First thing, I want to thank all of the guest bloggers and essayists who contributed to ABW last month. Your contributions were everything I hoped for and more — you’re all amazing and talented folks.

On the guest blogger front, I’m happy to announce that Karynthia will be joining us as a regular political blogger. She’ll usually post on Mondays, though if this election continues to bring the crazy, you might see her even more. Nora will remain a contributor as well.

Due to the awesomeness of the author essays, I am going to make them a regular feature. I might use different themes each month or stick with the history thing, I’m not sure yet. Suggestions are welcome.

I must say, though last month was awesome, was also one of the busiest on this blog in a long time. I loved it, but I am ready for a break. So here are some links to tide you over this weekend:

If you’re interested in more discussion, debate, and musings from creators (not just of fiction, but of art, comics, television, movies, etc.) then I highly suggest you look over the Race Around the Net list compiled by digital_femme on LJ. It’s an excellent place to start if you’re looking to read and learn more.

You may have noticed links to Black News Junkie on some posts. BNJ is sort of like Digg for black blogs. It’s a good place to see what folks on blogs are talking about, you can vote on interesting stories, and you can submit your own blog posts to it. Right now it only drives a bit of traffic, but as more people use it, it will benefit both bloggers and readers more. Go make an account!

For those of you interested in children’s literature written by and about black folks, check out the festivities over at The Brown Bookshelf. Every day in February they highlighted an author or illustrator and there is a lot of good stuff over there.

A few weeks ago I got an email about TheRoot.com, a new website headed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It’s a bit like a Huffington Post, but with African-American concerns at the fore. It’s also more news magazine-like with the various bloggers only being one component. So far I find it interesting and entertaining in equal measure.

Besides the blogs and news, there’s also a section where you can start your genealogical search and get your DNA tested to see where your origins lie. Now I am aware that this process isn’t perfect, but I am rather interested to see if there’s something in my background I’m not aware of or if I can find out from what region of Africa some of my ancestors hailed from. Still, until I have a few hundred dollars lying around doing nothing, I will just have to wait.

Last and least, here’s the stupidest Black History Month thing I came across on the Internets:

Walgreens Sort of Celebrates Black History Month

Is this a cotton-picking joke? We’ll never know. What crazy stuff did you all find/hear about?

All good things must come to an end -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by David Anthony Durham

The first story I wrote as a “serious” undergraduate writer was called “Hannibal, on an Elephant”. It was about an elementary-aged black kid growing up in a conservative, white neighborhood in the 1980’s. This kid – Marcus, I think his name was – was the only person of color in his class, and he felt it like a glowing stamp on his forehead each and every minute of the school day.

The story begins as a catalogue of small, racially influenced events. Marcus overhears two kids making a racist joke in the lunch line. One of them sees him, gets awkward, says, “We don’t mean you. You’re not like them.” During a dispute over a pencil trade, a kid calls Marcus a nigger. The teacher notices the altercation, calls the boys up and asks what happened. Marcus admits that the boy called him a name, but doesn’t want to say it. The teacher – with the entire class watching – makes him say the word. Nigger. The weight of it, the pain of having heard it, of having to say it, of naming himself in front of the entire class… is too much. Marcus breaks down in tears, which only makes it all worse. There are a few other similar incidents.

As children will do, Marcus internalizes all of this, places the blame on himself, and wishes he was different. If only he wasn’t black than all these uncomfortable situations wouldn’t happen!

Okay, let’s get to the turning point. Another day Marcus is out in a store when he bumps into an African-American friend of his parents. The man asks him about school, what he’s studying, etc. When Marcus mentions that he learned about Hannibal and Rome the man asks him if he knew that Hannibal was black? Marcus is stumped. What? Dumbfounded. What? No, he certainly had not! Days later, the man sends him a calendar with “Heroes of the African World” in vivid illustrations. One of them, sure enough, is Hannibal.

That night, Marcus stares up at his ceiling, watching images of an army mounted on elephants marching over the snow-covered Alps, dark-skinned men in armor, with weapons, figures from history with a skin not that different than his own. It is, for him, a great awakening. Suddenly the world is bigger than he knew, much larger than his suburban neighborhood. History is longer, more complex, much more multi-hued.

That was my first real story. You know what they say, of course. Early stories are likely to be autobiographical. That one was. I was Marcus. I experienced all those moments, and in some variation had that cultural awakening, spurred by images of Hannibal. My awareness may not have happened in the tight time frame of the story, but the motion of it is accurate as far as I can remember. It marked the connection with history – and with the history of people of African heritage – that became fundamental to my life ever since.

I’m a novelist now, and my first two novels, Gabriel’s Story and Walk Through Darkness, dealt with African-American history. My third, Pride of Carthage, is about Hannibal’s ancient war against Rome. When people ask me how I came to the subject, I can’t help but remember the boy I was and how important that revelation was to me.

My Hannibal novel is by no means a black and white conflict. It’s not about our contemporary racial hang-ups. I’ve grown to love complexity, and Hannibal’s war with Rome is that in everyway: multi-ethnic, international, polyglot, all about allegiances across tribal and regional lines, featuring convoluted disputes on which no side has complete claim to virtue. That’s the kind of story that I love and that has become the focus of my professional life. I trace its birth to that afternoon in my boyhood when some friend of my parents (I don’t actually remember who any more) so casually – and profoundly – rocked my world by introducing me to African history. I’m sure that man, long lost to me now, doesn’t know the effect he had on me, but his influence on my life will forever be part of my history.

I did an interview with David for Fantasy magazine, which many ABW readers will find very interesting. In it we talk about creating multicultural worlds within fantasy structures. It’s awesome, though I say so myself.

“I’ve grown to love complexity” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by Tobias S. Buckell

I grew up in Grenada: a white-looking mixed race boy with an English mother and a Grenadian father. Unlike a lot of the ex-pats in those areas, we didn’t have a lot of money, so even though I attended private schools I was usually the minority, both in terms of being mixed and looking white. I lived in various parts of the English-speaking Caribbean until I was 15, so it’s still the bulk of my life. Until next year, when I turn 30, in which case I’ll be hitting the tipping point of having lived in the US as long as I’d been in the islands. My identity is pretty complex, but it’s basically Caribbean.

Growing up I was raised by my mother alone. In order to get me out of her hair she encouraged reading–reading big, fat books. Because one didn’t have cable TV on a boat, which was what I grew up on. I started reading Science Fiction and Fantasy at a young age, and fell in love with the genre.

So when I started writing it in high school, it was not surprising that I started drawing launch galleries on Caribbean islands. I named starships after Caribbean politicians and heroes.

Because SF/F featured few minorities as heroes, or primary civilizations that were positive about non-Westerners, I wasn’t sure where I fit in. During my apprenticeship, so to speak, I wrote a ton of standard military-SF thriller fiction, and other oddball stuff. I started getting to the point where I was feeling like I had my finger on what I wanted to really write in 1999, while a junior in college. I started using non-Western settings, Caribbean heroes, and standard SF archetypes and tropes to play around with. One of my submission stories to the well known SF/F 6-week workshop, Clarion, was a story that I felt melded all those interests. It was called The Fish Merchant, and featured a Caribbean cyborg assassin loose in China during a First Contact situation. That became my first short story sale.

Later, when I started my first novel, I took a Caribbean-settled world cut off from the rest of the universe, developing on its own. I wanted to place Caribbean people out in outer space, something I’ve actually gotten hate mail for doing (I was told by the emailer I had no business writing about 3rd world people in outer space because only westerners had the ability to pull of the technological grunt work do ever reach the stars). I guess my writing set out to provide an antidote to attitudes such as that.

I’m a die-hard multiculturalist as a result of my experiences and very existence. I believe the strength and amazing story behind the U.S. is that more than any other country it’s made taking in immigrants a mission, and more than any other country we’ve managed to handle doing that without dissolving into armed conflict. There is an element of society that is seeking to make ‘multiculturalist’ a dirty word, but we have only to look at other societies ‘purges’ and racial wars to realize that turning our backs on that grand experiment is a path lined with blood and tears. My small contribution to the world is to imagine a multicultural future struggling with some of the same things we do today, laced with large doses of adventure so that no one ever feels preached to.

A diverse future is not a bitter pill to swallow, but an adventure.

But that isn’t to say this is my only focus. I think one reason for puzzlement some people have about me is that I don’t sit and hammer this message via fiction or whatever. For me it’s one wedge of a giant pie of interests I have that include futurism, general gadgetry, art, adventure story telling, and the fun of a rip-roaring tale. To that extent, this is stuff where I’m saying: “the future is multi-cultural, let’s take that for granted and now let’s go have fun.”

A Caribbean blogger once pointed out that a lot of fiction that gets raised up and promoted by white people reading fiction by people of diverse background is the stuff that is painfully aware of the past of white cultural domination or slavery or colonialism, and that while there is a tremendous gravity to doing that (both because, well, it is a giant elephant in the room which diverse writers rightfully should and do tap into and mull, and because of a sort of self-flagellating self importance on the part of non-diverse readers who keep circling around the subject of the horrors of their past and self guilt, which I think rewards looking backward more than forward) we do need more stuff that looks at what things could be, or is at least forward looking. Several people have indicated that is what they get out of what I’m doing, and hopefully I get to do more of it over time.

“I’m a die-hard multiculturalist as a result of my very existence” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by Andrea Hairston

For many years I have taught various courses in 20th century Black Theatre, focusing on how 19th century blackface minstrelsy and its 20th century progeny served as a catalyst for many black theatre and film artists. In our discussions of black performers who donned the minstrel masks, many students couldn’t understand why any self-respecting African American would act in a coon show or why Native Americans acted in Wild West Shows. Despite our (obvious) complicity in any number of contemporary atrocities, students insisted they would never have done minstrelsy or “stood around watching horrible things going down on stage and off.”

Although I persuade them of the complex choices facing 19th and early 20th century performers, I realized that to a degree, I secretly shared my students’ smug, superior attitude. Shocked by my own self-righteous judgment, I determined to write about characters who we, given the luxury of historical distance, might dismiss or hold in contempt. On sabbatical, I researched blackface, hoodoo, vaudeville, and early film for a novel and a course I now teach on minstrelsy from Daddy Rice to Big Momma’s House.

I finally have a draft of the novel, Redwood and Wildfire! I decided to embody people who chose to act in coon shows, Wild West Shows, and early blackface comic films. I wanted to discover their humanity and increase my own.

One of the major characters in my novel was inspired by my mother’s aunt who was born in 1889 and who was by all accounts a fierce conjure woman. I witnessed her personal power as a child. She was tireless and fearless. “I ain’t scared of nothing!” she said once before jumping on the triple-dipper, mountain rollercoaster in Pittsburgh to inspire great grandchildren who were too scared to ride. With minimal formal education, she was a teacher, union organizer, rabble-rouser. Age didn’t slow her down. She started a Head Start program at seventy-five and received a ten-year plaque at eighty-five for exemplary service.

I have always had enormous respect for my great aunt. She inspired and challenged me to be an engaged citizen, a fearless artist, and a free woman. She told me wild tales of her exploits from the turn of the century. Her stories were far from the standard hoodoo/voodoo tales! So I used her to create the character of a conjure woman/performer in theatre and film at the turn of the twentieth century—Redwood Phipps.

My father’s family, the Hairstons, is a prominent multi-ethnic American clan with books chronicling the family tree and large reunions. I have always shied away from what I considered circus get-togethers. Growing up, too many of the relatives on this side of my family wished to claim any identity other than one with an African ancestry, talking ‘bout Indian this and Irish that. Coming of age in the 60s, I glibly attributed the Hairston’s (multi-cultural) family myths to denial and self-hatred. It seemed to me that they were all too happy to be Cherokee or English, but screamed “I ain’t African!” when connections to that “dark continent” were mentioned.

In my righteous anger and black pride, I simplified what was going on.

I now wish I’d paid more attention to the tall tales the old folks told. I did remember stories from my grandparents (who were both very fair) about the trials and tribulations of the black, Native American, and white folk who wove a good life in the midst of turbulent and destructive times. I used these stories to help fashion my second major character who has a multi-ethnic background and did early Westerns—Aidan Wildfire.

Through research and also through teaching the class on minstrelsy and film several times, I developed a deep appreciation for the richness, complexity, and brilliance of people coming up from Georgia and making a life on stage and screen in turn of the century Chicago. Here was a treasure trove of stories that haven’t been told—people whose lives we often cannot imagine. Aida Overton Walker, a major African American actress, writing in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1906, deplored the fact that the general public didn’t have the faintest idea about the lives of colored performers. She also lamented that during her ten years of performing in and producing plays, there had “never been even the remotest suspicion of a love story.”

So Redwood and Wildfire is a romance, exploring the lives of “colored” performers from Walker’s time.

I also had a great time delving deeper into hoodoo. Hoodoo is an African American “magical” practice encompassing everything from herbal medicine used to cure physical and psychic ailments to the creation of fetish bags for attracting lovers or punishing enemies. The power of hoodoo is the power of a community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow. My Georgia hoodoos are word wizards casting a spell with story, singers and dancers shaking reality with their hips, conjurers jazzing up our minds and leaving troublesome gods to the Baptists and Vodou practitioners. Still, many folks condemned hoodoo as backward superstition—a belief system we needed to let go of in order to be acceptable to a modern society.

At the core of Redwood and Wildfire are brilliant, powerful characters whose options are limited by real-life Injun and coon shows. We don’t live in a meritocracy now and we certainly didn’t have one in 1910. It’s a grand myth, a grand fiction, but indeed the American Dream of social mobility is still a dream, not a reality [PDF].

People with power, talent, and beauty don’t necessarily get wealth, success, and happiness. The tragedies that befall us are not simply caused by the flaws in our characters. Power and talent can be a torment in a system stacked against you. People can shun the magical ones, be jealous or frightened of brilliance. Social forces can thwart even the strongest will and structural reality can crush individual imagination and agency.

In all of my stories, History and the Future are always manifest in the now, in the Present. As a writer, I ask, even if folk are talented, powerful, and beautiful, what do they need in order to come through a treacherous world, whole and creative?

How can we conjure the wondrous world we believe in?

This is the struggle I love to write about.

Indeed, this is the struggle I live.

Photo Credit: Micala Sidore

“How can we conjure the wondrous world we believe in?” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by Charles Saunders

History influenced my writing from the get-go. In a way, fantasy fiction offers a different perspective on history – the perspective of mythology and folklore. It’s like looking at history through a kaleidoscope. Each turn of the tube yields a different image. And each turn of a writer’s imagination creates a different history.

Part of my motivation for writing the Imaro novels and other African-oriented fantasy stories was to make a new kaleidoscope for African history, because the one that existed at the time was flawed. The African-history perspective in fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fiction was either distorted or missing altogether. What I wanted to do was to reclaim that history, and bring what was lost or hidden back to light.

Three outstanding books on African history formed the foundation for the setting of the Imaro novels: The Lost Cities of Africa by Basil Davidson, The World and Africa by W.E.B. Du Bois, and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization. Interestingly, Davidson was a white British scholar, Du Bois was African American and Diop was Senegalese. Yet despite the differences in their backgrounds, their works are remarkably similar.

Together, those books illuminate the African history that was hidden or destroyed in an attempt to foster the illusion that Africans had no history before their continent was colonized by Europeans. The fantasy fiction of the time when I conceived Imaro and his setting (that would be the early 1970s) replicated that illusion.

I used real history to change fantasy history – a reversal of the usual mode, in which fantasy history is a transmutation of real history. Were it not for the historical sources provided by the books of Du Bois, Davidson and Diop – along with many others that line the shelves of university libraries – I probably never would have started writing at all.

“Each turn of a writer’s imagination creates a different history” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

“Women in South African History” by Nomboniso Gasa (Ed) published by HSRC Press, 2007.

Women in South African History traces the lives of South African women from the pre-colonial, pre-union period (mid 18th century) through to the post-apartheid beginnings and present day South Africa. It is written in four thematic parts: Women in the pre-colonial and pre-union periods; Women in early to mid-twentieth century South Africa; War: armed and mass struggle as gendered experiences; The 1990s and beyond: new identities, new victories, new struggles.

The book is a radical departure from the traditional history texts in that it uses a feminist analysis rather than the “more acceptable gender analysis” in it’s approach by examining “the ways in which gender intersects with race, culture, class and other forms of identity and location in South African history“. By including the present as part of history the book shows how the past and present are inextricably linked and thus better examines women’s experiences over the past 300 years. The experiences of women’s struggle and their continuing hazardous journeys towards liberation are expressed through the dual metaphors of “they move boulders” – challenges; and “they cross rivers” – dangers.

Women in South African History goes far beyond the many well known events and periods by feminizing those events and periods where women’s participation has never been acknowledged. In the chapter “Like three tongues in one mouth”: Tracing the elusive lives of slave women in (slavocratic) South Africa, Pumla Dineo Gqola, brings to life the slave women brought to South Africa from South East Asia, East Africa and Southern Africa. Despite the scarcity of historical and biographical narratives, Pumla is still able to document the lives of some slave women and more importantly the ways in which they resisted and revolted against their enslavement and their central role “to the historical constitution of Afrikaner society“. Other examples are women’s mass protests against carrying of passes in Bloemfontein and Potchefstroom in 1913; women’s involvement in the trade union movement during the 1930s; the participation of women in the ANC underground and military wing in the 1950s; township uprisings in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s and 1980s; naked women protests against lack of housing in Soweto in 1990; migrant women in Johannesburg and women learning to live with HIV/AIDS in present day South Africa.

The book concludes with a powerful essay by Yvette Abrahams in which she chronicles her experience of researching and writing on Sarah Bartman. Or rather searching for the REAL Sarah Bartman not the racialised sexualised object constructed by white male fantasies …a “living specimen of barbaric savage races” one who according to Lindfors [Courting the Hottentot Venus]
was willing to collaborate in her own degradation in order to earn more money…

she allowed herself to be exhibited indecently to the European public, and she persisted in this tawdy occupation for more than five years….. She may have been the victim of the cruelist kind of predatory ruthlessness, but her collusion in her own victimisation was unmistakeable…. he concludes
To put it plainly, she may have engaged in prostitution as well as exhibitionism. Her degradation may have been complete..

Abrahams tears these racist, sexist texts to pieces written not in the 1800s but in the 1980s. Men such as Lindfors were able to pass these lies off as academic text by so called intellectuals. Abrahams leads us through to the convincing conclusion that Sarah Bartman was a slave – a Khoekhoe slave woman. She does this by connecting her own personal herstory to that of the Khoekhoe. Born in the pre-colonial period of the 1780s, she must have had a Khoekhoe name and the only way she could have lost that name at that time was through slavery. Also the only way for her to move from her home in the Western Cape to England was as a slave. Sarah Bartman lied (that she willingly exhibited herself) because she was a slave and knew very well that her words would not be believed over that of a white man and the consequences of her telling the truth would have been too horrible to contemplate such as life imprisonment and even more degradation and abuse.

Abrahams again makes the absolute convincing statement without any hesitation or qualification that the “abuse and degradation” of Sarah Bartman was rape. Rape not only of Sarah but of the whole Khoekhoe nation. The white male racist, sexist texts she quotes in her essay are a form of “surrogate violence” against African women, Black women, Khoekhoe women and Sarah Bartman.

“Was it not rape of a symbolic sort to parade the degradation and humiliation of auntie Sarah before me? Was it not a sexually violent act which expressed male power and my vulnerability to pain? Has not each male author I have brought before you been unable to resist the temptation of demonstrating their psycho sexual power and auntie Sarah’s inability to resist?

In the place of false witness it is time to speak the truth. I name the posthumous abuse and degradation of auntie Sarah’s body, rape. The rape of her body is a rape of my mind.

As Abrahams writes, Sarah Bartman whose real name, real self was stolen like that of millions of other slaves and their descendants, is dead and therefore can no longer feel the pain. But she (Abrahams) feels it – I feel it and Black women throughout the world feel it. Every racist, sexist, misogynist text by whiteness against Black women is felt by me, by all of us. The symbolism of this sexual violence is explained by a more “refined and broader” definition of rape.

…the element of sexual abuse are the violation of a person’s integrity by force and/or threat of physical violence, dishonouring the ethic of mutuality and care in relationships of domination, and an infraction of one’s psycho-spiritual-sexual integrity. Sexual abuse is sacrilege of God’s spirit in each of us [Eugene, TM "If you get there before I do: A womanist ethical response to sexual violence and abuse. In J Grant (ed) Perspectives on womanist theology"

In reviewing South African Women in History, I chose to focus on Yvette Abrahams essay because the story of Sarah Bartman speaks to the book as a whole and speaks to me personally. It is both the beginning - pre-colonial and the present, continued racism but always resistance. Sarah Bartman's agency was expressed in her act of survival against all odds. Sarah Bartman, Khoekhoe woman represents the loss of mother and land that came with slavery and colonialism as well as the ongoing struggle for liberation and emancipation.

Women in South African History is a "transdisciplinary" interrogation of events and periods in the history of South Africa from a feminist perspective. The narratives bring to life the daughters of Africa in their quest for emancipation, sometimes at great cost to themselves and their families, particularly their children. But always there is an unflinching determination - choices are laid bare and the choice is still emancipation.

Some other non-fiction from Southern Africa which may interest readers:

The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court: Reflections on the Trial of Jacob Zuma by Mmatshilo Motsei [Khwezi One Year On]

Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same Sex Practices in Africa by Ruth Morgan & Saskia Wieringa.

AND BESSIE HEAD Imaginative Trespasser Letters between Bessie Head and Patrick and Wendy Cullinan: 1963 – 1977. An insight into this brilliant and complex woman and the politics of colour and gender not just in Southern Africa 40 years ago, but as it is still played out today across the continent.

sokari ekine is a Nigerian living in London. She is the founder and editor of Black Looks blog which has been running for 3 1/2 years.

Sarah Bartman & other herstories of South African women -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by Alaya Dawn Johnson

There seems to be a pervasive issue of credentials when any writer decides to tackle race in fiction. White people tread in this territory at their peril: no one wants to be the twenty-first century’s Harriet Beecher Stowe. But it’s not just white writers who have to beware the pit of fraught historical relationships and remembered grievances when they address race (and racism) in fiction.

A few years ago, I had an unusually vivid illustration of the unwritten rule that says that when black writers write about black people, those characters must be thinly veiled versions of themselves. To some extent, everyone hopes to discern some important quality of the writer inadvertently revealed in their writing. Why else make so much of the fact that Jane Austen died a spinster, or that Zora Neale Hurston lived in poverty and literary obscurity? Fiction reading is an utterly different experience when you have no personal knowledge of the author. Sometimes, the author bio can help inform texts and give you a greater appreciation of the depth of the work and characters. But at others, these personal details are irrelevant and can irrevocably damage the reading experience. Specifically, how do you approach fiction differently when you decide that the author does not have the “cred” to write that story? And when the author is black and writing about race, we edge into fraught territory: just how black is “black enough”?

Whatever that means.

Yet, there I was, reading a negative review of one of my short stories that managed to make only a passing mention of the story itself.

The problem? Well, my daddy, this reviewer said, was white, my mom was black, and I just didn’t know what I was talking about. This reviewer did not know me personally. Information about the ethnicity of my parents is not available online. There was, however, a photograph of me at the end of my offending story, revealing the salient detail: I’m one pale black person.

And now we begin to understand the perils of placing too much emphasis on personal history in fiction. Because the main character of that story also had a white father and a black mother. Assuming biographical details of an author based on her characters should always be absurd, but many people, oddly enough, make race an exception to that rule. Any reviewer who speculated, say, that Ursula LeGuin is a hermaphrodite because the humans in The Left Hand of Darkness perform the functions of both sexes would probably be laughed out of the profession. Thousands of science fiction authors write about aliens, and yet no one claims that as evidence extraterrestrial invasion. But let a black person write about people of color and they’d better make sure they have a very explicit author bio. You can imagine these denials over the course of the twentieth century: no, my husband never died of rabies, I don’t have a special room in the basement covered in light bulbs, and as far as I know the ghost of my murdered slave baby has not come back from the grave.

Listen, either the story succeeds in its aims, or it doesn’t. The personal history of the author is tangential at best. Put another way: Zora Neale Hurston’s literary obscurity matters only after we’ve established that she is worth reading in the first place.

My maternal grandfather grew up on a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina. My maternal grandmother was a lovechild raised by her half-Blackfoot mother in the twenties and thirties. My dad actually was the defendant in a historic supreme court case that desegregated the national court systems (Johnson vs. Virginia). Both of my parents are black. Yes, I’m “high yellow”, but last I checked the brown paper bag test is not an ideal method of evaluating fiction.

Of course none of my other stories resulted in similar personal speculations. I wish they did… I’m not a blue-skinned, shape-changing demon who lives in a desert. I never grew up on an island or dove for pearls or had to leave my home at a young age because of natural disasters. I don’t know witchcraft. I was never reanimated from the scavenged body parts of a Victorian graveyard, and though I’ve visited Brazil, I’ve never been in the Amazon rainforest.

But I am a person of color. And I wrote a story with a bi-racial main character. Wait, it all makes sense to me now! My daddy must be white.

I guess I’ll have to tell him.

“The personal history of the author is tangential at best” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by Linda Addison

I looked up the word ‘history’ because sometimes we take words for granted. We assume we understand their meaning, when often what we understand is how they are used around us but not necessarily their definition.

His-tory:
1. An account of what has or might have happened in the form of a narrative, play, story, or tale.

I would add ‘poem’ to the list of forms history can take since my storytelling often takes the form of a poem. I have three collections of poetry and stories in print. Looking back it is clear that the first collection, Animated Objects, is intensely flavored by personal history.

The story, ‘The Box’, although not directly autobiographical, pulls from images of photographs that my mother collected over the years of our family life. Each photo held great value to my mother. Here was our history, our lives, happy and sad.

When my parents divorced, those pictures invoked different moods for all of us. There were some pictures that suddenly were haunted with the premonition of sadness that was hidden until they divorced.

There are two poems in the same collection, ‘Joyous Spirit’ and ‘Sassy Love’; emotional documentation of what effect two strong aunts had on my life. Two very different people, but undeniably authentic in their lives, deeply influencing a shy, skinny niece who loved the very air they breathed.

Years later I found my own joyous sassiness and know without a doubt it was a gift from their lives breathed into me.

2. Something important enough to be recorded.

The first poem in my second collection, Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes is called ‘Fire/Fight’. I wrote that sitting in a tiny room in a house we rented that we called the Paris room because it was just big enough for a little café table and two small chairs. It looked out on the street and was a perfect place to sit with a lap top computer and write.

I often wrote in this room, listing to the world. One night a fire truck rushed down the street, sirens ringing, red lights flashing, filling that small room with light and sound. I didn’t think, I let myself feel: being a firefighter, somewhere someone’s home, loved ones, pets, gifts, furniture was burning, being reduced to ash. The fire truck rushing, always rushing. We humans in our cities rushing, always rushing through life.

The last stanza of the poem:

The poem came quickly and was polished with very little rewriting. It was first published in 1999 by Edgar: Digested Verse an impressive chapbook size poetry magazine. I reprinted it as the first poem in my book in 2001.

I was scheduled to have my first book signing at a Barnes and Nobles in Manhattan the week of September 11, 2001.

That week Manhattan became a city of ash, of burning dreams and it was a long time before I could read that poem out loud.

3. The systematic documented account of the past.

January 1, 2007 I sat down in my office to begin my third collection. 100 poems. A crazy idea. Although I had been writing a poem a day in my journal for months, they weren’t publishable poems. Most of them were bits and pieces of observations, feelings, reactions. How was I going to gather 100 poems and have the book come out in 2007?

Life teaches if we listen. I had been working on being in the Now, the moment, to find my authentic place in this body, city, country, planet, universe.

I decided to trust this great lesson and simply be present to the possibility.

I sat in my writing office at night (after the day job), every night from January 1, 2007. I said a prayer to open my spirit to whatever the world would like to whisper.

I listened.

March 14, 2007 I finished the 100th poem. Of course there was rewriting, taking out poems, writing other poems to put in their place. The fitting of the poems together in a tapestry that became the book, Being Full of Light, Insubstantial.

This book has poems that are personal, that sing outside time and space, light and dark. The world has much to say.

To be in the Now and systematically document the past. Everything becomes the past, everything becomes history and I cannot be separated from its influence. Each word written, dances from the now into the past.

As the world whispers to me, as stories and poetry fall from my hands, history personal and impersonal take form, teaching me many lessons. I try to be a grateful student.

“My storytelling often takes the form of a poem” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today’s Guest Essay is by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

There’s a thin line, if any, between fiction and nonfiction. Often, fiction is just nonfiction through a distorted lens. For me, this has often turned out to be the case, though these areas of modified fact or realism are often difficult to detect. I’ve noticed a trend in my stories that is a prime example of this. My characters always have some “ability” and they always have something “wrong” with them.

I come from a family of athletes. In Nigeria, both of my parents are track stars. My father was a nationally known and award-winning hurdler. My mother’s event was the javelin. She was known throughout Africa as “The Golden Girl with the Golden Smile.” She even made the Nigerian Olympic team. So I inherited my speed and quickness from my father and my super strong arms from my mother.

My sisters and I were semi-pro tennis players. We are each one year apart. This meant that by high school, we took over the tennis team. It was no real surprise that our team went on to win the State Championship. My last year in high school, after tennis season, I joined the track. I won 22 medals in the 400M, high jump, and 800M. My little brother, Emezie, (seven years my junior) played tennis, too, and is a second degree Black Belt in Tai Kwon Do.

When you are athletically gifted, in many ways, it’s like having this weird magical talent. You can just do these things that people find amazing, yet, it comes easily to you. I was always the first chosen during games on the play ground. I was always the one racing and beating the boys. It was all easy, natural. Being in motion always brought me great joy. So I’ve known this kind of ability.

Nevertheless, since the age of 13, I had started growing so fast that I developed severe scoliosis. The curvature of the spine. Also hereditary. Technically, it’s a deformity. An old boyfriend (now a close friend) once told me that my back looked like a Picasso painting. When I was a freshman in college, I had to have spinal surgery to straighten it out. I woke up from the surgery paralyzed. Though I regained the ability to walk, my athletic career was over and my spine still has some of its strange “S” shape.

During Clarion in 2001, I started writing about this angry Efik woman (Efik is a Nigerian ethnic group) who found she had the ability to fly. She was a Windseeker. Her name was Arro-yo. I didn’t like her much because aside from being kind of mean, she was super promiscuous, and often irrational. But she could fly. She could travel around the world without the use of her legs. In her village, her ability was seen as an aberration, a deformity. You see where this is going? One of my Arro-yo stories was a finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest. Another won The Margin Magical Realism Short Story Contest. Another will be published in a fantasy anthology later this year.

About two years later, I wrote Zahrah the Windseeker. Again, you have a character with a “deformity” (her dada hair) and an unbelievable ability. Ejii in The Shadow Speaker has very unique eyes and few people can stand to look into them. She also has the ability to commune with earthy spirits dwelling in shadows. In my short story, “The Albino Girl,” Sunny is an Igbo albino girl who has a special ability.

On the flip side, as my experiences can influence my stories, my stories can also have a strong impact on me. My most recent example is a character from my draft of The Shadow Speaker 2 (I had absolutely no intention of writing a part two to The Shadow Speaker. It all just came to me in the last month).

This character has very very strong beliefs about the environment and the earth’s beasts and creatures. While writing about him, I was so absorbed into his ideas that two weeks ago I stopped eating meat. Just like that. Granted, environmental issues are very important to me and I’ve always had a problem with eating meat. But it took writing this character to shove me over the edge. We’ll see how long this lasts.

It just all goes to show that art imitates life and life imitates art and sometimes they are one of the same.

“Fiction Is Just Nonfiction Through A Distorted Lens” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Last week Naamen started us off with his post on why he doesn’t like to admit he supports Obama.

Karynthia hoped that Super Tuesday would result in a clear front-runner for the Democrats — no dice. So, sadly, the long national nightmare where we’re told that black women have to choose between voting their race or their gender continues apace.

Angry Black Bitch had much the same complaint, and spent the day yelling at her television because ALL women of color are being horribly dealt with by the media.

Sokari posted a wonderfully insightful review of THE LIONESS OF LISABI that you must read.

And frequent guest blogger nojojojo kindly asks, again, for Black people to stop embarrassing us.

Saturday saw the first of many posts by black authors on the subject of history. I wasn’t aware of S. Renee Bess‘ work until I contacted her for this project, but now I’m eager to read her fiction!

Tomorrow we resume with the guest blogging and Friday there will be more author essays. Read, comment, enjoy!

Phew! -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman