Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

My childhood can be measured easily, in pools of light spilling onto
pages and books blanketing the surfaces of our house in Aba. When
the electricity died, as it often did, I read by candlelight or with a torchlight
balanced against my body. Both my parents had been heavy readers; they
dragged their libraries into their marriage and kept them separate, distinct,
as if they both knew their relationship would end. My father had a
collection of Reader’s Digest condensed novels on the top shelf of the
bookcase in my brother’s room. In one of them, a little boy called his sister
stupid because she was seven years old. I took it personally when I first
read it, bristling with rage, because I was seven, too. That didn’t mean we
were stupid.
When my parents discovered I’d started reading the sex-advice columns
in my mother’s magazines as a child because I had run out of material, they
quickly bought me more books. Stories became my entire world, unchecked
and unrestricted; I was nine when I read V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the
Attic, which I think is entirely too young for a child as lonely as I was. My
sister and I rummaged through my mother’s trunk, a steel tomb tucked in a
corner of the house, and we found a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca,
with that haunting first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley
again.” My father’s library had a copy of Ken Follett’s book The Key to
Rebecca, which I’d read before, and eleven-year-old me was in awe at
finding a book that I’d first read about inside another book; worlds eating
worlds, all made by words.
By the time I started college in the States, I’d read every book in my
childhood home. The white dean of my school kept introducing me as the
sixteen-year-old freshman from West Africa who’d already read Dickens
and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as if any of that was surprising or special. I’d
only read those books because they were there; the awe associated with a
certain European literary canon wasn’t relevant. I’d also read Cyprian
Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, the secret
copy of The Joy of Sex hidden away in my parents’ room, every
encyclopedia entry in my school library on Greek mythology, labels on
shampoo bottles, the sides of cornflakes boxes and Bournvita tins during
breakfast, countless contraband Harlequin and Mills & Boon romance
novels bartered with secondary-school classmates, narrative interludes in
my brother’s video games, and all the parts of the Bible that referenced sex.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there was a canon I was
expected to prioritize, especially if I wanted to consider myself a writer, that
the work of dead white men could be a type of currency.
A few years ago, during a nonfiction workshop at my MFA program, I
read Vladimir Nabokov for the first time. The workshop was mostly white,
except for me and two other writers of color, and we’d been assigned his
memoir, Speak, Memory. I hadn’t expected much before reading the book,
but I ended up delightfully surprised at how strongly it resonated: the ways
in which Nabokov engaged with his own selfhood, the thinking that
unspooled from that, how it reflected what I was doing in the debut novel I
was working on. I felt like I’d found a precedent for what I was creating.
On the day of the workshop, we were all asked to bring in pieces we’d
written, to be critiqued after we discussed the assigned reading. I brought
the requested printout of my work, as did all the white writers, but the other
two writers of color had nothing to turn in.
“It’s Nabokov,” they said. “No one writes like he does. No one can do
what he does.” They were so intimidated by his brilliance that they’d
chosen not to present their own writing. I didn’t know how to respond, but
my enthusiasm about the connection I’d felt with his work dimmed into a
guarded wariness. In the air of that room, as everyone agreed with them
about how untouchable Nabokov was, it felt as if the only permitted
emotion was awe, like anything else would be seen as incredibly arrogant. I
wasn’t supposed to read Nabokov and think, “Ah, we’re doing something
similar with this study of the self.” I was supposed to be intimidated,
worshipful. I was off script.
In the moment, I figured they knew better. They’d read more than I had;
I was clumsy and naive to see a potential peer in Nabokov. As a young
writer working on their first book, it made me even more nervous about
what I was writing, the ways my work deviated from other stories that were
out there. I was besieged with anxieties: What if I wasn’t allowed to do
what I was doing? What if it didn’t get published? What if the gatekeepers
read it and saw it as arrogant, me stepping out of place, writing about
metaphysical selves as if I had the creative freedom of a white writer in this
industry? I knew the world saw me as a Black writer, as an African woman
even though I wasn’t a woman, and I’d read enough about racism in
publishing to worry about how it would play out in real time against me.
I kept looking for stories like the one I was telling, but I couldn’t find
them, and that terrified me. Maybe I was meant to be writing stories that
looked more like what popular African writers had done before; maybe if I
stuck to themes that were familiar, perhaps even expected, I could have
some of the success they had. I couldn’t blame the other writers of color in
my workshop for swallowing their work instead of presenting it. They were
hearing the same message, broadcast by the limited range of our stories
made available to us, a message that seemed to tell us which of these stories
would be allowed through the gates and which would be held back. “When
you read work like Nabokov’s,” the message said, “turn your face away.
That’s not the kind of work you can make. There’s a script for people like
you; stick to it.”
I’ve been a reader all my life; I know books can be many things. My
favorites are the ones that function as portals into other constructed worlds.
I’ve loved those since I was a child; it’s why I read so much speculative
fiction. Some books are windows into another’s experiences, or even into
our own—demonstrating our raging desires to be seen and to see ourselves
—but I wonder if it is enough, this reflection of known things.
As I clawed my way through my manuscript, I remained deeply doubtful
about its future. When it went out on submission, none of the rejections
surprised me. I’d prepared myself for them—not because of the writing, per
se, but because of the market. The book wasn’t “immigrant experience”
enough; it was too internal; wouldn’t it be difficult to sell a book so deeply
rooted in Igbo ontology to a U.S. audience? I occasionally talk about
placelessness as it attaches to myself and my life, but in my fog of worry,
that feeling seemed to extend to my book, wrapping it in blurry tentacles.
Months later, after it finally sold, I was composing a description of it
with my editor and agent when the word “identity” came up.
“We can’t use that word as is,” I wrote in an email. “Everyone’s going to
assume that we mean national or racial identity, just because I’m a Nigerian
writer. We have to specify that it’s about metaphysical identity.”
“Are you sure you want to use the word ‘metaphysical’?” they asked.
“I know it might sound pretentious, but I honestly don’t know another
accurate word,” I wrote back.
My main character’s life and experiences weren’t centered on her being
African, or Black, or an immigrant. Those were negligible, secondary. Her
core conflict was that she was embodied: that she existed, that she had
selves, that she was several. I didn’t know any other books by African
writers that asked or answered the questions I was working with, but I very
much wanted to find precedent. I figured that would tell me if what I was
doing was permissible or possible, that it would allow me to predict the
trajectory of the book and afford me some security. Sometimes we don’t get
the reassurances we want; we make the work anyway. By then, I knew what
it was like to look for books that reflected my world and not be able to find
them. I know the power of people feeling seen, having access to stories that
mirror their own, and what that experience can move inside them.
I wonder if it’s enough. I know, for me, it’s not.
—
IT IS SUMMER in New York and I am at a cathedral uptown, meeting with
Katherine Agyemaa Agard, a Trinidadian writer whose work and mind I
love. We walk past the ceiling that looks like nothingness and climb into the
ornate choir section. I give her a signed advance copy of Freshwater and
she gives me a spray of velvet orange flowers. We eat two tangerines, piling
the rinds sweetly around us. Katherine is telling me about her book Of
Colour and its strangeness, how she’s not sure it is actually a book; we are
thinking about what a book can be. I tell her how I want reflections that are
alive, that shift things for me instead of showing me the familiar. Perhaps
it’s because I couldn’t find my own world when I looked for it in books, and
though I found other worlds there—ones I’ve lived in, pretended in, moved
through—it has never felt like enough.
So instead I turned to work that didn’t reflect my story, but made me
want to write new ones. I fell for books that challenged form and
convention because something in them challenged me. Within the
cathedral’s quiet, I tell Katherine about Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass,
punctuated with commas alone, and Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, storytelling
within storytelling, blurred realities. I use my phone to pull up the ebook of
Fran Ross’s 1974 novel, Oreo, and show her the first two pages, with the
diagrams and the equations, the magnificent things Ross did with structure.
“That’s an alive reflection,” I say. “It’s the kind of work you’d think only
white writers get to

I went to the theater on Thirty-Fourth Street, dissociating intensely, very
much absent, wondering if this counted as being high. I sat next to Yagazie
and whispered to her that I was on pills, so if I acted weird, that was why.
She nodded. We watched the movie, and when we stood together on the
street outside afterward, my human mother tried to make plans to see me. I
was headed for the subway station and I remember how desperate she felt to
connect with me, the way she touched my arm, my internal recoil. She is
not a safe place; I don’t trust her concern. She wants the relationship we
have to match the one in her head. I used to play along, and then I turned
thirty and stopped a little, and then the book came out and I stopped some
more, and it has just been more and more stopping since then. I see how
that could be painful, when the masks are put down and I shrug away from
her hand and go underground, back to my apartment, back to the sleep
that’s waiting just under my skin, to that drugged and gone place, that you
don’t have to deal with how this world hurts place.
A few days later, I fly to San Francisco, and then to Seattle. Death flies
with me.
I start to think about estate planning, about what to do with my unedited
and unfinished manuscripts. Who should get the royalties when I die, who
should be in charge of things, who will be executor of my will, who will
own the literary rights—it has to be someone I trust with the stories. I text
Christine from Seattle and ask her if she knows any lawyers who do estate
planning. She asks me if this is part of a suicide plan. I lie and say no. She
tells me that she would still help me even if it was. I know she knows I’m
lying, but I don’t take it back.
I feel Death pressing closer, tighter, leaning against my neck and rustling
in my ear. I have so many more stops on the tour. I know I won’t survive
them, but it’s my first book, it’s the debut, it’s been supported by so many
indie booksellers, and I don’t know how to not show up. The book is
apparently doing well. The reviews are coming in and they’re brilliant, I’ve
been on the radio and written all these essays, including one published by
The Cut, where I disclose that I’m trans. It’s such a flesh term, but the
announcement gives me a chance to talk about the dysphoria in its accurate
form, as spirit at odds with flesh. I’m afraid that the true spirit affirming
surgery for me might just be dying, that all these other things I do are the
equivalent of binding, or tucking, or all the ways we fold the flesh we don’t
want, to try and get it to mimic the self we see. I want to fold the flesh right
off my bones and collapse into nothing.
There is so much happening and I can’t feel most of it, just Death
stroking my throat and calling me home.
I call Chinelo and tell her what’s happening. The rules of deathspace are
that I have to tell someone, no matter how much the whispers say not to, no
matter how convincing they are that all of this makes sense only in my
head, that once I let it out it’ll be clear that I’m lying, just looking for
attention, that it’s not that bad, it can’t be that bad, there are people out there
who actually deal with the closeness of death and this doesn’t count, this is
just childish nonsense, I’m not going to actually die from it. I know by now
that these whispers make it all unreal, so that they can sever me from this
and claim me for themselves. It’s how the first attempt happened: the cops
and the ambulance and the charcoal back up my throat.
So I tell Chinelo and she talks to me, reassures me that the first book
almost takes people out all the time, that no one talks about it because they
don’t want to seem ungrateful. She says I need to come home, come and
stay with her, so she can make sure I’m okay. It makes me want to cry, how
largely she loves me. The magician had said the same thing, about the
debuts and the ingratitude, about how people would mock: “Oh, are your
diamond shoes too tight?” and he always wanted to tell them, “Yes, yes,
they’re too tight and they’re hurting me.” I imagine dancing at a literary
gala wearing the diamond shoes, my feet slippery with blood, the light
catching red off the stones, having to smile, smile, you’ve been reviewed in
The New York Times, in The New Yorker, in The Washington Post, you’ve
been in Vogue, Annie Leibovitz shot you, aren’t you lucky, you know this
doesn’t happen for every writer, even if they’re brilliant like you—and
they’re right. It doesn’t. I’m lucky. The dance floor is streaked with me.
The hotel room in Seattle is lovely and huge and Rick Simonson, the
bookseller, has sent me a saffron card, which I’ve saved. I’m talking at his
store tomorrow, and tonight I can order whatever I want from room service
because they’re paying for it. I order dinner and a crème brûlée, which
comes in a huge bowl, the cream poured generously in, the sugar on top
scorched and crackling. I can’t finish all of it, so I eat what I can and shove
the rest into the minibar. The next day, the sugar crust is now just a sweet
brown layer, collapsed from what it used to be. I am also collapsing.
I talk to Alex, who has had to live with the possibility of losing me for
almost a decade now, and they are terrified, but they tell me how they’re not
the one who has to live with it, so they can’t say anything, they can’t really
tell me to stay. I appreciate that, because so many people tell me to stay
without knowing what they’re asking, the kind of pain they’re willing me to
just continue being in, and they can’t imagine that this pain has been there
since I was little, since before I can remember, always and constant, and my
whole life is a calculated distraction to try and get away from it. I always
knew writing my books couldn’t keep me alive forever, that they would run
out and I’d need something else, a new treatment plan, because I’d
developed a resistance to this one. The magician tells me about his father
and the bus—how all you have to do is miss this bus, because another one
will be coming. Another one will always be coming. You will always, at
some point, want to die.
I realize I have no idea how to cancel the tour, how to stop the wheels
from crushing me. I call my agent, Jackie—you’d like her—and tell her I’m
dying. Not in those words, probably in more measured ones, but enough
that she understands how serious it is. She’s wonderful, as she always is,
tells me she’ll handle it with my publisher, tells me that my health is the
most important thing. Jackie says that enough times in the next few months
that even I start to believe it, that my well-being matters more than selling
this book. That I can say no and stay at home, which is where I want to be,
not alone in hotels, brokenhearted that the person I love is not with me, that
I go out there and talk to people who love the book, love the self I wear at
the readings, and that self loves them, too, but it collapses when I leave, and
there is another me that belongs to just me, and it feels like that one is
always sad and alone.
Jackie cancels the rest of my tour, leaving only the New York events. I
tweet obscurely about it, unwilling to share the things I’m sharing now, how
hard a time I’m having staying alive.

If you release the idea of an essential self, throw it naked into the surf
and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes. Without it, masks
take on a new expanse of possibility. They can conceal, yes, but as the
magician says, they can also clarify what is true—in precisely the same way
a story can tell you something better than stark facts ever could. They can
hold you together like a tight cellophane bandage over curved metal, like a
gaze across two bodies, a starched knot whorled in gold. They can be
adornment, clothes as costumes that mask the body, bright enough to direct
your eyes.
We are what we choose to do, which can be as simple as which mask
you pick. You wear the mask, you are the thing. For people who live in the
knuckles with sixty-seven faces, it’s not really about pretending to be
people you’re not. It’s more about having faces for all the things you
already are—blurred spaces, trickster mobility. In the space of teatime, one
of the cafés we’re sitting in has been demolished. The other two and a half
have dimmed their lights. The teapot curls up and falls asleep as leafy vines
crawl up the table legs. All of the floors are pale sand. I hold the magician’s
hand and his copper fingertips break off into my palm. “A present,” he says,
“for later.” A colorful cloud of slashed tulle falls from the ceilings.
A mask doesn’t always look the way you think it does. It can be a total
smear of pigment, a stamp made of sand, or sometimes—like a lot of ours
—it can look like nothing at all. But it can still make you into whatever you
create: the inhuman face in the forest at night, a figure resplendent on the
shore, a haloed soul floating on the water. All these things are as true as you
want them to be.
The magician’s tea has turned into the ocean. He drinks it anyway.

Early on, however, a friend with decades of publishing experience had
warned me that Freshwater wouldn’t win any literary awards in the West.
“They’ll nominate you,” they said, “because the book is too good to ignore.
But they won’t let you win, because you’re not writing about Black
abjection.” When Freshwater was long-listed for the Women’s Prize, the
backlash that followed was transphobic and ugly. I knew it wouldn’t make
the short list; it’s one thing for an awards committee to rock the boat with a
long-list nomination for a Black trans author—that gets them points for
inclusivity—but it’s quite another to let it go as far as a win or even a short
list. When the Booker nominations came out and Freshwater was absent, I
was unsurprised. After the negative publicity the Women’s Prize had
received for my gender, I didn’t think the Booker would want any of that
smoke, not from the same book in the same year, not when there were safer
choices with similar subject matter. “It’s absolutely a gender thing,” my
friend agreed.
I thought about these costs, you know, when I disclosed that I wasn’t a
woman—even earlier, when I decided not to compare my work to the
Western canon, when I made it clear that I was writing for people like me,
not for a white gaze. There are always costs when you choose a center.
In coming to terms with embodiment as a god, I have accepted the desire
for attention, for glory, for worship. It’s been around since I was a child,
and after years of trying to smother it with performed modesty, I’ve decided
to leave it alone. It doesn’t have to be a good thing or a bad thing; it can just
be a thing. I had genuinely thought Freshwater would win a slew of awards.
I don’t think that’s arrogant to say; I know what that book is. The first year
of my career was a brutal one, because I realized that the shape of the
success I’d predicted for myself was quite wrong, in interesting ways. It
didn’t look like awards, and that bothered me for months. I tried to remind
myself that institutional validation was a complicated and problematic
thing, that people were subjective no matter what, and that the structural
bullshit that defines this country is not absent from these spaces. Part of me
didn’t care. I wanted to win. I wanted to stunt. I wanted the money and the
prestige, the stage and the spotlight and the speeches. I’m a fucking god, I
wanted the offerings. I wanted the power.
The magician talked me down. He reminded me that I wasn’t in this to
write the great American novel, but to make a body of work, so I would
need a different standard of value. Other friends echoed the point, urged me
to divest from award culture, dead those emotional bonds I was feeding
with my want, my greed, my gleaming hunger. I knew they were right.
When I cast questions to my spirits and deityparents, the answer has always
been the same: to face my work. To make it, to protect it, fight for it, bring
it to the people who need it. I keep myself whole so I can keep making the
work—these books upon books that clatter inside my head, growling to be
fed and written.
You’ve taught me so much about how aggressive we have to be with our
wellness in order to survive the lives we’re mapping out for ourselves. I
want visibility so it can stretch as far as it needs to, and this kind of
visibility is not free. It comes with costs: madness and paranoia and the
partial death of privacy. It’s ugly and difficult and I am an altar on a
mountaintop, sacrificing myself to myself, to burn in a fire that the whole
world can see.
The work is at once a service to the people I’m writing for, and a flex
that will attract shine and power to me. Both can sit next to each other. I’m
not ashamed to want the spotlight, because really, it’s what makes me
suitable for this job. What would be the point of telling stories like these
and being amplified if it was just going to hurt you? It hurts me anyway, of
course, but it’s also what I wanted. Not entirely, not in a way that would
consume my life, but enough to go through all this. The work is everything
to me.
It’s been difficult to disengage from award culture, though. It feels like
having to reset and reset and reset again, over and over, dragging myself
back to my appointed centers. At the same time, everything is easier at the
center. All you have to do is write. The work is a beast on its own, a
breathing thing that does its own work. It has a mouth and a voice. I saw
this when I first signed with my agents, and then when I got the deal for
Freshwater. I’ve never had to pitch this work, as in convince someone of it.
All I’ve had to do is say what it was or let them read it. That’s how we got
the development deal with FX—you told them about the book, they read it,
and they made an offer. We skipped the entire step of pitching it to people,
and a new set of hungers yawned open in me. I want to win in every room
I’m in. I have a tulle dress that’s waiting for our series launch party. It has
polka dots and is the most expensive item of clothing I ever bought. It is
also a spell, sitting in a black garment bag in Shiny. We’ll see how it works.

I keep forgetting.
“All relationships end,” she said, and I flinched. I didn’t know. I knew
some ended, but in my head, I was holding out for a partnerspirit. I was
waiting for an entity who would never leave me. I had learned to accept
impermanence from other people: family, friends, a husband even. I knew
the drill. Love them anyway; enjoy the time you have with them; just
because it might end doesn’t mean you have to be afraid. If anything, love
them harder for that. But, I confess, I am terribly stubborn. Drag me into
these human cells all you want; I still remember that I’m missing a cohort. I
still believe I can bend the world into what I want. I have been trying to
create immortality, bonds like the one I lost when I incarnated. I thought all
I needed was another god. I thought you had enough power.
Every time I accepted impermanence with other people, I simply
transferred the expectation of immortality to a partnerspirit who doesn’t
even exist yet. I see now how that might have been too heavy. Like I said, I
forget the constraints of this world. It genuinely didn’t occur to me that it
was impossible until she told me they all end, and I thought, Fuck. She said
it like a rule, you see, a rule of this world, and she was right. That’s the
whole fucking point of mortality, that there are ends. My god, the things
these assholes have done with time. There are no forevers.
I forgot.
I thought I would find a partnerspirit and we would spin immortality, and
to be honest, I thought they would die first, and I would die right after.
That’s as close as you can get to forever here, dying together. Afterward
didn’t matter, the consciousness that’s been cobbled together in this body
would be lost to oblivion. The dead ọgbanje goes home to its brothersisters.
Playtime starts again, like it always does. There are forevers in our original
world. I keep forgetting which world I’m in, one foot on the other side.
The note you wrote me is still full of hope, but it contains versions of us
that are both ghosts now. I cry quietly in my bathroom so Katherine won’t
hear it. I want to try again with you. I don’t know when to stop. I refuse the
limits. I refuse the limits with you. But I am only a small god, put here by
deities bigger than me, so I have to obey the limits, even as wrong as they
feel. I still believe that if you worked with me, we could bend the world into
anything we wanted. I wish you believed that too; it’s the first step in
worldbending. I can’t believe for the both of us, and it makes me so angry
and sad that you gave up. It’s never too late—that’s a human lie of time,
there is no late, there is mostly now because now is so flexible, I find. You
can change a whole life, a whole world, inside of a now. The change can be
a ripple, but if you crack a whip and the tip breaks the air of the future, the
handle is still in your hand now, don’t you see? This is how gods shape
reality.
I thought you had enough power. I keep forgetting.
That’s why I couldn’t let you go, my burning and crashing magician,
because I expected you to stay forever, so every time you stepped away, my
head went mad with abandonment. The threat of an end, even a temporary
one—what does temporary mean, distance is distance, a bond severed is a
bond severed, what is this human back-and-forth, my cohort lived in
everlasting before the things done to time gave that any meaning. I cannot
survive the thought of ends, of being alone. I accepted it with other people
like a trade. Fine, give me these transient ones, but for the weight of their
fickleness, I will counterbalance with a partnerspirit who will feed me
immortality. I think the humans would call that codependence, but that’s
because they have ends and separations and all kinds of unnaturalness. I’m
not saying that’s wrong. You have to bend to some of a world’s rules, even
if you bend worlds. There is an order to things, but I forgot.
I couldn’t let you go because you were supposed to be immortal, with
me. All relationships end, she said, and for the first time it occurred to me
that perhaps I cannot bend immortality into this world the way I thought I
could. There will be no everlasting partnerspirit, no embodied brothersister
in this dimension re-creating the bond we had on the other side. These
might be rules I can’t break. It hadn’t occurred to me; the impossible rarely
does. I was terrified that I’d end up alone—but terrified because I thought
the chance was slim, not that it didn’t fucking exist. This is all so
unbelievably heartbreaking, the way I’ve been waiting for an incarnation to
find me. I can’t tell you how many lifetimes of grief flashed through me,
mournings stacked on mournings, shimmering and then dying because
impossible things can’t draw much of a breath. How could I forget that even
if I’m not human, I’m still mortal, and that always means ends, many small
deaths? Forever doesn’t exist in this world. I thought you were forever;
have I been breaking my own heart?