The patient as a diagnostician: voices of hatred, manipulation, and societal pressure in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater and Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom

Abstract

This article examines how Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018) and Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom (2020) depict their protagonists as more than sufferers of mental and spiritual turmoil: they become active diagnosticians of the societies, cultures, and institutions that create and perpetuate their crises. ``Patient'' functions here as a critical and metaphorical category, denoting narrators whose testimony of suffering also produces clinical and cultural insight. Drawing on Mad Studies, postcolonial feminist criticism, and critical race theory, the article argues that both novels use confessional narration as a mode of reverse diagnosis through which Ada and Gifty name, anatomize, and challenge the forces that colonize their inner lives. The comparison develops three interwoven thematic axes: the internalization and deconstruction of racial-spiritual hatred; emotional manipulation within familial, religious, intimate, and biomedical spaces; and diasporic, gendered, and institutional pressures on Black women's psyches. Each author constructs a poetics of survivorship in which narrating illness becomes cultural critique and the patient's gaze turns outward to indict systems that claim the authority to cure.