Ogbanje: Using Cultural Identity to Reimagine Human Lifespans in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

Lehmann, Zoe Christina (August 2022). Ogbanje: Using Cultural Identity to Reimagine Human Lifespans in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (Unpublished). In: ESSE Conference. Universität Mainz. 29th August-2nd September 2022.

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Speculative fiction has a tradition of radically removing individual characters from the progress of their normal lifespans, to place them instead within universe and epoch spanning experiences. This protagonist (and presumably the reader) can thus escape their atomistic and momentary existence to instead encounter vast timescapes. Olaf Stapledon’s narrator of Star Maker, for instance, having been plucked from his back garden to go on a millennia-spanning tour, at the end of his cosmic journey finally reaches an understanding of the eponymous star maker, creator of the many universes that he has witnessed. In such depictions, the temporally-bound individual identity is replaced with a ‘loss of self’, instead becoming an ageless spectator of human cosmology.

In this paper, however, I will make the case that contemporary SF is now rethinking the narrative potential of temporal ‘disassociation’ by not altogether removing these protagonists from their cultural and social situations, but instead depicting disruptions to their ‘normal’ lifespans within socio-cultural understandings of what that lifespan should signify. Disruptions to the ageing process allows for reconfigurations of notions of gender, national and familial identities. These texts are insistent on cultural communities as a point of contact between individuals-in-time and the history of humanity. Thus these characters become not so much figures ‘outside time’, but as representatives of what a lifetime might mean as part of a community identity.

Such a shift requires particular narrative strategies in order to hold in tension the temporal identities of a cultural community and the radical displacement of ‘ageless’ SF entities. Taking as exemplary the novels Freshwater by Akaweke Emezi and Chana Porter’s The Seep, this paper will examine what narrative strategies are in place in contemporary SF, and what it means for SF to make use of cultural narratives to reimagine notions of an individual ‘lifetime’.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures
UniBE Contributor:	Lehmann, Zoe Christina
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures 400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages
Language:	English
Submitter:	Zoe Christina Lehmann Imfeld
Date Deposited:	30 Nov 2022 12:35
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 16:29
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/175358