Guest Contributor Victoria Elisabeth Garcia

Ancient, Ancient is a fierce, challenging, and occasionally perplexing swirl of a book by emerging speculative fiction author Kiini Ibura Salaam.  The winner of the 2013 James Tiptree, Jr. Award for science fiction and fantasy that expands understanding of gender, Ancient, Ancient is a collection of thirteen stories, three of which are original.  Though her short fiction has previously been published in Sheree R. Thomas’s groundbreaking Dark Matter anthology series and elsewhere, Ancient, Ancient is Salaam’s first book-length publication.

Salaam’s stories employ magic and time travel, spacecraft and prophecy to explore deeply human questions about motherhood, sex, identity, and inequality.  Written in lush, precise prose and deeply rooted in feminine experience, they evoke feelings both hauntingly familiar and disorientingly alien.  Though readers who are not frequent consumers of science fiction may find a few of the stories rather opaque, the book as a whole is a joy and a revelation.  Adventurous souls willing to journey beyond their comfort zones will be well-rewarded.

The collection begins with “Desire,” a commanding and deeply physical piece about Sené, a hunter-gatherer woman worn out by hard work and childbirth, who learns to reclaim the erotic power of her body.  Full of crocodiles, longing, and animal-bodied gods, the story hums with passion and poetic intensity.  Its sonorous, folkloric tone is makes for a compelling and satisfying read.

“Desire,” is followed by a smart and graceful trio of linked science fiction stories.  In these, we meet WaLiLa and MalKai, a pair of mothlike beings who travel, incognito, among everyday human beings in order to collect a vital human essence that their elders need for survival.  The first of the three stories, “Of Wings, Nectar, & Ancestors,” is a broad and ambitious piece.  Blending club music and glow sticks with nonhuman thoughts and prayers, the story gives the reader a convincingly alien perspective on the limits of spoken language, the power of sex, and the cycle of life. In contrast, “MalKai’s Last Seduction,” the second story, is an intimate tale that focuses tightly on male-bodied MalKai’s erotic connection with Cori, a deeply closeted gay man.  Earthy, sensual, and emotionally rich, it is a gorgeously rendered character study that just happens to include an alien.  In the third story, “At Life’s Limits,” Salaam uses WaLiLa’s striking and unearthly voice to describe Lukumi religious practice, family conflict, and neighborhood life in Havana, Cuba.  The result is an elegant and resonant tale about the hardening and softening of boundaries; between people, between nations, between human and nonhuman, between life and death.

Not all of Salaam’s work quite so fantastical. A few are more tightly grounded in the day-to-day.  “Rosamojo” is a tale about a young girl whose decision to use conjure to defend herself against abuse turns her world upside-down.  Though the magic is drawn with convincing sharpness, the non-supernatural parts of Rosa’s world (family betrayals, a funeral, kitchens, cranky siblings) are drawn with equal sharpness, and affect the reader with equal power.  With a nicely understated adolescent voice and a satisfyingly snappy ending, the piece is one of the collection’s standouts.  “Marie,” is another nearly-mainstream story.  Full of funny, heartbreaking, and often uncomfortable detail about pregnancy, race, assimilation, and being a Southerner in New York City, the piece is one of the most accessible in the collection.  Though it morphs, midway through, into a rather predictable deal-with-the-Devil story, its well-wrought characters and gorgeous flashes of sensory insight keep the reader engaged until the end.

Several of the stories, however, are almost impenetrably strange.   “Ferret,” for instance, is a very short piece about a grandfather and granddaughter who have been lost for years in space.  Control of their spacecraft involves freeing a sphere of flesh and viscera from their bodies and coaxing a special sort of creature to enter it. Courses are plotted through divination.  The depiction of far-future travel in original and evocative, and Salaam’s play with notions of bodily integrity and body horror certainly has the power to fascinate.  But that may not be enough for some readers; especially those who aren’t already science fiction fans.  Though also fascinating, “K-USH: The Legend of the Last Wero,” is similarly problematic.  It is a meaty story that explores themes of sacrifice, loyalty, mentorship, and natural disaster, and it is certainly well worth reading.  But because it is packed with neologisms, and built almost entirely of imagined beliefs and social structures, its depth of strangeness may prove alienating to some readers.

Still, some of the book’s most bizarre pieces are also among the best.  “Debris” is a surreal and eerie story about a family of skeletal beings who visit the earth on the Day of the Dead.  In this piece, a grandmother goes insane after inhaling dust, and starts giving away her bones; the souls of living people can be pulled from the body and juggled; and human emotions act as a drug on the skeleton-beings, producing trembling and exaltation.    The story is disconcerting, but beautifully so, and its devastating final note hints at a kind of uncanny redemption.

The collection’s final piece, “Pod Rendezvous,” is likewise both rich and strange. Set in the far future, in this sprawling, carnivalesque coming-of-age story, marriage is for the moneyed, and motherhood is done by dedicated collectives who live bound together in communal veils.  Here, Salaam’s ability to see the emotional dimensions of social and technological structures is gorgeously displayed.  When a room is no longer needed, its walls disassemble themselves and coalesce elsewhere; a nostalgic character runs her hands along these new partitions, hunting for traces of her past.  The twisting, smart-fabric veil of a mother-group produces claustrophobia and anxiety in a woman first learning to use it, but later, it brings clarity of vision, and even comfort.  One mothering collective redefines its mission, and its members decide to forgo children, and to nurture themselves, each other, and the world around them.  The longest piece in the book, “Pod Rendezvous” is also perhaps the best.

Salaam, in sum, is a powerfully talented new writer.  Catch her on her way up.

Published by Aqueduct Press. 272 pages.  $18.00 in trade paperback and $9.95 as an ebook. (affiliate links)

Additional link:

• Kiini Ibura Salaam official

• All posts on the Sundays @ series

That’s right: Come out to St. Vitus’s in Brooklyn to support Laina Dawes’s official launch of here book on black women in the hardcore and metal scenes,  What Are You Doing Here?.  Really thrilled for Laina, who seems to have gotten a lot of good coverage on the book:

• Here she is on NPR
• . . .and VICE
• . . . as well as the AV Club

Cool, too, that the event features special performances by Tamar-Kali and Militia.  Definitely some face-peeling ish.

There’s no cover, so come out, show your support, and please buy a book.  Laina’s even got some dope merch available here.

And here’s the author who’ll be signing your books and rockin’ out in front of the stage:

Congrats again, Laina!

Additional link:

• Laina Dawes official
• St. Vitus Bar

(photo credit: dpa, Frank May)

I will admit this now: When I was a student at Spelman College in the early ’80′s, I didn’t know that Africans wrote books.

Lucky for me, the venerable English teacher Millicent Dobbs Jordan changed all that. She taught a course entitled Contemporary West African Literature, a title so enticing that I signed up for the course out of curiosity. Of course we read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. And No Longer At Ease. In her classroom, Dr. Jordan — who’d witnessed Nigeria’s 1960 independence ceremony — spoke of the bravery of Achebe’s novels, their seminal distinction and extraordinary gift of western language brought to bear on a dignified, true portrayal of Africans. I began then to foment two desires: to become a writer who wrote stories that way, from the inside, and to visit Nigeria.

In the wake of his death, much has rightfully been said about Achebe’s effect on a younger generation of Nigerian writers. Indeed, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Teju Cole and Uzodinma Iweala owe an immeasurable literary debt to him. The young Nigerian writer Buki Papillon spoke for many, I’m sure, when she wrote on her Facebook status update: “Things Fall Apart was the first book to teach me that the written word can reach into your chest, tear out your heart, shred it, stomp on the pieces and leave you grateful for the experience. RIP, Chinualumogu Achebe. Your work lives on.”

But as Kwame Anthony Appiah points out, for most people around the world, Achebe was “their first African writer.” That includes generations of African-American writers as well. Indeed, Toni Morrison has said she was influenced by Achebe and other African writers who, unlike the black male writers of the ’60s and ’70′s, saw their blackness as central and felt no need to explain themselves to white readers.

**

I did get to fulfill my two desires — to write a story that told my truth about a world others assumed they knew, and to visit Nigeria. After college, a fellowship to study African media women allowed me to live in Lagos for nearly a year. I recall sitting beside the lagoon at the University of Lagos, a slight breeze rippling its water, and reading from cover to cover Achebe’s slim, brilliant and prescient book The Trouble With Nigeria. That book predicted the New Year’s Day coup of ’84, and quite frankly, the entire sad, recent history of his beloved country.

After living amidst the intellectuals and journalists and writers who revered Achebe, I left Nigeria with an even deeper appreciation for his work, as well as that of other African writers, many of them women. I carried that appreciation with me to Columbia University, where I once innocently asked a professor after her lecture who was this Somerset Maugham she spoke of? She looked at me with incredulity and said, “If you’ve never heard of Maugham and you’re at an ivy-league institution, then you should just go back to ‘Go’”. Fuming, I later barged into her office and announced that I was in fact quite well-read in African literature, rattling off names of several authors, Achebe included. “I find that far more valuable than knowing about a British writer who wrote melodramas in the ’30s,” I said. Nodding vigorously, she stumbled out an apology, and later slipped a written one into my mailbox.

Fast-forward many years, and I have just completed a novel based on my time in Nigeria. Into The Go-Slow is its title and it has Achebe’s influence all over it — from the uncompromising newspaper editor inspired by a character from Anthills of the Savannah to the painstaking care I took to render an honest, complex picture of modern-day Nigeria.

I appreciate that Achebe was the godfather to every African writer who came in his wake. But you do not have to be a native son or daughter to show your gratitude for his influence. You can also be a black girl from Detroit and feel just as grateful.

Thank you, Mr. Achebe. RIP.

UPDATE: We’ve added journalist and novelist Farai Chideya (2009′s Kiss The Sky) to the lineup.  See below.

(l to r: VONA writers Buki Papillon and Camille Acker)

Is there anything else out there like the AWP writers’ conference? Where else can you hear — under one roof — readings by Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Tretheway, Major Jackson, Mat Johnson, Kevin Young, Carleen Brice, Cornelius Eady and Sundays @ The Sackett alum Samantha Thornhilll?

But it is a conference, which has a certain formality. Luckily, one of the more enervating events of the conference took place off-site, blocks away from Boston’s massive and sterile convention center and thankfully a day after winter storm Saturn.

For two hours last Saturday night, VONA alums shared the spotlight with authors from Las Dos Brujas Writing Community as they read powerful fiction, poetry and memoir to a packed and adoring crowd at the cooperative workspace Make Shift.

What’s VONA/Voices you ask? It is the only multi-genre workshop for writers of color in the nation.

Hosted by co-founder Elmaz Abinader, the night’s readings were meant to promote VONA’s forthcoming anthology, Dismantle, but the event was really about celebrating a tight-knit community of writers and those who love them. After each reading, folks whooped and yelled and cheered, sometimes calling out “VONA! VONA!” amidst effusive applause. Think writers as rock stars.

Indeed, the writers’ work was across the board stellar, from Buki Papillon’s searing tale of a young Nigerian woman newly arrived in America naively bumping up against western mores and bracing for the worse; to Camille Acker’s pitch-perfect story taking us into the mind of a DC teen intimidating her way into self-worth; to Dionne Irving Bremyer’s cautionary tale warning a black Barbie of her woeful fate; to the riveting verse of Gail Dottin (above) who captured the tyrannical voice of self doubt living inside every writer’s head.

Throughout the night, writers noted that VONA workshops had been both validating and life-changing. If you’d like a validating, life-changing experience, VONA’s next workshops are June 23-29 @ University of California at Berkeley. Summer faculty include Junot Diaz (fiction), Staceyann Chin (memoir), Mat Johnson (graphic novel) and Ruth Forman (poetry). Deadline for applications is April 8.

Additional links:

• VONA official 

• Buki Papillon Official

• Gail Dottin Official

We’re thrilled that The Coffin Factory reviewed the launch of Sundays @ The Sackett.

One of the most interesting components of this reading, which is much different than the usual, was that all the authors read works in progress and, at the end of each reading, the audience was invited to comment on the pieces.  The discussions were interesting and fruitful… The listeners were engaged and eager to contribute and to be involved; even participants who didn’t consider themselves “literary people,” offered useful commentary on these developing works….  All the authors graciously welcomed the audience’s thoughtful commentary, discussions which carried on long after the reading was over.

You can read the entire review here.

In her recent piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “When The Lights Go Down: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative”, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah brilliantly argues that Lamar is a direct descendant of Richard Wright, that he is in fact a rare young writer “quietly committed — like Morrison — to telling stores about the community most familiar to him.”

She writes:

“What makes him important is the way in which the autobiographical good kid m.A.A.d city is so novelistic and so eloquently anchored in the literary blues tradition of which Ellison wrote. Lamar is equal parts oral historian and authorial presence, and more than many authors writing today, he has captured all of the pathos and grief of gun violence, poverty, and the families who carve their lives out amidst all of that chaos.

Lamar has offered up his hymnal for a lost generation, a defense for the black family, and in his jumpy prosody, his shell-shocked sensitivities, his clipped memories, and recorded conversations, he has produced “a novel from life” that single-handedly revives the long lost, suppressed literary tradition of young, working-class black boys on fire, with pens smote in hell, telling us how they become gifted, tenderhearted, black men — something we have been missing even though no one seems to notice it.”

And she puts forth the astute observation that a class-based schism between black writers and black readers is the real reason the marketplace teems with urban lit titles:

As some literary black authors struggled to find a culture of readers who looked like them, their would-be readers seemed to be thinking the inverse of the question: where are the literary writers who are writing stories that sound like mine? The post-racial generation had created their own disconnect, and the authors of urban fiction were vampiristic. They saw a void and filled it — cheaply, but they filled it.

They became the writers who were still speaking to black and Latino Americans who were slipping through the cracks, a group of people the new literary generation seemed reluctant to acknowledge as an audience or as subjects. And their failure to do so is what makes work that deeply and realistically deals with class (like the fiction of Z.Z. Packer, Junot Díaz, Edward P. Jones, the reporting of Jelani Cobb, the early music journalism of writers like Bonz Malone and Touré, the theoretical work of Tricia Rose and Greg Tate, and the poetry of Thomas Sayers Ellis and Nikky Finney) so necessary — and it is also why Lamar’s project is more relevant than ever.

You can read Ghansah’s full critique here.

And consider supporting the Los Angeles Review of Books, a non-profit cultural site that has — in this world of shrinking literary criticism — taken a revolutionary stand for “curated, edited, expert, smart and fun opinion written by the best writers and thinkers of our time.”

Additional links:

• Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah OFFICIAL
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Kendrick Lamar OFFICIAL

So our reading series is off to a great start!  Thanks again to books editor Bridgett M. Davis for assembling a fine trio of writers–all of whom surprised her with unexpected reading choices–Samantha Thornhill, Michael Gonzales and Tonya Hegamin.

And thanks, too, to our friends at The Sackett.  We’re looking forward to being back there on March 24!  Mark your calendars.  Details soon!

In the meantime, enjoy the photo recap!