‘The Uses of Anger’: Outlaw Feeling as Decolonial Intervention in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater

Anger is a recurring presence in Freshwater (2018), the debut autobiographical novel by Nigerian writer and video artist Akwaeke Emezi. The novel narrates the coming of age of Ada, a non-binary ọgbanje, as they negotiate a plural sense of self, including their gender identity. Its polyphonic narration calls on the reader to witness different aspects of Ada’s identity and the feelings generated by fraught relationships, alienation, self-harm, suicide attempts, eating disorders, and gender dysphoria. Drawing on affect theory and decolonial thought, this contribution reads anger as an ‘outlaw feeling’ and explores how its changing uses in the novel challenge sentimental frameworks that continue to shape dominant Western interpretations of anger as wholly ‘negative’ or as ‘clouding’ rational thinking. In the novel, anger registers as cosmological displacement, ambivalent protection, and embodied and epistemic refusal. Across these movements, it shapes character formation, the reader’s relation to Ada’s multiplicity, and the conditions under which the story can be told. The article argues that attending to anger reveals how Freshwater unsettles sentimental and psychiatric frameworks of interpretation, reconfiguring anger as a decolonial mode of knowing through which the novel sustains forms of subjectivity and belonging that resist assimilation into singular or binary explanatory frameworks.