You know it's quite a book when you're not even sure how to shelve it. It's not that Emezi is intentionally genre-bending, it's that she's writing outside the categorical confines of the academy's idea of genre in the first place.
So much of this book is about de-categorizing, of re-defining, of exploring the construction and destruction of identity. I feel supremely unqualified to talk about what it is that Emezi is doing, for all that it is clear that the book itself is a project of that doing.
I keep thinking of Peter Ochs on the ways that modern western ways of thinking and logic create and prioritize conflict. I'm not sure if that's what Emezi is writing about here or if that itself is setting up a dialectic (mental illness versus cultural/historical understanding) that is external and the mark of specific aspects of modernity.
And also the book as process. I still don't know what I think about it...or the degree to which I even need to be thinking about it rather than experiencing it and letting it exist as it is.