Akwaeke Emezi
AKWAEKE EMEZI HAS TAKEN OFF THEIR MASKS—the ones we all wear that grin and lie, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote. The ones that hide and shade more than our cheeks and eyes, camouflaging the traumas we’ve triumphed over. The masks we don to survive a white-supremacist world that simply can’t hold our Black, queer, trans and godly brilliance.
The Nigeria-born, best-selling author of the critically acclaimed Freshwater, PET and The Death of Vivek Oji is simply no longer interested in projecting false versions of themself—even if disengaging with such a survival mechanism comes with costs. After all, true liberation is priceless.
“Just to be able to talk to my own people is freedom,” Emezi says on a recent morning via Zoom, describing the ways writing for white audiences, or rather a publishing industry that centers white readers, is the exact opposite. As a Black author who’s always expressly desired to write for Black people, they’re at a moment in
