Literary Realism, Speculative Fiction, and Queer African Futures in Akwaeke Emezi’s <i>Freshwater</i>

This article positions Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater (2018) as a text that challenges definitions of multiple genres, namely literary realism and speculative fiction. I argue that Freshwater’s seemingly fantastical elements are in fact iterations of Igbo cosmology, which recognizes coterminous human and spiritual realms as part of material reality. By positioning Igbo ontology as the grounding principle of earthly existence, Freshwater contests the division of realism into multiple subsets (magical, animist, literary). Furthmore, I argue that the novel playfully refigures ogbanje identities and Igbo cosmological structures to envision new horizons for future kinship. Rather than speculating about futures that respond to African histories of European colonization, Freshwater reconfigures uniquely Igbo concepts such as ogbanje and iyi-uwa into means for queer agential re-destination. Thus, the novel shifts the speculative focus away from postcolonial efforts to “write back,” and instead locates the basis for speculative futures within Igbo ontological structures. Freshwater’s complex navigation of not only multiple realisms and speculative fiction, but also tradition and change, defies easy categorization and instead offers open-ended avenues for queer Igbo and other African futurities.