Sometimes the lovely folks at Tor send me a book I would likely not have picked on my own, and I’m always better for it. I devour short story collections for breakfast; therefore, I thought I’d sail through this one in three days, tops.
I did not sail through it. Clocking in at almost 500 pages, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction picked me up, wrapped itself around me, and did not let me go for weeks. It demanded reading and rereading, and so I’m going to tell you a little about it tonight.
Understand, being a white person of a Certain Age ™ means being blinkered and having large unconscious blind spots. Being such a person and also being a medievalist first and a fantasy-lover second means having formed a worldview where a white Eurocentric universe is the default, and for years I had no idea how limited and limiting such a world really is.
Such is the curse of a blinkered life. Even so, it’s the ground from which I grew and have been (all too slowly) learning to know better. What I’m trying to say is that I’m supremely unqualified to review Africa Risen; having not been aware of the importance, the urgency, and the brilliance, of the writers of the diaspora. I see them now, and am changed.
The only possible and partial benefit to having such a past is the pleasure when the blinders fall away and you see the wider perspectives, the new vistas and possibilities. It almost makes up for the cultural racism of publishing. Because for the gatekeepers in publishing, the accountants with their eyes on salability and scalability, investing in diverse voices is risky; it means committing resources and sunk costs into projects that might not sell well and might indeed spark an outrage du jour by some dudebro whose nose was twisted out of joint by a stray image or comment. I write this because Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney and Tananarive Due should not be so damned hard to find in a bookstore (let alone Steven Barnes and Tobias Buckell), and because the editors and writers who collaborated to produce Africa Risen should damn well be household names. And, as John Dryden wrote once of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Here is God’s plenty.”
Thirty-two short stories are too many to even begin to describe — imagine a heady brew of technological imagination and cultural memory and you’ll start to get close. Imagine a voice rising out of confusion and repression, exploitation and self-hatred and hundreds of years of disregard and/or hostility, and that voice sings Yes! I am, I can, I will. The editors Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight write in their introduction, “As the origin of humanity and home to the world’s oldest civilizations, Africa is the origin story of storytelling. It is from its vast lands that humanity first sought to make sense of our world, the cosmos above and beyond us, the natural flora and fauna below.” This awareness of history and myth informs most of the stories that comprise Africa Risen, combining the ancient and speculative in ways that both look both forward and back. “Where before we spoke of dark matter [this book is the heir of the Dark Matter magazine and anthologies], now Black writers from across the continent and around the world speak of black holes and wormholes, pathways and portals through time and space, wondrous mythologies and creations of new and old gods to reconnect the world to the origin, the source, the mother of all its stories” (pp. 1-2).
It’s an ambitious vision, but wonderfully executed. Tales of men of brutal ambition and their comeuppances, in “The Deification of Igodo” by Joshua Uchenna Omenga, “The Taloned Beast” by Chinelo Onwualu, and “Peeling Time (Deluxe Edition)” by Tlotlo Tsamaase; the courage of regular folks trying to get by in a hard world, as in Ada Nnadi’s “Hanfo Driver,” or Russell Nichols’ “Mami Wataworks”; the intersection of the extraordinary and magical into the mundane in Ytasha Womack’s lovely “Liquid Twilight,” or the downright gods-walk-among-us magical of Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga’s “Housewarming for a Lion Goddess,” Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s “The Soul Would Have No Rainbow” and Moustapha Mbacké Diop’s “When the Mami Wata Met a Demon.” The brutalities of culture and history are close by and some of the stories are tales of revenge: Tananarive Due’s “Ghost Ship” and “A Soul of Small Places” by Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo, but even the revenges are tempered and wise.
Seriously, this book has been out for a year, and it’s taken me a month to wrap my head around all its multitudinous complexities. When you pick it up, you’ll come away with a new list of favorite writers and, for the staid white folk among us, the world will be wider, stranger, brighter, and quite a bit more dangerous.
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