BETWEEN SPIRIT WORLDS AND PSYCHIATRY ONTOLOGIES OF DISTRESS IN AKWAEKE EMEZI’S FRESHWATER

Abstract

Mental health has become increasingly visible in contemporary African writing, but critical debates still tend to split interpretive labour between biomedical and spiritual paradigms, as though narratives of distress must finally be settled within a single explanatory register. Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018) refuses that settlement. The novel narrates Ada’s life through a shifting chorus of human and spirit voices, tracing childhood in southeastern Nigeria, migration to the United States, gendered and queer embodiment, trauma, and encounters with both religious and psychiatric institutions. This article addresses a gap in existing scholarship by analysing how the novel represents mental distress as an outcome of negotiated identity meanings rather than as an experience that can be reduced to either diagnosis or possession. Using identity theory as the primary theoretical lens, supplemented by work on ogbanje/abiku cosmology and stigma, the study employs qualitative close reading of key episodes including early family and church contexts, diasporic transitions, intimate violence, moments of non-graphic self-injury, and clinical encounters (Burke; Stets and Burke; Goffman). The analysis demonstrates significant relationships between polyphonic narration and identity salience, between chronic failures of identity verification and escalating distress, and between spiritual multiplicity and ambivalent coping strategies that can be both protective and risky. The article argues that Freshwater reconceptualises mental health as emerging at the intersection of social, spiritual, gendered, and diasporic identities, thereby stretching identity theory beyond its secular assumptions (Magaqa and Makombe; Talabi). It contributes a culturally grounded model for reading African mental health narratives that neither romanticises spirituality nor reduces experience to diagnosis, aligning with medical humanities and African literary scholarship that seeks theoretically rigorous and ethically sensitive analyses of cultural representations of distress (Gureje and Lasebikan; Patel).