 Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm a little jet lagged right now so please bear with me. I was just in New York yesterday for the the sister black festival uh black comics festival at the Schomburg. It's really wonderful and I'm so excited to talk to three goddesses of black speculative fiction. That's what y'all are. Goddesses, yes that's right. So I'm gonna jump right into it because I know we're right on it but um mostly I talk about a lot about process and inspiration and some of the political aspects of why these particular narratives are so important right now you know and um I think I want to start with the truths that you try to get to when you're writing like what inspired you to write what are some of the things that you are trying to tell truth about um because I feel as someone who creates work that I'm trying to get at us some specific inner truth of some kind and I'm kind of curious about process why you write some of those types of questions. I'm sure a lot of people are curious about those as well right see I can feel that okay anyone can y'all all goddesses go. I'm just glad they didn't say no we don't care about that. I'm okay okay sorry. It's a complicated question because it's never the same truth. People ask me know what do I write what do I write about well it's like ask me what I'm working on now and I'll tell you what I'm writing about. So at the core of it more often than not is that I want to put us on the page I want to be able to see myself as a black Caribbean queer woman on the page um but over and above that every every book has a different theme. I guess I'll jump in uh it's a that's a very big question it's very big and I guess the first things that I thought of the first things that popped into my head with your question which probably doesn't embody everything that I that I think about when I'm writing or all the truths but the first thing that popped into my head was um wanting to see the the Africa that I know um in the future and also in the present in the way that I knew it you know whenever my family would travel to Nigeria and and and I would see interactions with technology for example and and just people being people I would realize that you know I wasn't seeing that in the types of stories that I wanted to see so um one of the things that my mom always says is if you can't if you're not seeing something done then do it yourself and so those are those are some of the things that drive me um drive me to write but also I'm very much one of those types of writers who I bleed onto the page so the the pain that I'm feeling if I'm going through something if I'm dealing with something if I'm if I'm um experiencing something from just seeing how the seeing things happening in the world and I'm responding to that and and I'm very emotional about that like I I feel very connected to just people around me and I often kind of respond to that and so um a lot of that will come into what I'm writing as well like a lot of the emotions that I'm feeling a lot of the the pains and the conflicts and that the rage rage is a big one that comes out in my work um those are the some of the things that that come out in my writing um I think I'll I was talking earlier about what prompted me to write the Gilda stories the first story and I would love to hear if if people have specifics about what prompted them to write their first because I um mine was based on a very specific incident that happened to me in the mid 80s does anybody here remember telephone booths okay um I was in a telephone booth at the corner of my street I guess my phone wasn't working or I had rebelled and not paid the bill but uh so I was in the phone booth and these two guys walked by me and went into their whole thing oh baby let me suck your blah blah blah blah blah and I want to do this to you and oh you're looking so good as if that would interest me their opinion and I was talking to my friend Mary Ann and she said what's going on I said hold on a second I turned and looked at them and I said please go away and then I turned back to Mary Ann well of course they didn't go away they just went on and on I said hold on I turned around and one guy said this bitch is crazy and the other guy was just like kept on going I said yes I am crazy and I will kill you and use a lot of that language that my grandmother had asked me not to use um and the one guy dragged the other guy away and this was on West End Avenue and 93rd street in Manhattan my adrenaline had gone through my body like crazy I was so happy there was nothing at hand for me to pick up right because they keep West End Avenue kind of clean um so my friend Mary Ann I heard her screaming because she thought I was killing someone and um so I said Mary Ann I can't talk I have to go home I can't talk so I went home and I caught my breath and I sat down and I wrote the first Guilder story and it was a woman walking in on the street and a guy does that to her and of course she kills him um so I decided I better use my powers for good and uh and over time you know evolved the the vampire mythology because that's really what I realized I was working on uh so that she didn't have to kill people and develop the whole philosophy around it so that fit into my political social political philosophy as a lesbian feminist and I felt like um you know the surrealists believed that you have to first change your dreams in order to change the world right and I feel that that's what speculative fiction any kind of speculative fiction people writing black comics they're imagining a better world they're dreaming a better world a different world um and I realized that's what I wanted to spend my life doing as opposed to you know killing people on the street we're so glad that that wasn't you're visiting me in jail right I don't want to think about that it's a whole another wow okay so so so picking up some of those on some of those threads I've been I've been really fascinated since uh childhood around uh the supernatural science fiction horror I came up in the south you know in itself is a very speculative scary place right talking like post civil rights era Mississippi right so I was introduced to a lot of these particular types of narratives by my mother right and by my grandmother who I think probably was a hoodwit or a conjure woman herself just thinking about some of the things that she would talk about you know which at the time I thought were like superstitions but now I feel I realize what other types of truths right as you were saying so I've been thinking about this notion what I call the ethnographic right the idea of using um gothic tropes in a particular fashion right that are connected to ways of exercising trauma right and of course like one of the um other aspects of the gothic is the grotesque the monster right this notion of these hyperbolic frightening spaces right so I'm curious about uh because I don't know y'all deal with monsters or monstrous things and sometimes sometimes what monster inspires you the most and why and how does it connect to some of the political aspects that you think might be inherent in the work by way I teach a professor so you hinted to me you would be asking this question and I've been mulling it over ever since I don't see I know I've been sort of walking around in days thinking I can't pick just one it doesn't pick several pick several I think I'm going to put a bunch into all together so this is the nature of monsters yes exactly they are uh shameras um and it is stagoli it is papa legba it is issue it is the that tall lean man dark man in the top hat who knows more about the dark in you than you do and and knows that you want it I think uh well mine uh I'm sitting here trying to figure out why this monster is so central to so many of my stories there there are two um I don't know what one of them is yeah one of them is Godzilla and and this is why I'm sitting here trying to figure out okay because Godzilla has shown up in many of my stories in various ways and uh I know that if someone were to just ask me without intellectualizing it why do I like Godzilla it's Godzilla's destructive nature Godzilla comes out of the water and just destroys shit for no reason you know there's no like there's no rhyme or reason just comes out destroys everything goes back into the water I love that I don't know why I don't know why there's something about it um and it may have something to do with my obsession with post-apocalyptic narratives as well this idea of everything being destroyed you know and then and then having to to deal with that um it also may have to do with my anger issues I don't know a lot of a lot of rage um the second monster it's not really a monster um it's just this this this entity that has shown up consistently in my works now it's it's in lagoon and it's in um it's in Akata which part two as well um and it's a spider it's this this giant spider that is its name is Udide which means spider and Ebo um spider the artist the first time the spider kind of the idea of the spider showed up in one of my stories it was in my story called spider the artist which deals with the Niger Delta where you've got like these it's set in the near future where you have these the the government and the oil companies have created these robot spiders to guard the pipelines that the oil pipelines in Nigeria prevent people from bunkering and these spiders of course they kill anyone who touches them they just tear them to shreds so that they can guard the oil so um that that's sort of another story but but this this spider um is it's not a Nancy I know that um I had an uncle who told me about uh I'm very I'm terrified of spiders so there's that I'm utterly irrational if a spider were to jump like come right now you would see me embarrass myself so I'm terrified of spiders I don't know why it's an irrational fear and um so spiders have always shown up in my stories but this particular large one it lives underneath the city of Lagos and it it it turns onto its back and and feels the vibrations of the people and it's a monstrous spider and it weaves and creates stories and narrative and controls everything it's just yeah so that's that's my second spider yeah I'll stop there okay so I want to stop and read that story like right now okay um well I guess my monster started out as there's two guys on the street hmm and has evolved to uh any figures that prey upon people who are less you know powerful um and I think that was one of the reasons I was interested in doing vampire stories because Dracula is such a pervasive mythology such a pervasive character and insidious because he's charming and he's a serial killer and you know if you go back to the original ones that he um you know seduces women and kills them and everybody is like excited Dracula's coming over you know I'm like is it so that really fascinated me that people would find this such a romantic figure in such a predatory figure um and I've seen you know just about every Dracula movie ever made and I remember one day I went with my mother and grandmother to see the play Dracula on Broadway we left that and went to see the movie with Frank Langella which was playing in Times Square same time and we were in conversation about that for hours like how can he be so sexy and be such a killer um so that really set me up to work on how to redo the mythology so that I felt like uh vampire could be heroic and not a predator not a serial killer um and in this new book that I'm working on it's about the society becoming predatory using people who are empathic using people who have certain kinds of skills artistic skills and making them work for the government segregating them into patches so they only associate with people who are doing what they do and um how to escape that so it's it it really is the monster is really is uh those who prey on less powerful people I'm really fat I mean I'm obsessed with it I'm actually teach a course called the medium is the monster which is kind of a it's uh actually I think you actually came to that particular neti went to that particular course and um yeah she was you know but but I'm really fascinated by it because as a metaphor it has these different multivalent aspects to it and could stand for so many different things and um you kind of touched upon like some of your interest in like you know social justice to a certain degree or uh some of the issues that are going on right now in our country could you talk I'll you talk a little bit about um I've been really fascinated by why about how like black speculative culture has had this not necessarily a resurgence because it's always been there but it seems like to be a lot of interest in the black speculative arts and you know afrofuturism and these different types of like ways of making meaning through um the black imagination because as I was stating earlier I mean the idea of aspiration and the idea of imagination are like key to all types of movements right I mean look at uh Robin D. G. Kelly's book um Freedom Dreams thank you it deals a lot with um this notion of the the initial spark of imagination and how it kind of pushes forth every movement right or this idea of how um there seems to be these intersections between black speculative culture and you know various movements that have been happening recently have you want to maybe talk about some of the things that have been happening or your own personal beliefs around social justice issues whether it's representation whether it's gentrification whether it's you know particular identity politics and how it relates to these particular types of narrative constructions sorry that's a question that's what you're talking about do you see those those things being being intersected or do you see those things being having common grounds because it seems to me that there there are some particular instances like for instance like Octavia's Brood for instance right where you have underground activists who are actually using um narrative uh to to deal with those issues right yeah I keep going back to Walter Mosley who you may or may not know has written science fiction novels and short stories yeah all right all right and uh and I'm going to paraphrase him but he basically said we we need a better world and in order to have a better world in order to make it we first need to be able to imagine it um and also Samuel Argelini um mentor of mine who said we need visions of the future and our people need them more than most so yeah that's right it was true then true now um and so there is very much a connection and I sort of also think yeah the the work is there the work needs to be done it's desperate but we also need to be able to enjoy to have fun to have imagination to have passion because why else are we doing this so I think we also need to give ourselves permission to enjoy Godzilla coming out of the sea and smashing everything up there is nothing wrong with enjoying that um the the work is there and we will do it so there's very much a connection between allowing ourselves to imagine allowing ourselves to think that we get to like anybody else have fun and using that to fuel the vision of what it is we're trying to make um sometimes I just want to write strange stories set in strange places the the my own reality will always seep into those stories but I want to hold on to the fact that that we get to do all of it right yeah I'm I'm I'm sitting here thinking about the word um using these narratives for social justice and I'm very resistant to that um because I know that when I sit down and to write something I'm not thinking that okay I want to make this point you know this is something I want to show the world about whatever um when when when it comes down to it when I sit down to write I'm not thinking about anything I'm just just letting it flow I'm very a very subconscious writer where oftentimes I don't even have an outline I don't even know who the character is I'll just sit down and just start and whatever is flowing through me is what will flow through me so um the idea of of using the narrative for something is foreign to me I mean I understand other other writers other artists who operate like that but for me I definitely don't but I do know that I'm very much a political person so those ideas and and and my what I want to see the changes that I want to see and the things that I want to do and want to see done those are already there those are things that I might have conversations about when I'm not writing but when I sit down to write those things come through in in a more um a more indirect way like I mean I deal with my my books tend to be very political and it's not it's not that I sat down and thought okay I want to write this political story it's just that they are because I am right yeah yeah I I would say the same I think I might be a little more conscious of it um you know I don't I don't think I start out to write adjuprop uh but having come of age you know in the civil rights movement the black arts movement all of the work that people was were doing um was an expression of liberation and opening new worlds to us the worlds of blackness so I think I started writing in a very conscious way about blackness the same as uh as being a feminist I started writing very consciously about women and how women are placed in the world at the same time I don't want to write a tract you know so people will just you know snore um but I think though having come of age in those particular movements make me much more conscious of it as I'm doing it and I think that's one of the interesting things for this um going from african-americans saying how dare you write a vampire novel with african-americans in it how could you do that how could you connect those things um to you know 25 years later as my vampire novel is about to have his 25th anniversary um and a new edition um to see the community come full circle and say oh yeah we're going to claim this and we're going to give it its own name afro-futurism you know it's really great um and in part I think that's because the political evolution on campuses uh in communities uh poor poor communities who are starting to understand their economics has to be uh taken in their own hands they can't wait for the government to fix it um that racism sexism any of the isms really need to he's saying shut up jewel um need to be in our hands how we fight them need to be in our hands and I think that is a sign of hope and I think that's one of the reasons that our writing has started to spread out into these fields into black comics into future afro-futurism and other speculative fictions I think it's a sign of hope I think so too seriously I want to um you know get ready to open things up for questions any any um our question cards for the audience um excuse me so this concept of blade and how the last film the trilogy brought forth the woman and the and was it the second one I'm not totally sure I had to go back and look at it was two and so I mean I'd like to hear you guys take on that because it's amazing that you know you're talking about it from your perspective and I wonder where your mind goes when it goes to blade and how that sort of community builds up within itself if you don't mind me I loved blade the original blade and I was you know it's like all of us we can look at anything and project ourselves into it even if we aren't there literally there you know even star wars finally had a decent black person and a woman in it I mean doctor who has a lovely black woman doctor doctor jones so you know it's a very um it's very easy for us to see ourselves sometime in our minds but it helps when there's really a person there really helps you know and she doesn't have to be you know have bubble breasts and be half semi-clad to save the world she could be wearing regular clothes and have a regular body um so I I enjoy that expansion so that women do get included and the vampire mythology has always been predatory around women so it's it's hard I think for people to reimagine the vampire mythology without doing that but I loved what blade did manifest could I okay I have a lot I'm out because I'm sorry did you want a question because I'm like about to jump out my seat that way I'm sorry yeah not the geeky I love geeky but so one of the things I thought was really interesting about the first blade is how much it likened itself to like black exploitation films and where did blade get his serum from in the first film he got it from the black community right he was surrounded by black people he was surrounded by his people right and it's and this is actually before Marvel Comics kind of took over the the franchise right and so it seems as as soon as it became more corporate because they didn't want him to do it probably right I mean they just kind of like wanted to throw him whatever character right but he actually made it and also jumped off this obsession with the superhero genre in the film also too right so it's almost like this the more and more corporate that particular character became the more um you know he started to be erased from it right yeah removed from community that's right that's right they let me take him out of the community because he actually like he actually got his serum from some space that was it was from a black space yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely I'm sorry yeah I couldn't help it because I'm like you know the other thing too I thought was interesting how they used the metaphor of the of the corporation and the vampire I thought that was really interesting as well can we get um sorry about that he's a mic is coming I'm sorry I'll ask how much of you guys imagination is tied I know it's called Afrofuturism how much of it is tied to your knowledge of the past and past rituals and stuff because a lot of times I know that the imagination is circular whereas it deals with the past and the future but I know that you guys are Afrofuturist writers so how much do you guys read about the past do you guys deal with the past do you guys deal with the ancient past do you you know I just want to know how much of that and what is the process of how it creeps into the future in your imagination okay I gotta you know like Nadie say that when I sit down to write I don't think I'm an Afrofuturist writer I'm going to write to an Afrofuturist whatever um I'll happily claim the adjective it happened after I started writing it is it is it is a label that people use to to try and pull together a pattern that they're seeing and then in so much as what it is it's useful but um it and it is also not as simple as I'm just a writer of course I'm not just a writer I am everything that I am um but the Afrofuturism part is it's just gotta be somewhere else when I write or it will stop me um but of course I'm writing science fiction fantasy so of course yes there's a lot of research that goes into it and a lot of not just research but theorizing because of course the history books leave stuff out so you have to imagine yourself into those places um I'm researching the future I'm researching the past I'm researching uh black history Caribbean history white history I barely stayed awake through a history class when I was in school and now if you look up my shelves that stuff is all over the place and I discover the more I go into it the more I realize that human beings are human beings um you can reach back into the the very beginning of time when human beings are human beings and and we aren't that different uh and there's something there's something healing about being able to go back into African histories and African cultures and African ways of life and and and see that um what we are capable of which you know you know but to see it proven over and over and over and over again as the centuries go by and the centuries go forward um I definitely look into into my past I am um what I consider Niger American which means Niger is slang for Nigerian and I'm American so Nigerian American I was born and raised in this country um but from a young age my parents were taking me back to my siblings and I back to Nigeria to reconnect with our heritage reconnect with our family most of our family is there um and so and then also just being Nigerian American in the house within that culture within the Ebo culture um those those old traditions and ways have seeped into who I am as well so those all manifest themselves my Nigerian Americanness definitely manifests itself in my work um I deal a lot with the the traditional spiritualities especially of the Ebo people but of other parts of other parts of the continent as well um one example are masquerades masquerades show up in my in my works a lot masquerades are found in many different African cultures but I have like a lot of a lot of what I write about comes from personal experience so my personal experience with masquerades masquerades are like um they are manifestations of the dead and the ancestors and spirits and they look they can look in there are many different types some can look very monstrous like you know just rafia and cloth that they look can look like monsters and those are the ones that I've been obsessed with and so as a when I was a kid whenever we go back to Nigeria they the masquerades would come out around Christmas time which is that's a whole other issue just um they come out around Christmas time and because my sisters and I were um American Nigerians they would harass us the most so and they would literally chase us down the street okay they would chase it they had like a whip and they would whip people and they would chase us down the street with the whip and luckily we were fast so we weren't caught too many times and so when I think back I'm like okay and a lot of times we would outrun them and so I when I think back I'm like oh I was outrunning the spirits and so in my own stories you get you you see the masquerades show up a lot in my stories and they show up in a way where um they show up in the way that I imagined them because I've seen the really big terrifying ones at weddings and where all the women just run to the other side of the room it's just it's really it's really quite epic and um in my stories because I'm writing speculative fiction I can imagine those masquerades the way I see them which is as they're not these they're not people or men in particular dressed up in these elaborate costumes who then take on the ancestor of the spirit they are that creature and so in my stories I can do that I can show them that way and I have a lot of fun with it so so yeah you look in the past I would say definitely history is important for me as a writer I mean my my vampire novel my first vampire novel starts with a young woman escaping from slavery in the US in 1850 and follows her after she becomes a vampire till the year I think it's 2050 so my goal was to see the line of history through a couple hundred years and the way I do that research is um I pick a place a town or area of the country I want her to be in then I pick a year I want her to be in and then I research that town and that year and see what story emerges for her whether it's you know during the black migration to the north and she ends up in a town near the Mississippi River where African Americans have moved to work during World War One or Chicago in 1927 you know the meatpacking industry is at its height as are you know mobsters and how do African Americans fit into that and so I find that I'm doing specific research for different periods in different places for each section of the book that I'm writing and I'm writing a second one now but the first one that was exact I mean I almost opened a map and put my finger down someplace I said hmm what year would I like to be in hope Mississippi we have a question we have a question from the audience on the card um so this one is dealing with uh the social political uh agency of art and basically it's amazing like the last question was dealing with history this was kind of dealing with where you think the future's going what do you think this notion of what has been constructed as Afrofuturism or or black speckled culture what have you how do you how's it shaping the future do you think where are we going next do you think it's not it's not really hard I can see where I hope it's going okay and I hope it gives more people permission to know that they can imagine and that they can make stories I mean the three of us were at astro blackness a few months ago and there's a young woman in the audience black woman who um also loved horror and didn't think she could write it because she kept imagining black characters until she found um an ARC and advanced reading copy of one of Octavia Butler's novels on the streetcar or whatever they do in LA um and then it was like her imagination broke open and now she's writing um and it it cuts to my heart somebody thinks that because they've never seen it they can't do it um so that's where I would hope it's going is that that more of us have just sort of know that they we can stand up and make what we imagine I think also that um what I'd like to see and what I think is going to we're going to see more are more African writers from the continent you know writing um afro I have an issue I have issues with the label but I'm not gonna I'm just gonna use the word though yes so with um with afrofuturist stories and I think that that the change that I've seen because I've had a lot of interaction um uh with with especially especially Nigerian um writers and what I remember from maybe about I'd say maybe about 10 years ago there there was this general attitude of um what is real literature and science fiction and fantasy and speculative fiction were not considered real literature and and what was considered real literature were like things fall apart you know serious writing without any of that weird stuff going on in it and um yeah yeah exactly exactly because things fall apart has lots of speculative elements in it um but that's another issue but but I think that we'll see more um more Africans directly from the continent writing um this kind of this kind of literature and I think that that what what they write is going to have like a different flavor as well and and and what I what I also would like to see in terms of afrofuturism is just more uh diversity in the types of writing I'd like to see um I'd like to see female writers um uh writers with disabilities just more just more variety within afrofuturist writing that's that's what I'm waiting to see because right now it's so the it's so small you know and it's it's slowly building it's slowly building and it's increasing and and um and growing but I'd like to see more of that and I'd also like to see really uh an extremely successful afrofuturist writer extremely successful as in like like best-selling status who's mediocre ice yes all right okay um I I I for me the um the idea that genre fiction and I I usually say speculative fiction to cover everything as an umbrella term but I I think speculative fiction is really an easy way for a large population to find themselves and find their politics any kind of genre fiction whether it's detective stories whether it's cartoons um whether it's a romance I know you find that hard to believe but any kind of genre fiction can get away with telling a political story and if it's a genre fiction more different kinds of people are going to read it because they they feel like oh this is just going to be fun and then when they finish they realize oh wow I thought about that that was deep and whoa and you know you saw Star Trek do it with issues around race we see all kinds of TV speculative fiction shows introduce complex ideas and I think the more of us who write and start writing younger the more complex ideas we will put in genre fiction and the more of us who will read them and become increasingly conscious of our political surroundings wonderful I'm or I hope so yes I totally agree I'm I'm gonna have to be the bad guy and be like that was our last question I'm so sorry about that no I know um so thank you for the three again three goddesses of speculative fiction this is a conversation I'm gonna get a picture with all of us of course yeah