Book Review: Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi
Last year left its decades-worth of emotions in the atmosphere. Feel deeply into it: all the conflict, all the joy, all of it. As you think through your own personal narrative, the movie reel of your life, be filled with the magnitude of meaning. You’ve come so far and still the future expands ahead of you, within you, a universe of its own. With all your worlds, imagine what sort of creature would emerge from your heart-space if you had the power to birth such a thing. What kind of being would it be? Would it be a giant with loving arms to hold the world tenderly? Would it be a leviathan, armed and ready to swallow ships that carry destruction in their bellies? What would your inner world conjure into reality?
These are the questions this novel brought up for me. It took me a long while to work through the reading, not for lack of interest or excellent storytelling. Bitter just made me feel as if the story was leaning closer to home than I’d prefer. It felt like there was light shed where I’d prefer things to remain in darkness. Yet, it compelled me to look, to brood on the questions until slowly understanding crept its way to me. As an artist and someone passionate about the return of humanity to equitable ways of being and systems that support living, there was were two perspectives that occurred to me that made me uncomfortable: the work of creating flows from imagination and art created is a conjuring force of this imagination.
As a teenager, I adored the idea of the dedicated school for gifted creatives. I skipped over the series of books about the kid living beneath the stairs, and dived into the task of writing my own school for extraordinarily gifted children. As I continued to build my plot and array of characters, my world building leaned heavily into utopia. I wrote about sustainable farming projects and libraries so much, my work-in-progress read more like a manifesto with aspects of fiction than a YA page-turner. My passions were (and are) obvious; that writing stalled, but reading Bitter, I realized that my writing was mirroring to me what I was ruminating on as a teen. My writing was bound in my imagination.
In the book, Bitter, the main character, is a visual artist whose works come to life through the application of a drop of her blood. In a moment of anguish, she unleashes a dark force on the world through her paintbrush. Her imagination is cordoned off by her felt isolation from the political movements in her area. And from this aloneness, she brings forth the physical manifestation of her wounded heart. Without spoiling the story, Bitter reiterated the truth to me that none of our parts are left out of the artistry we share with the world. Our imaginations are full of us, every part of us. And as if creating a religion of our own, we take bits and pieces of these self-revelations to create a monolith in the form of an art-piece. In this way, when our imaginations are skewed in one way or another, our work orients itself in the direction of our visions.
Like pictures of deep sea creatures or minerals dug up from beneath the earth’s surface, what we bring out of the depths of creativity is representative of the worlds within. This can be beneficial and it can be dangerous. Depending on what our values are and the degree to which we have chosen to align ourselves with them, artists can see new worlds, solutions, and communities emerge from our work. Our responsibility is to ensure that our imaginations are tethered to a life-giving future, a connected and engaged present, and a past lineage of truth.
Bitter, in the book, recognizes herself as a gate: a doorway capable of the realization of horror as well as transformational love. And while her power is immense, Bitter requires the love and embrace of community to bolster her ability to imagine better futures and work towards them. Don’t we all?
Friendship and true community seem to be further and further out of reach in this generation. This loneliness forces people to seek out success, belonging and safety/self-worth in the forms of capitalistic supremacy and religious fundamentalism, to name some heavy hitters. These ideals dominate the contents of their imaginations and their conjurings. I come back to my questions at the beginning of this essay and I find myself realizing that the only creature I want to conjure is myself, but in community. Myself, but in greater connection with other people aligned to the causes of anticolonialism. Myself, but not bitter.
It’s a new year and the work continues. Your support is essential; please feel free to buy me a coffee.
English