common in that part of the world, one that defied cure and forced these communities to take elaborate steps to ensure these "trickster" children didn't get reborn. One of the steps was to mutilate the dead body with scarifications so that the child would not be tempted to return, or could at least be identified when they did. Emezi writes: "The possibility that I was an ogbanje came to me years before I wrote Freshwater, around the time I began calling myself trans, but it took me a while to collide and connect the two worlds. I suppressed it for a few years because most of my education had been in the sciences and all of it was westernised - it was difficult for me to consider an Igbo spiritual world to be equally if not more valid ¿ When I finally accepted its validity, I revisited what that could mean for my gender." You could say then that this book (and indeed the other books, especially the autofictional Freshwater) is an attempt by the author to fight invisibility. It is all about the process of becoming. In carefully described passages the author details how, in transitioning, they had their breasts and uterus surgically removed; this was paid for with money skimmed from their student loans. "The choice to finally modify my body felt like a big deal in large part because other people treated it that way." Casting off the physical in order to attain the purely spiritual becomes analogous with the scarification of the ogbanje by their parents. Another way to fight marginalisation is to make the marginal become central, a lesson Emezi says they learned from Toni Morrison, but which the author chooses to achieve through more mundane means, by acquiring fame and riches, by shining like a literary star. The earlier parts of the book are about this imperative to be successful and to be rich; there is a whole chapter on the importance of flaunting and not holding back. Emezi details how much money they make - half-a-million dollars from a two-book deal for Vivek Oji and this memoir, and a few hundred thousand here and there from their other books and a movie option for Freshwater. Their big, beautiful house in New Orleans, described from room to room, with specially ordered furniture, which they bought with the book deal money, is called "Shiny" and also the "godhouse". "I always wanted to be famous," they write. "When I first started writing for a living, it seemed like a decent avenue to accomplish this. I wanted to win all the prizes: a MacArthur, a Booker, a Pulitzer. The usual." There is a logic behind this relentless need to flaunt, we discover later. The logic is: since ogbanjes are named and shamed by humans in order to deter them from ever coming back, what will happen if an ogbanje decides to own their name and, instead of slinking away to the spirit world, live an opulent, shiny life? But when does this calculated, self-affirming quest for fame and wealth become inordinate and even destructive? When the author begins to contemplate, and goes on to attempt, to kill themselves for the first time: "I felt very strongly, that I needed to die. It would be in service to the work: the book might sell even more attached to the story of the tragic young writer who could have had such a stellar career if their corpse hadn't been found before their first book even debuted." Or the second time? The second attempt to take their own life, years later, is in a hotel room in Los Angeles after a break up from the lover referred to in the book as "The Magician" or Kaninchen. This makes for extraordinarily uncomfortable, almost voyeuristic reading. A lot of sentences begin: "My therapist told me ¿" There are sections musing over cannibalism with their lover, what parts of the body would be the best to cut out and eat. There is a lack of modesty and a lack of self-awareness that is almost fascinating here; fascinating in the way a car crash in slow motion is fascinating. You just can't look away. Sometimes you can't look away because of the garish self-advertisement, other times it is simply for the brilliance of the writing. For all their self-obsession and narcissism, this is an author who can write. There are beautiful reflective passages on love, betrayal, loneliness, spirituality and friendship; unfortunately, there just aren't enough of them.
Kirkus Review
A unique, visceral memoir from the author of The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). How does a spirit child drawn from Nigerian tribal cosmology negotiate modern life? That's the metaphysical conundrum at the heart of this highly personal and unusual memoir. Emezi grew up in Aba, Nigeria, and identifies as ogbanje, an "Igbo spirit that's born to a human mother, a kind of trickster that dies unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again." In order to ameliorate their feelings of "flesh dysphoria" or "metaphysical dysphoria," the author underwent multiple surgeries, including breast reduction and a "hysterectomy with a bilateral salpingectomy." As Emezi writes, they chose "to mutate my body into something that would fit my spiritself." Structured as a series of far-ranging letters written to friends, lovers, exes, family members, and others, the narrative raises questions about the author's "embodied nonhuman" existence and Igbo conceptions of reality. While Emezi's personal and professional travels have taken them around the world--Trinidad, Berlin, Johannesburg, Vietnam, Tanzania, and homes in Brooklyn and New Orleans--this book is not a travelogue. Although conventional elements of memoir reoccur--a painful breakup, estrangement from family members, career ups and downs--the author presents them as manifestations of a deity's "deeply traumatic" embodiment as a human being. Emezi attributes much of their meteoric rise--multiple literary award wins and nominations, National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honoree, etc.--to the casting of the right spell. The author is crystal-clear in their focus on "writing for people like me, not for a white gaze," and seen through the prism of Igbo ontology, this adventurous life story is undoubtedly compelling. For some readers, getting past Emezi's "outrageously arrogant" demand "for attention, for glory, for worship" as a self-described "bratty deity" may require a leap of faith and a modicum of empathy, a merely human trait. Tribal spiritual beliefs meet contemporary literary acclaim in a powerful memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji, 2020) bears the weight of a special responsibility. As an ogbanje, a malevolent Igbo spirit born into a human body, the writer feels the need to break the cycle of reincarnation. In this high-voltage epistolary memoir written as a series of letters to friends, family, acquaintances, and role models, Emezi describes how removal of their uterus along with a double mastectomy lets them come to shaky terms with their complex identities. The fiery prose describes a difficult childhood in Nigeria, a fractured relationship with their parents, and the challenges of fitting into traditional societal roles. At times the red-hot intensity of their world can be a bit difficult to take in: "Dear Senthuran, The first time I met you, we sat in the cafe on Malcolm X that doesn't exist anymore and talked about eating people, carving them up in tender moments, swallowing their meat and gristle," Emezi writes. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable memoir by a writer who doesn't shy away from sharing their ambitions or their vulnerabilities.
Library Journal Review
With this first work of nonfiction, best-selling novelist Emezi writes an expressive memoir in letters, with an overlapping focus on spirit, divinity, and humanity. For Emezi, these epistolary essays--addressed to friends, family, and lovers, some close, some estranged--are an exercise in memory and a warning not to forget the past. Aspiring writers will appreciate the candid letters that document the writing process behind Emezi's Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, which make clear that the author's success was far from guaranteed. Poignant letters also recount Emezi's dysphoria and efforts to reshape their body to reflect their spirit. The author is at their best when delineating the difficulties of hypervisibility; of being at once seen and unseen as a queer disabled Black writer. The body, in all its forms, is a recurring subject here, and Emezi movingly contemplates a body's mental and physical limitations. What sets the book apart is that its letters span time and place, from the author's native Nigeria, to Malaysia, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and beyond, reflecting their life and search for freedom--including the moments when Emezi doesn't know what their freedom might look like. VERDICT A must for fans of Freshwater; readers new to Emezi's writing will find themselves drawn in by their way with words.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal