“Both Exist at the Same Time”: Reconceptualizing Religious Syncretism in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018)

ABSTRACT: This article explores how Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater (2018) reconceptualizes Christianity and represents religious syncretism as an inevitable, rather than elusive, aspect of contemporary African identities. Because of the protagonist’s identity as an ogbanje—both spirit and human and yet neither—the novel presents a narrative that challenges the concepts of religious syncretism as a contamination of one religion by another, and it accomplishes this by representing the process of syncretization between Igbo cosmology and Christianity in its plot and characterizations. One of the ways in which it achieves this is by characterizing Christianity’s Christ as “Yshwa” and portraying his contentious and ultimately reconciled relationship with the ogbanje. Some readings of the novel underscore the dichotomy between the ogbanje and Yshwa, and this approach not only perpetuates binaries and purist impressions of religion and spirituality, but it also presents religious syncretism as elusive because of presumably stubborn dissimilarities. By resisting this dichotomous reading of the novel and understanding how and when religious syncretism is represented, I suggest that this narrative contributes to current discourse on literary representations of syncretism in ways that dismantle hegemonic representations of Christ as a Western-centric symbol of Christianity and reconfigure Christianity by characterizing Yshwa through an Igbo ontological lens.