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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Akwaeke Amezi’s novel Freshwater uses “we-narrators” (Bekhta 2020) to negotiate West African ontologies of communality, suggesting that the novel problematizes the dualisms of human/nonhuman and fantasy/spirituality as a way to re-imagine the future through the past.

Paper long abstract

“No man beholds his mother’s womb—

Yet who denies it’s there? Coiled

To the navel of the world is that

Endless cord that links us all

To the great origin. If I lose my way

The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.”

—Wole Soyinka, _Death and the King’s Horseman_

African Speculative Fiction (ASF) has been gaining popular and critical traction over the past decade, as part of a growing sense of urgency in reckoning with the future. Noting how “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh 2016: 15), speculative fiction is seen as a key avenue for re-imagining the future (Chattopadhyay 2022). This paper explores how ASF offers alternate conceptions of the future by questioning ontological assumptions about the present, thereby re-imagining the future through the past.

I read Akwaeke Emezi’s novel _Freshwater_ for its use of multiple nonhuman narrators, who tell the story in the first-person plural: as a nongendered spirit-human “we.” Building on Emezi’s later claim that the novel was autobiographical, I explore of Freshwater’s use of a “we-narrative” technique (Bekhta 2020) as tied to a West African ontology of collectivity (Soyinka, 1975) in which the human and nonhuman are seen as interconnected. I briefly compare Freshwater to other speculative texts that use “we-narrators”—Noel Cherutu’s “We Broke Nairobi,” NoViolet Bulawayo’s _Glory_, and Nnedi Okorafor’s _Lagoon_— to suggest that this form of communality is increasingly thematized in ASF because it speaks to the crisis of future of our times.