THe Resurrection of a little god: REbirth and selfhood in akwaeke emezi’s CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING
Shannon Moran Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi Copper Canyon Press, 2022.
“i believe in new skins,” asserts Akwaeke Emezi in their debut poetry collection Content Warning: Everything. The book, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2022, is a remarkable story of resurrection and self hood, full of poems that speak directly to Emezi’s identity as Igbo and Tamil, nonbinary transgender, and ogbanje—an Igbo spirit born into human flesh, fated to die and be reborn again and again. Our speaker is also a “little god,” untethered from the laws of life and death. As you might expect of a book entitled Content Warning: Everything, some of the themes are harrowing, vulnerable, and hard to read, and yet the speaker also makes it clear: i did not die, do you hear? i did not die what i’m saying is, it doesn’t matter which water i will never know what it’s like to drown. Amidst self-harm, assault, and abuse, our speaker’s insistence on
survival and rebirth is both a comfort and a power. This poetry collection is less an introduction and more a return to the form for Emezi. Though they are more widely known for their fiction, young adult literature, and memoir
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writing, Emezi’s first writing workshops were taken at Cave Canem, a foundation for African American poets, in 2012. They have since published books across genres in almost rapid-fire succession with Freshwater (2018), Pet (2019), The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), and Dear Senthuran (2021), all of which received significant critical acclaim and helped establish Emezi as a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” and TIME Magazine Next Generation Leader. While Content Warning: Everything interacts with Emezi’s other titles (one poem is a “self-portrait as asughara,” a character from Freshwater), and the themes of body, identity, and voice throughout will echo to readers of Emezi’s other works, the poetry collection is strong as a stand-alone read. The book has no sections, but brings about structure through a series of prose poems that read as small stories, written with Emezi’s brilliant knack for narration, but with the poetics of stunning language and visceral image. These poems contain characters—mary auntie, jesus, and magdalene—who form a pseudo-family for the speaker as they struggle with being othered. When our speaker’s own family cannot comprehend, or love, or protect them, these characters step in, offering vengeance, comfort, and advice. This narrative both disrupts and bridges together the poems that surround it, anchoring a collection that can, at times, be intensely internal to a larger story of survival and self hood. The rest of the poems fill in around this thread of narration, detailing our speaker’s most intimate moments—stories about dying fathers, near-death experiences, and the struggle to find, and name, themselves. Our speaker, however, always comes back with a nearly violent show of resiliency: i resurrect on the lake’s shore blood coating my eyeteeth diamonds of cartilage on my scalp
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Throughout the collection, forms and titles repeat and circle back. For a writer concerned with new skins, the inclusion of five “self-portrait as” titles serves as a reminder that the speaker is inventing and reinventing themselves at every turn. The entirety of the collection is written in lowercase letters, with no capitalization, perhaps showing that our speaker knows better than to assert a self hood that has not yet been fully realized. The poems often move quickly between styles, delighting in slashes, playing with punctuation, and moving deftly between lineated and prose forms. These poems are both formed and formless— the perfect vehicle for our speaker and for Emezi, who is always writing so deftly about identity and transformation of both body and spirit. In the poem “sanctuary,” Emezi writes that “the safest place in the world . . . is a map for someone who has died / many times and wants to come back.” Content Warning: Everything serves as that map, and readers will delight in the story and language that Emezi crafts along the way. In “disclosure,” Emezi writes, “one day a coward who will break my heart asks me how i / ended up still so soft i tell him i am stubborn i wanted a better world,” and it is here, in the pages of Content Warning: Everything, that this better world is built. While the poems sometimes strike with pain and deep sadness, Emezi’s speaker finds strength, telling us “i remembered how to be a god i give / myself what i want.” Emezi’s better world is one of survival and acceptance of self, of always coming back from the everyday death, and of creating one’s self through the journey. Just as “disclosure” starts with softness and hope for a better world, it ends with freedom: who knew i could love me so loudly who knew i would survive who knew their world meant nothing meant nothing meant nothing look when i last came out i called myself free
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This collection sparkles with newness, with a strong and unique poetic voice that is both well-trained and yet never approaches a manufactured sound. Content Warning: Everything is a breathtaking look into Emezi’s brilliance, and it absolutely sings on the page.