(no subject)

Found another article about Akwaeke Emezi that's even more explicit about their more-than-oneness and how they conceptualize it.

(contains mentions of sexual assault)
https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/d3bjyz/akwaeke-emezi-freshwater-adama-jalloh

Akwaeke told them that they were working on a book, the premise being “if you’re the child of a deity, and you put a deity into a human mind, of course the mind is going to break because it’s not designed to accommodate that”. Raised Catholic, Akwaeke had always looked at life through the lens of Christianity, and tried to deal with their own plural spirit through a western mental health point of view; using therapy as a means of controlling the conversations in their head. However, speaking to people about the traditional Igbo religion, Akwaeke found for the first time that people understood exactly what it was they were experiencing. “It felt like all these things that didn’t make sense in my life had finally clicked into place.”

[...]

Of course, the battle now is ensuring that Freshwater is read in the context in which Akwaeke intended. Although rapturously reviewed, and currently longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, numerous articles have continued to critique the book through the lens of mental health; the depression, loneliness, and self-harm that Ada experiences being symptoms of some dissociative identity disorder, rather than genuine embodiment. When pressed, Akwaeke likes to use a quote by the novelist Toni Morrison who, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, was asked what it was like to be accepted by the mainstream. “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central,” she said. “Claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” This is also what Akwaeke is doing with Freshwater – asking the reader to move themselves and find a different perspective, consider what life looks like lived in an indigenous faith tradition. Imploring them to accept that lens as a valid reality.

Related is a statement they made in another interview:

I think everyone's centered in their own reality, you know. I think part of the thing that's a problem, really, in the world today is this inability to acknowledge multiple realities, and this insistence that there has to be one dominant reality, and everything that falls outside that reality is false and untrue. And that's how colonialism worked in great part — people came in and enforced a reality and said, "Well, if you believe in anything else, if you believe in your indigenous deities, if you believe in these spiritual entities, then you're ignorant and you're backwards, and it's only because you haven't been educated by the West." And you know, there's this [thought that] everything that is outside the dominant reality becomes something that's pathological.

And with my work, I'm not really interested in trying to convince anyone to shift their center, I'm just refusing to shift mine.