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Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater isn’t only a fine debut novel that announces the arrival of an exciting and talented new literary voice, it’s also a book that asks Western readers to reconsider what we’ve been taught to think about gender identity and mental health, not to mention how internal experience might be understood as well as expressed on the page   Freshwater is the story of Ada, who, like Emezi, is born to a Nigerian father and a Tamil mother Ada’s father Saul is a doctor, and his wife Saachi is a nurse They meet and marry in London, but shortly thereafter move to Umuahia, the city where Saul was born, as was his father before him It’s important for his child to be born here too, we’re told, ‘blood following paths into the soil, oiling the gates, calling the prayer into flesh’   While her children — Ada has an older brother, and a younger sister — are still young, Saachi leaves them in the care of their father while she moves to Saudi Arabia, ten years of her life ‘contracted away’ in the desert ‘And this is how you break a child, you know,’ we’re told ‘Step one, take the mother away’   Ada begins cutting herself when she’s twelve, boasting to her classmates at school about what she can do: ‘She raised the blade that she had taken from Saul’s shaving supplies, that double-edged song wrapped in wax paper, and she dropped it on the skin of the back of her hand, in a stroke that whimpered The skin sighed apart and there was a thin line of white before it blushed into furious wet redness’ At sixteen she’s digging into her arm with a shard of glass from a broken mirror At twenty she steals scalpels from the veterinary school classroom where she’s studying to keep slicing away at her scarred flesh By now, she’s living in America And it’s here, in her dorm room in Virginia, that she has a first damaging sexual encounter:   “You need to get birth control pills” His voice was calm, a pool of quietly congealing blood with a