Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater (2018) places its protagonist, Ada, in the midst of Igbo cosmology through her embodiment of ọgbanje, children spirits. From this multiple identity ensues an interesting postcolonial reading of questions about monstrosity and metamorphosis in a gripped dance of words and wounds with feminist and queer rhythms. Aligned with the theory of relationality in sub-Saharan African philosophy and of Sara Ahmed’s notion of affect, this paper explains how the ọgbanje figure enables the re/birth of a hybrid postcolonial genre/gender by analyzing first its ambivalent position between tradition and modernity and second its bodily play between injunction and resistance.