Akwaeke Emezi Won’t Let You Hide From the Truth

In their eighth book, ‘Little Rot,’ the author spins a dark, thrilling tale that allows the reader to reckon with their own moral fallibility.

Little Rot — Akwaeke Emezi’s eighth book since their 2018 debut, Freshwater — forces us to see the world with painfully sharp clarity. As relevant as it feels for this particular moment, in which the attention economy makes it easy to obscure reality in favor of hazy but attractive surface-level contentments, the novel has been in the works for ten years, rooted in a short story Emezi published in 2014. At the time, the writer was frequently in Lagos, which had been the distant “big city” of their youth while growing up in the smaller town of Aba, Nigeria. “When I actually started spending time there, I realized what a violent city it was in a way that was very naked,” says Emezi. “There was no artifice about the violence. No one tried to hide it. No one tried to pretend it was anything better than it was, and, more terrifyingly, it was so normalized.”

For the past few months, social media has also given those who want to see it a digital window into the massive scale and soul-crushing severity of the violence that so many people in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo are facing. For Emezi, it’s triggering but not shocking. “There have been multiple genocides going on,” they say. Both their parents are genocide survivors, and Emezi is still reckoning with complex PTSD from a childhood in which they were regularly confronted with violent sights, smells, and sounds. “I know certain things that I wish I didn’t, and I’ve written about this before — knowing the smell of bodies that have been out in the sun for too long and all of that. These are core memories that I have.”

Their intimate knowledge of violence is precisely what has given them a pragmatic perspective on what to do about it. “Feelings about violence are such a personal thing. What I care about is the action,” says Emezi. They view their work as a storyteller as their role in the collective struggle for liberation, with the philosophy that no one can do it all; each individual must find their niche. In their previous fiction books, including Pet and You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, their protagonists’ identities are not the sources of their primary conflicts or challenges. That’s mostly true in Little Rot, too, but Emezi is doing something different. They were fascinated by the mundanity of evil, by how a person’s morals can falter or transform depending on their environment. “It doesn’t give you hope for a better future, but it does something else that is very important in a story, which is to teach you to look at things,” they say. “We can’t get out of this world, let alone start building a new one, if we can’t look at the truth of what this world is in the first place.”

Monkey Man

My book was based on life, not necessarily other mediums. I was workshopping edits with a friend of mine. Afterward, they were like, “I just treated this like it was a feature film.” And we were workshopping it like it was a film. Whenever I have a story, I see it in my head first, so when I’m writing a book, it’s transcription. There’s a movie happening in my head. Little Rot feels very much like a fast-paced dark thriller. It has this frenetic energy to it. Dev Patel’s Monkey Man has a similar vibe to John Wick. It’s in a specific type of city that’s not in the West. It has a different ambience to it, to be hunted through this tropical, overpopulated city. That’s something Monkey Man and this book really have in common. There’s all this structural corruption — all these people who have untold power, and no matter where you go, they can reach you. The thing with cities like that, where the power is structured like that, is that the people at the bottom are desperate because the people at the top have stolen everything from them and people will swarm you for a crumb of power or resources. Monkey Man, for sure, is in this line. And also there’s a gore to it. Little Rot is not particularly gory, but I feel like it’s emotionally gory. It has that brutality.

Nigeria’s Music Scene

The Nigerian music scene is fantastic, and it’s so much bigger than Afrobeats, which is the pop version of everything. But there are all these other artists, like Obongjayar and Lady Donli and Kah-Lo and the Cavemen. These are some of the artists who make up the soundtrack of Little Rot. There’s a song by Lady Donli called “Cash.” It’s an amazing song, and in my head, it’s the character Ola’s soundtrack. The hook goes, “I’m addicted to cash.” She’s chosen her priorities, and it serves her well. She’s actually the only person who just floats through all of it because she’s like, I understand it. I’ve decided how I’m playing in it. I can wield power and wield my influence here and there. I know what to look at. I know what not to look at. She’s got it down.

Toni Morrison

With Toni Morrison, it’s never really a specific book. It’s always her writing style, specifically, because it’s been one of the biggest influences on how I write. As a baby writer, I was absolutely a purple-prose person. That’s how I wrote. Every single sentence was shoved full of a thousand metaphors. I was briefly at an M.F.A. program, and it’s a very different writing aesthetic that they teach there, which is “A sentence as clean as a bone.” I didn’t like that either. Morrison, for me, was the example of a writer who was able to write a beautiful sentence that was still clean and precise. They don’t teach that, actually, at an M.F.A., with that level of involvement. They teach a very sparse, “Cut away all that stuff,” which to me is a very white way of writing. It’s like you take out all the seasoning. It’s a different flavor of writing. With Morrison, it was like, you can write lushly, you can write all these gorgeous visuals, but your technique is still tight.

Helen Oyeyemi

Whenever I cite my writers, it’s always Toni Morrison and Helen Oyeyemi because Helen is a fantastic writer but also an incredibly weird writer. Reading Helen’s books when I was a baby writer gave me permission to be an immigrant writer in America and write whatever I wanted and be experimental with my fiction in a very particular way. I feel a lot of writers of color don’t necessarily give themselves the freedom to play across such a wide span of types of books or structures. Helen Oyeyemi is someone who really goes off into the experimental and ends up with such gorgeous, strange books.

The Collector, by John Fowles

The Collector is written from two perspectives. Half the book is written from the perspective of the person who was abducted, and the other half is written from the perspective of the person who did the abducting. Someone recommended it to me and I read it years ago, but I really liked that he gave the perspective of the kidnapper. It has the choice of perspective and an interest in rot, in corruption. I had a friend who read Hogg, by Samuel Delany, and we talked about it a lot, but I didn’t read it because I honestly didn’t think I could handle it. I was really curious, What would it look like if I let my imagination write the most evil thing I can think of? I never actually wrote a book like that. But Little Rot is as close as I would get. My imagination could really write an evil book, but that wouldn’t be in line with my actual principles. I don’t judge any other writer. But for me, I don’t think I could go much deeper and still be okay. I would rather be okay.