Dear Senthuran

The state of my body matches that of my mind-floating, tripped, and suspended amid clouds, crashing down into borders, lonely. Nowhere seems real; all the people are constructs. I have stopped fighting detachment and started learning how to sink into it instead. Rumi suggests being dead to this world and alive only to God; in Sozopol, a former monk leans across a dinner table with bright stained-glass eyes and tells me about the types of nothingness in Buddhism. I tell him that my search for somewhere to be is really a search for self, and the only self I feel at home with is one that doesn't exist, not anymore, one that's been taken apart, whipped into dust.





I tie back my hair, so it doesn't interfere with my eyes, and start climbing down toward the sea. My sneakers slide slowly over the wet rock and I drop my legs into crevices, press my palm against outcrops. The rest of the land grows higher and higher as I sink. The sea pulls. I could see how people would try to lose themselves in it, when the detachment gets too strong, when the urge to be nowhere becomes an action. I unscrew the cap from the bottle I'm carrying and crouch on a rock, dropping my hand and waiting for the surf to wash it full. I feel utterly alone. The water is clear inside the faint blue plastic. I should leave-I have buses and planes to catch-but this curve of nothing feels too right, so I sit there for a long time.





I text the magician, tell him about the way the sun turns the rocks into cradles and clothes-racks. Perhaps, with time, if I waited here long enough, I could dissolve into foam and be withdrawn into something vaster than my immediate body.




I want to be nothing, nowhere.




The magician texts me back. I too am turquoise, he says, stained by phytoplankton.




Fire | Dear Jahra





Kerosene burns nearly everything.




Growing up, our house was sometimes invaded by soldier ants, rivers of red, clacking bodies that ran over our windowsills and bit us with thoroughness. We soaked newspaper in kerosene to make torches and burnt the ants back, singeing our carpets and bathtubs. The price of petrol kept climbing, so we transferred all our cooking over to the small green kerosene stove and watched as the pots blackened. In the dry season, we raked dead leaves into a pile next to the borehole that didn't work, sprinkled some kerosene, and dropped a flame. I remember being amazed at how a little wetne

2021

Akwaeke Emezi opens a portal into the brutality and beauty of their own self-creation and [reveals] the immense potency of their spiritual existence. Electric Literature

A memoir that transcends expectation and challenges readers to explore our own flesh and spiritual multiplicities. Them

The brilliant Akwaeke Emezi candidly shares their reflections on gender, embodiment, queerness, creativity and relationships with the same fierce dedication and candor that defines their bestselling novels. Ms. Magazine

A memoir in letters, to various friends, lovers and family in Emezi s life. . . . It s like no memoir I ve ever read before in the best possible way. Alma

An illuminating account of storytelling, self, and survival. Lambda Literary

A must-read memoir about creativity and identity. Bustle

Refreshing. . . . there are no wasted words. Everything Emezi writes holds importance and deserves space. . . . They have created an entire universe within themselves [and] share with the readers. Real Change

Hypnotic and poetic . . . In Dear Senthuran, Emezi generously shares both their wounds and their wisdom, offering aspiring writers and artists fresh inspiration for creating new forms of making, loving and being. Bookpage (starred review)

Spellbinding . . . a gorgeous epistolary memoir [with] consistently captivating prose.   Publishers Weekly

"Fiery. . . . a remarkable memoir by a writer who doesn t shy away from sharing their ambitions or their vulnerabilities. Booklist

"A unique, visceral memoir. . . . Tribal spiritual beliefs meet contemporary literary acclaim in a powerful memoir." Kirkus

An intimate, disarming diary of transcendence, of wielding magic hidden deep within the marrow of our bones, and the spells we cast when we obey the work of honoring the unpretty truths of one s beginnings, Dear Senthuran is a swan song of survival written for survivors everywhere. Paperback Paris

PRAISE FOR AKWAEKE EMEZI:
 
[One] of our greatest living writers. Shondaland
 
Akwaeke Emezi parts the seas of the self.   Vanity Fair
 
Remarkably assured and graceful . . . encourage[s] us to embrace
a fuller spectrum of human experience. The Washington Post
 
Emezi has a gift for prose that is often as visceral,
tender and heartbreaking  as what it describes The Guardian
 
Extraordinarily powerful. The New Yorker
 
Dazzling. Los Angeles Times
 
A beacon of literary genius. Lambda Literary Review
 
Name a writer more essential to the recent landscape of contemporary fiction and more prolific than Akwaeke Emezi has been over the last five years. . . . I ll wait.
Harper s Bazaar