Akwaeke Emezi’s DEAR SENTHURAN is a masterpiece borne of pure magic and jagged pain. It is a lightning rod for the most intimate parts of the soul. It will smack the air from your lungs and catch you in a hazy, literary trance.

This book is both a memoir and an epistolary. Assuming the form of letters to different people in their life, Emezi dissects human frailty in prose that is raw, intimate and merciless. They speak with the unapologetic fearlessness of a god speaking to mortals because that is how they identify. That is what they are.

"DEAR SENTHURAN is a masterpiece borne of pure magic and jagged pain. It is a lightning rod for the most intimate parts of the soul. It will smack the air from your lungs and catch you in a hazy, literary trance."

Emezi flays their life wide open for us to read, ink becoming blood in this book that catalogs their tendrils of trauma and the hollow screams of suicidal longing as a spirit in a world built for humans. They unravel everything for their readers, from their metaphysical dysmorphia and modifications to personal spells for success, like a synaptic ball of yarn. Then they weave that metaphorical yarn into something so beautiful that it hurts; so beautiful that it feels like it must have wound itself around some vital organ while you were distracted by the words on the page. Emezi’s ability to string words into sentences, and sentences into spells, is hypnotic. It is otherworldly. Perhaps this is no coincidence. Emezi is an ogbanje, a trickster spirit of Igbo lore born to a human mother that dies unexpectedly only to return as another child.

It is a testament to Emezi’s openness that they can convey the foreign pain of inhumanity to us --- the loneliness of living simultaneously outside and in the in-between, the claustrophobia of inhabiting a human body, the desire to be understood while being something many consider unfathomable. Yet even after they have been harmed by it, even after they have tried to escape it, Emezi approaches life and the world around them with intricate compassion.

As much as this book is about Emezi, it is also about their readers. Through Emezi’s eyes, we witness humanity. We are privy to moments of reciprocal human tenderness against the violent and greedy legacy of humanity as a whole. Emezi, who straddles multiple realities that we as humans consider mutually exclusive, is able to criticize us as a species outside of in-group bias. They ruminate on the destruction brought by colonialism and the rejection of the spiritual world. They speak of human arrogance; of our fascination with labeling the world coupled with our inequitable distaste for the parts of the world that attempt to label themselves; of our propensity to insert ourselves into matters that are larger than we are, where our voices are irrelevant. They lay out our flaws matter-of-factly. They hold a mirror to our species and tell us to look.  

DEAR SENTHURAN takes up space. It has gravity. Upon reading it, I am inclined to say that it even has its own orbit. With this raw and blindingly brilliant work of art, Emezi has certainly carved their name into the fabric of artistic history.