My childhood can be measured easily, in pools of light spilling onto
pages and books blanketing the surfaces of our house in Aba. When
the electricity died, as it often did, I read by candlelight or with a torchlight
balanced against my body. Both my parents had been heavy readers; they
dragged their libraries into their marriage and kept them separate, distinct,
as if they both knew their relationship would end. My father had a
collection of Reader’s Digest condensed novels on the top shelf of the
bookcase in my brother’s room. In one of them, a little boy called his sister
stupid because she was seven years old. I took it personally when I first
read it, bristling with rage, because I was seven, too. That didn’t mean we
were stupid.
When my parents discovered I’d started reading the sex-advice columns
in my mother’s magazines as a child because I had run out of material, they
quickly bought me more books. Stories became my entire world, unchecked
and unrestricted; I was nine when I read V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the
Attic, which I think is entirely too young for a child as lonely as I was. My
sister and I rummaged through my mother’s trunk, a steel tomb tucked in a
corner of the house, and we found a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca,
with that haunting first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley
again.” My father’s library had a copy of Ken Follett’s book The Key to
Rebecca, which I’d read before, and eleven-year-old me was in awe at
finding a book that I’d first read about inside another book; worlds eating
worlds, all made by words.
By the time I started college in the States, I’d read every book in my
childhood home. The white dean of my school kept introducing me as the
sixteen-year-old freshman from West Africa who’d already read Dickens
and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as if any of that was surprising or special. I’d
only read those books because they were there; the awe associated with a
certain European literary canon wasn’t relevant. I’d also read Cyprian
Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, the secret
copy of The Joy of Sex hidden away in my parents’ room, every
encyclopedia entry in my school library on Greek mythology, labels on
shampoo bottles, the sides of cornflakes boxes and Bournvita tins during
breakfast, countless contraband Harlequin and Mills & Boon romance
novels bartered with secondary-school classmates, narrative interludes in
my brother’s video games, and all the parts of the Bible that referenced sex.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there was a canon I was
expected to prioritize, especially if I wanted to consider myself a writer, that
the work of dead white men could be a type of currency.
Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran, A Black Spirit Memoir
