Even after several semesters of master’s-level workshops, rigorous literary theory courses, and hours of listening to authors and artists talk about their creative processes, actually beginning a novel felt so daunting that I was initially running away from the form altogether to work on short stories featuring some version of the characters that ended up in Blue Futures, Break Open. I don’t at all intend to suggest that the short story is a less expansive form, but the characters knew as well as I did that their story had to be told in a very particular way, in spite of my anxieties. I knew that I wanted to create a world that would fit into the universe of Black femme collective creativity, one that was mutually intelligible with Vodou cosmology without carelessly co-opting its sacred parts. Reading anything I could find in these realms felt like the best way to approach the ambitious task in front of me, even if after a year of reading it became a mode of procrastination. [I learned you can never really know “enough” to get started.] I was reading—and watching, the men in this book would not be three-dimensional characters were it not for countless re-watches of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight—for historical and aesthetic grounding, but also for a feeling. In the books below, there was a certain feeling I encountered that I wanted to recreate for the reader. I’m not sure whether or not I was successful, but the attempt has been an ecstatic experience.
Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson
I first learned about the release of Wicked Flesh by Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson when I was almost done with my first [very rough] draft of my novel. For some reason, though I was determined not to enter 2020 with the work unfinished—there’s no way I could have known the fear and grief that lay ahead—I also felt very urgently that I wouldn’t be able to arrive at a complete draft until I was able to read Johnson’s book.
And I found exactly what I was seeking. Wicked Flesh is so beautifully written and treats the lives of African women and women of African descent with care and rigor. Mapping history from Senegambia to New Orleans and Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Johnson’s work considers Black femme freedom in the 18th century, probing archival silences (or rather deliberate exclusion and erasure) as spaces of possibility and not just emptiness. Johnson traces the various ways that these women experienced the slippery nature of power and subjugation across the African continent and diasporas and how they practiced intimacy, sometimes as solace and sometimes as strategy.
Reading about these “wicked,” “women in the water” (Johnson’s reference to Rae Paris’ poetry) deepened my hope that my characters, my own women in the water, could be recognizable to the women in her book, that maybe they passed by each other or even held hands somewhere in ritual or in flight.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
The main characters in Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s novel aren’t quite “star-crossed.” It is probably more accurate to describe them as worlds colliding. With the death of her mother, Petronella, Yejide is now the new custodian of a very heavy family legacy. Like the women before her, she is tasked with taking care of the dead and their restless spirits. Emmanuel was raised by his mother, Janaya, as an adherent of the Nazarite faith, which requires that its believers never interact with the dead.
After a long period of struggling to support himself and his mother, Emmanuel finds work in Fidelis, which turns out to be a cemetery in the fictional city of Port Angeles, based on Trinidad’s capital city, Port of Spain. Renouncing his faith and to the horror of his mother, Emmanuel takes the gravedigger job. He doesn’t exactly meet Yejide when she begins planning for her mother’s funeral. Rather, they meet in a storm, in what Emmanuel thinks is a dream, though both the storm and the dream are very much real in the world that Lloyd Banwo conjures.
The love story is layered and fraught as you can imagine, but the narrative goes beyond Yejide and Emmanuel, expanding into a meditation on grief and what we owe our living and our dead loved ones. I read this book the year I completed my first big revision of my own novel and immediately began to wonder how I could write something that would make other people lose themselves in it the way I did with Banwo’s work, about how I could bend the borders of real and surreal into something so lush. For example, without giving much more away, there’s a scene where Yejide comes across her mother sitting next to her dead twin sister, Geraldine. Both are knitting, but the dead sister’s needles and basket are empty of yarn. Incredible.
Sula by Toni Morrison
The thing about Toni Morrison’s Sula is, I don’t think I will ever find adequate words to explain how much this means to me, and that’s no exaggeration. You might be surprised to hear this if you know me in real life, because you’ve probably experienced me finding a way to work a mention of Sula into any conversation, again, no exaggeration. Part of my fixation lies with trying to understand how in such a short book, Toni Morrison is able to create a world so rich and so total that includes details like Dewey, Dewey, and Dewey the “brothers” who became indistinguishable from each other while also looking nothing alike, or the rose-stem-shaped birthmark darkening above Sula’s eyebrow as she got older and started to “act up,” or the water swallowing and then closing quickly over Chicken Little’s head, or the sentence “their meeting would be thick with birds.”
The thing about Sula is, I have never gotten over the image of her strolling away from her best friend Nel’s wedding celebration not to be seen again for 10 years, with a smile that Nel could see and feel even from Sula’s back. That scene has come to exemplify for me what it means to be free, dangerously so, to be the kind of woman to turn to my own desires and creative impulses with “an ungloved hand.” I think about it every time I’ve felt like getting up from some desk in some office and walking away for good. I think about it as often as I think about Toni Morrison saying that being free doesn’t mean not having any responsibilities at all, it means choosing what you would like to be responsible for.
The thing about Sula is, she was the kind of “wicked” woman that everyone needed, all the people of that Black neighborhood called the Bottom in the hills above the fictional Ohio town of Medallion. They needed some counterpoint and some justification for their own self-judgement and morality, they needed someone to be “bad” so they could be “good.” The thing about Sula and Nel is, they might have been the other half of each other’s extreme that they had been needing, all along.
The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier, translated by Harriet De Onís
I’m not sure that my book would exist—or at least not in the form it eventually took—had I not encountered The Kingdom of this World. I want to believe I would’ve found my way to Blue Basin somehow, but Carpentier’s novel set me firmly on that path. In the first year of my MFA program, I took a course called Cuban Literature and Decolonization, taught by one of my favorite professors, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann. Carpentier’s novel was the assigned reading one week, and I went from skimming through it to plan my homework for the weekend to sitting on the floor of my room and reading the entire book in one sitting. I was having a particular African diasporic encounter that would become regular for that class, finding elements in language, folktales, and descriptions of ritual that felt vaguely familiar and obscure at the same time.
In this book, it was the names of Haitian Vodou spirits that were the same in Ewe, but it was also what Carpentier called “lo real maravilloso” or “the marvelous real,” an ecstatic experience that lies somewhere between material and spirit, one that Carpentier himself had during a visit to Haiti. In under 200 pages, Carpentier is able to take the reader from pre-revolution Haiti to Cuba and back to Haiti under the reign of Henri Christophe. Through the eyes of a young enslaved man, Ti Noël, we witness rebellion starting in the poisoned enslaved people feed to their owners livestock, ripping through the Bwa Kayiman ceremony until the whole island is on fire with revolution.
One of the main questions the novel asks the reader to sit with is how one can free one’s self, only to adopt the brutal practices and societal structures of one’s former oppressors. This question lingers in my work as well, and I have Carpentier to thank, along with that course and the many Caribbean authors I studied for informing my own attempts at that uncanny African diasporic “marvelous real.”