Author’s Statement
I’ve had quite a bit of difficulty trying to write this, I must confess. I am not as practiced in writing the truth as one would hope, lies and fantasies are far easier and fun to sculpt. The truth can only be so many things, but a good lie can be whatever we want it to be, and that’s why I prefer to write fiction—speculative fiction in particular. Perhaps that makes me lazy as a writer, perhaps it makes me creative.
I’ve always preferred fantasy to reality, for the latter is often too dull to bear. Not necessarily because there were no ghosts, aliens, or robots around (I am still convinced all three can be found if one looks hard enough), but because real-life people seem utterly convinced that such things shouldn’t exist. Reality is not marked by the lack of the spectacular, but by the reluctance to acknowledge all the wonders which exist, and even as a child I found that mindnumbingly boring. So I watched cartoons. I read books like The Wizard of Oz and A Wrinkle In Time, and I escaped this stubborn reality for a far more liberally minded fantasy.
There were seldom any Black people in the fantasy worlds I escaped to. That said, I got off lucky. I grew up while Static Shock was on the air, and I began seriously reading as Troy Cle was shaping the Marvelous World series. Still, these were drops in a bucket, and even with the expansions of Black representation that have occurred in the years of my life, I still struggle to find those stories and fantasies and lies that would have truly resonated and connected with me as a child.
But it isn’t enough for me to see Black characters in, essentially, white stories. As I got older I indeed saw more Black characters in the types of fictive tales I adored; but those characters often had no other Black people around them. If the tale was a fantasy, the Black character often found themselves wrapped up in some EuroAmerican magical tale. If the story was sci-fi, then all the themes and metaphors would connect to Western capitalism and exploration rather than anything else. I began to realize just how common it was for creators, Black and non-Black alike, to create dark-skinned white people than actual Black characters. I’m not interested in Black characters that exist on their own, with no Black people around them, exploring a world of wonder and mystery, but no evidence of any influence of Blackness. It is not, and never was enough for me to see dark-skinned white characters, I more cherished the stories where Black people existed in fantastic, wonderous, horrific, and strange Black worlds.
That’s why I write what I write. To create the type of content that I wish to see in the world. It would be nice if, some years from now some Black child would read my work and think to themself, similar to how I thought to myself upon discovering Bradbury, Gaiman, L’Engle, Butler, and Ranpo, “I want to write like that!” But if that inspiration is never sparked, and if my stories never wind up in the hands of such a child in the first place, I’ll only be moderately disappointed. As long as someone is writing the types of stories I wish I could read, I’ll be happy—even if that one person is me.