To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Astonishing African Futures

It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Anstrang champs. Stop right there! Who are you? I have many names. My people call me Ah Kup Kung Kan. My enemies call me Namor. The second installment of Marvel's Afro Futurist Black Panther film franchise has viewers streaming back into movie theaters. Because who doesn't want to watch powerful African women from an advanced civilization? Bad guys. Small, small again. I am going to give you two options. You can come to Akanda. Conscious or unconscious. Okay, it's a superhero movie and an American made one at that. But meanwhile, we are living in a golden age of African science fiction and fantasy. Of a genuinely African futurism, non -Western, decolonized, rooted in African culture, history and mythology. First this. You

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Sitting in a movie theater watching Angela Bacett, Lupita N jako and Latisha Wright light up the screen and Wakanda forever it is almost hard to remember what it was like when the first Black Panther movie hit. That impact was practically exploded around the world. My name is Misha Inwongo. I'm a performance scholar, exploring what storytelling can do. Millions of years ago, a meteorite made a vibranium. The strongest substance in the universe struck the continent of Africa. A warrior's shaman received a vision from the Panther Goddess first. The warrior became King and the first Black Panther. The protector of Wakanda. On the day that the film was opening in cinemas, I was running a Black History Month

program at New College in Florida. As part of the Black History Month activities, the students had organized a trip to go and watch as a group. And I'm just over the roof excited to see Black people portrayed as heroes, kings and queens as we are. On the day that we were going to watch it, there was just such a party atmosphere. I remember getting there and realizing everybody was driving up and they were playing the soundtrack, the Kendrick Lamar soundtrack. They were singing along. It struck me that they already knew the songs. When you talk about superheroes, you only talk like Captain America, Iron Man, and all those stuff. But you don't really see one of those Black superheroes, right? So that's why it's really good for me to see a superhero that's good like me. Okay, is this Wakanda? No, it's Kansas.

You're watching a film and this is the first time all of us are seeing it. Not all of whom are American, so we had students from the Caribbean, students from the African continent, as well as the Balka from the U .S. And coming out, it was all completely infectious excitement. Coming back to Kenya, the theaters were full. All my students were talking about it and I teach in a center which brings students from different African countries and finding the same enthusiasm. I watched Captain America, the Avengers, and all that. I was very eager to watch this film. They feel that Black Panther gave them a sense of being represented on the global stage in a way that has never happened. So even when they are very important critics and I think we must take on board, the work that Black Panther is doing is one that I'm fascinated about.

And what is the work that Black Panther is doing? Meshai Mongola would say it's less about adding superheroes of color to the Marvel Universe and more about creating a space for Black Americans and continental Africans to engage in imagining the future. I met Meshai for the first time in Addis Ababa. She was leading a kind of contentious discussion of Black Panther for humanity's scholars. Including Valmont Lane of the University of the Western Cape, Surafel Undemove from the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and Fonsosidogi from the Institute of Technology and Tawny, formerly Pretoria. Is this a Black -centered film or is it an African -centered film? Yes. I say that even though I like this, when it comes to the music of the technologies, I didn't find it originally Africa, the spacecraft, for example,

that is common in other movies that we watch. The fighting, the main character does, it's similar to Batman, Spider -Man, and the light. The music that drum beat, jumping, the naked, that is just an imposition from a colonial tradition of portraying Africa for me. So I didn't feel like it is genuinely and originally Africa. So he's suggesting to us that even though it's set in Africa, it's got nothing to do with us. A friend of mine wrote a piece in the Washington Times called Galara that we know, for example, very uncomfortable about. It's a great film for African -Americans, it's got nothing to do with us as Africans. Yes, I was in the States when Black Panther was screened and I saw it there. I didn't like it. That in 19th century anthropological kind of representation, Africa was old, you know, cultural attire.

What the hell is going on? I mean, the filmmakers claim that it's an Afro -futurist experience. But for me, even in the Afro -futurist world, we were not allowed, you know, the writers. So. And I'm not, sort of, I want to explore that. Even in the Afro -futurist world, we are not allowed to. I want you to hold on to that. Can I enter the Afro -futurist debate? My biggest gripe with Afro -futurism is the Afro. For example, you don't have an equivalent of Asian -futurism, or European -futurism. You have the future. And in order for Africans to take Africa out of the developmental form of states is that it is in, we have to ask ourselves, how did China conquer poverty? How did they conquer maldevelopment for certainly not by going back? For certainly not by celebrating the form of Asianness. Which is

what essentially Afro -futurism does. And we have to ask ourselves who is benefiting from that. So we celebrate the fact that it was a black director, and the cast was mainly black and so on. But fundamentally, the owners of that product, who are they, and ways that money going? Those billions and billions of dollars that were made from that movie. Do Africans have the space and agency to create movies in the caliber of Black Panther right now, of course, not? And I think those are the discussions we should be having. Yes. My kids would sort of play the western movies. So what do you think are the most important critiques? I think one of the biggest critiques, and I think some people really love the fact that they do not focus on any one African culture. But pink from right across the continent, very liberally, other people hate it, because it takes people back to this thing

of Africa is a country, and you can just pick and choose what you want and move on. I've also met people who are very critical of what they felt was a portrayal that seemed to suggest that the diaspora in coming back to the continent is number one very aggressive. And number two is not conscious of a certain politics. Can you explain what you mean? So the portrayal in the film, the one person you see coming back who comes into Wakanda from the diaspora is Killmonger. And Killmonger is the villain of the film. He comes back, he's a CIA agent. So we are told by Agent Ross, look, he's been trained to do this, to destabilize a country. So is what we see him doing representative of an American agenda? Or is it the whole idea, which is a very old idea of the return to Africa? And some people have read it by saying those who are outside come back into a continent that's very rich, that's got the resources, that's got the intelligence, has got so much to

offer, but see themselves as coming back to take over. It's a very American imperial way of coming back to the continent. Now what do you want? I want the bomb. Hey, you, the tuna. You're all sitting up here comfortable. Must feel good. It's about two billion people all over the world that looks like us. But their lives are a lot harder. Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all. And what do you want us? I want you. Your weapons. Our weapons will not be used to wage war in the wild. It is not our way to be judged, jury, and executioner for people who are not our own. So some people have been very critical about that, when we've had a very rich history of people of the historical diaspora coming into Africa. I mean, I know members of the original Black Panther who live in Arucia. This is in a shallow to kneel and a husband, Peter kneel.

And they have become part of the community. That's not the way they have come back. People like the boys who came back and settled in Ghana. So there's a whole history of the diaspora's return that is not portrayed in that film. I could imagine somebody saying those represent an African -American vision versus a continental African's vision. Yeah, and I'm just not sure that we can make that distinction so strongly because Africans on the continent have also suffered. One of the things I personally find very compelling about Africans in the diaspora is that when you have lived for centuries and survived for centuries, it's very much in your face oppression on a daily basis. People find ways of not just surviving but thriving and of not just thriving but healing. And there is a grace and a strength and

an ability to fight when people need to fight and an ability to survive. That I find is very compelling from the diaspora and is also on the continent. So I find it very difficult to make the distinction because I think both on the continent and in the diaspora there's been deep pain, deep oppression, deep injustice. And then there's also been great resources for healing, for thriving, for making do. I do wonder if those two populations relate to each other. I mean, I'm living in the States. I'm more familiar with what Africa and an African homeland represent. I'm not nearly as certain what Africans who live on the continent think about Africans on the diaspora. So I think one of the big critiques I have of Black Panther East, there seems to be such separation in the film, even as there is this longing of bringing together. And I think again, it's positionality. I mean, I grew up, I remember as a very young child, my father would play LPs of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. So to this day, I can recite message from the

grassroots, from memory, right from the beginning to the end because you keep hearing it. Now, as somebody who went to graduate school in the US, I also know that there are also sometimes very artificial divisions but a lot of us from the continent would be told people of there, they're lazy, they could do a whole lot better. And you know, Africans go from the continent and think, how could you not do well in such a wealthy space? Africans from the continent, it's very difficult for you to understand race when you first get there. I mean, it's not that we don't know race, but I will say I've really, truly honestly become Black when I cross the border in the US in a way I'm not quite Black anywhere else. And it's somewhat stereotypical to say it, but it's true. And so I think sometimes continental Africans do not always appreciate the reality of living as a Black person in places like that. And I think people from the diaspora also do not

really fully understand what does it mean? There's been so many of the stereotypes. There's been so many of you look at your televisions and your films. What you see of Africans is they are backward, they're ignorant. They're stupid because you look at how do you do this to your own people? How do you kill all the stereotypes? And I don't think we've had enough spaces to truly engage. I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of story, like Black Panther, in we call it Afro -futurism, or thinking about the future either from African -American writers or African -writers. So one of the things that for me really works about Black Panther is that on one hand, you're working with a particular genre, which is the superhero genre, which is very American, in its orientation, in its foundations, in its history. But they have also chosen to use very deliberately Afro -futurism. And Afro -futurism comes from this space of imagining the future. Now, a lot of also our folk

tales, our traditional folk tales, do have this mythic space of anything can happen. And they also have this heroic figure who is a human being, but with extraordinary powers. And I think what that allows people to do is to lift their eyes from the present, is to start to imagine that there are possibilities that a 16 -year -old girl could be the greatest genius of the universe has produced. And she just happens to be African. The space of imagining the future, the space of saying, we don't have to leave our traditional folk tales in the 18th and 19th century, but to ask what do African stories look like? Africa has as much stake in the future as everybody has. And I truly believe, you know, we are the continent of the past, but we're also the continent of the future. How many times do I have to teach you? Just because something works doesn't mean that it cannot be improved. You are teaching me. What do you know? More than you.

Meshai Mungola is a performance scholar, theater artist, and storyteller. And that's from a conversation we had a few years back at the Africa as a method conference in Addas Ababa. More about African futurism and the politics of Wakanda, coming up. I'm Anne Strange -Hamps. It's to the best of our knowledge for Wisconsin Public Radio, and PRX. Music Music

The Black Panther movies are the first superhero blockbusters with an African American director and a predominantly black cast. It's built as an Afro -futurist project, which means what exactly? Steve Paulson caught up with two women who have been thinking and writing about Afro -futurism for a long time. Ainehi Adoro and Nadia Kaurafor. So I'm curious how long have you two known each other? Oh my gosh. It's kind of a while, no? You know, I don't know. It's like been just continuous. It feels like we've known each other forever. It's been a while. Do you remember when you first met or how you first met? We've never met in person. Oh, you've never met in person? No, no, no, we have. We actually, we met in Berlin. Take that back. We met in Berlin. Yeah. Yeah. 2018 -ish, maybe, for a book festival. Wow, this really is the new digital world, isn't it? You clearly know each other pretty well. And yet, you've just met, like, one time in person. Yes. I remember when we met, it just felt normal. It didn't feel like, oh, we're meeting for the first time. I just felt

like, hi. You know? Yeah. Because in a sense, we have known each other. I think in the digital space, you encounter each other through your thinking and your work. And there's something intimates, actually, I think, about that. Yeah. Yeah. I know he Adoro is a literary scholar and the founding editor of Riddle Paper, the pre -eminent online platform for readers of African literature. Nediah Kaurafor is a celebrated Nigerian -American author of science fiction and fantasy. And she's the writer who coined the term African -futurism. We should talk about what this term African -futurism means. Because Nediah, I know that a few years ago, you called yourself an Afro -futurist. And then, more recently, you said, you know, that label doesn't really fit anymore. And you've drawn this distinction between Afro -futurism and African -futurism. Can you explain the difference? Yeah. Yeah. For a while, I tried to embrace the term of Afro -futurism. And then specifically around 2018, when the Black Panther film came out, it's when I began to understand that I was doing

something else. And the way that I learned that was through other people telling me. So a lot of people saying that I was writing narratives that were not from the perspective and the stories of direct descendants of African slaves. And that is true. And if you look at the definition of Afro -futurism, it stated that way that it is the story of African -Americans, the direct descendants of African slaves, or stolen Africans is what I prefer to say. And so that's when I coined the term African -futurism, which, you know, it's in the same universe as Afro -futurism, but it is more directly rooted in African culture history, mythology, and point of view. So what would be some examples of the difference between African -futurism and Afro -futurism? Well, if Black Panther were an African -futurist narrative, a lot of things would be different. The very concept of Wakanda would be different.

I want to come back to that. Yeah. But like, in the Black Panther films, Wakanda, at the end of the movie, the first movie, Wakanda builds an outpost. And their first instinct is to build it in Oakland, California, the United States. An African -futurist version would be that Wakanda would build their outpost in a neighboring African country. They'd be dialoged directly with African countries around it, first. I only had love to get your sense, do you define these terms in the same way that Netty was talking about it? Or how might we think about a big, a huge Marvel Hollywood Blackbuster movie like Wakanda Forever? I mean, how it fits into this conversation we're having. I would say that for the longest time, Afro -futurism was enough for me, in naming a certain kind of black imagination of the future. That changed when Netty began to advocate and think about this new term.

And that too, an idea of science fiction or of the future that is centered on the black experience in America, which is kind of framed in relationship to slavery, and also is in conversation with whiteness, is going to look completely different when we go to a space where the history is framed by colonialism, right? Because sometimes people presented as a kind of antagonism, like Netty is trying to say that Afro -futurism is not enough. I think that that is simplifying it. It's just identifying that there are two different genealogies of blackness in relationship to ideas of the future. Let me pose the question differently. Is it a problem that we have the two Black Panther movies that are about this idealized African country? I mean, very much obviously from an American, from a Western perspective, is that a problem? Or is that

just, okay, we just need to understand this is for one audience, a largely Western audience, and I suppose if this movie were made in Nigeria, it would look totally different. No, I don't think it's a problem. I think that Black Panther is a very important cultural event. I think that the world needed Black Panther. But how well does Black Panther represent a kind of African imagination of the future? I don't know that it does that very well. But I also don't know that it needs to do that, in the sense that that's not its project. The problem comes when we begin to expect Black Panther to encompass every Black experience in the world. So Netty, I'd love to get your perspective on this because, of course, you've been immersed in the Black Panther world. Yeah. You've written Marvel comics about the characters in Black Panther. Yeah. For me, it's complicated. Okay. My issue is

with Wakanda, and these were things that I thought about when I was trying to decide whether I was going to write T 'Challa and Shuri T 'Challa's little sister. These are things that I have grappled with and that I thought hard about. And I agree with everything that she just said, what I want to add to it is kind of specific. My issues with Wakanda go down to the very bones of it. The existence of a landlocked African country that is supposed to be the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in the world. And it never participated in helping with, you know, issues of slavery, colonialism, all that. It never gave back to any of the African countries around it. That's just an issue with me. The idea of this advanced nation being a monarchy is an issue to me. It's technologically advanced and futuristic, but it's a monarchy, really? Yeah. My reaction to the two Black Panther movies is, so you have this incredibly sophisticated, technologically

sophisticated country, Wakanda. But you kind of see the sophistication, especially in the weapons they have, the spacecrafts they have, you know, how they can defend their country. And then this one science lab that Shuri runs, and it seems like it's just her, and maybe a couple of assistants, it doesn't seem very futuristic to me. I don't know. Is that incongruous to either of you? No, I mean, I think that what you say about the emphasis on weapon as kind of the central figure of the future, right? It's like we see the future in weapons as opposed to other places, speaks to the ways in which Black Panther betrays itself as a western project, right? In fact, the very idea of vibranium as an extractive technology. It's almost as if everything that the West did to make itself powerful in the world, we just take all of them and layer it on an

African world, right? And imagine that that is a much more liberated idea of Africa. Whereas a truly decolonial representation of the future is one that will essentially evacuate everything about the West that has led to its greatness, but that has also led to its own violence in equities and things like that. So it's almost as if if you look at what kind of from a setting perspective, it's the West that you're seeing, but acted out by Black bodies. It doesn't push as far as it could have pushed in terms of truly imagining what a future that is centered on Africa can really look like. And I think that if you want to see how that is done at a level of storytelling, a book to check out is Nadeez Lagoon, where literally the geopolitics of

the world shifts from land to water, from the West to Africa. So you're really talking about how to tell these stories about the future from a non -Western perspective, to de -center the West and all of that. Yeah, but we're really talking about this worldview here. I don't even like saying when you don't center the West. It's just, it's a different worldview, and that results in a different type of narrative, a different envisioning of what the future will be like, different wants and needs and goals and ideas. Because Western culture dominates things so much, this is often very difficult for people to imagine and understand. And can I add to that a re -told Black Panther that hangs on an African worldview, I think, might have three characteristics. One, whiteness will not be legible. You basically won't see whiteness. Right, right, that

it's not just a space where whiteness will be a thing that you have to think with or even think away. It's just one -be part of the world. So it would be a world that will be very, very, very, very black. And that will also explore and make visible the diversity of life within the continent. And one thing I love about African worlds is the chaos and the messiness of it. It doesn't mean it's disorderly. Sometimes people mistake the two. It's just a world that is not obsessed with forcing everything into categories and hierarchies. So there is order, but order works differently and looks different. And I think that a work like that will embrace that in terms of its feel and aesthetics. And it would be a world that puts a name to colonialism. And all these things that are wrapped up with colonialism. So extractive capitalism. And lastly,

it's a world that we definitely dissent at the human. Yes. And you see this all over African science fiction and fantasy. These are stories that allow the animal to exist in more, more interesting ways that allows mythical figures and ancestral figures to exist. Which is so interesting if we're talking about science fiction, which is futuristic and yet talking about the ancestors is maybe looking to the past, but I don't know. How do you bring those two together? So one of the things that became clear after my student and I started to advance enough far into African science fiction is the accent to each. Many authors are interested in the past. So one image that keeps popping up in novels that we read is the masquerade. And these is a figure that appears. I'm talking everywhere by the end of the class my students were like, if we see one more masquerade again, right? Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean by

masquerade? So the masquerade tradition is a very pervasive and ancient tradition in many African worlds. So these are essentially ancestral figures who come into the world of the human in the form of different kinds of masquerades. In the Eurobar tradition, they are festivals like the Galede festivals, where it's literally the ancestors appearing from the forest when they come in these really elaborately designed costumes. They appear and then they go back to their world. They are figures of the past, but they are also figures of the future because in so far as they are ancestors, it means if I die, I'm going to meet my ancestor in the future. So they are in the past, but they are in the present, and they are also relevant to the future as well. And in some of the stories that we read,

writers would take this figure that because of colonialism, we've come to exclude them as primitive times, writers would take these figures and kind of re -energize them or rethink them within the context of the future. And when they do that, what you see is that African science fiction writers do not see the past as a kind of dead time that they don't have to engage with. Well, Inetti, I would think that as a creator of imaginative worlds, that must be so rich that you feel like you can draw on all of these mythical characters from different African traditions to create a novel about the future. Yeah, I mean, for me, masquerades are big. They're very much the center of my work, my imagination, all of that. It's complicated for me to explain why. But I see the past, present, the future all mixed together. Like, literally don't see the

ancestors as beings of the past. They're very much the present. They're very much part of the future when I'm writing. I feel them looking over my shoulder. I feel them affecting everything that I do. And when it comes to masquerades, masquerades are a much more intense concept to me. I don't even know how to describe them. But for me, personally, as a writer, they're not mythical. They are very much now, they're very much here. Like, when I'm writing, I can see them dancing. I can hear them dancing. Like, it's part of the story. And I love that. I love masquerades. I don't even know how. Yeah, I love masquerades. So I'm hearing, I mean, I'm fascinated by your saying that, oh, it's like you feel the ancestors looking over your shoulder. I mean, how, how literal do you mean? Are they with you right there in the room as you're writing? Yeah. Yeah. It's literal. Like, they're there. They're beside me. They're looking over my shoulder. They're in front of me. They're criticizing

what I'm doing. They're telling me, don't write that. They're telling me to write that. They're around me. I've always felt my ancestors very strongly always. Even before I was a writer, it's just always been like that. I know he a few years ago, you wrote an essay that I think proved to be somewhat controversial about Chinwa Achebe, you know, when the giants of modern African literature, he wrote an essay in 1965 where he said that essentially that African writers had this moral imperative to be a teacher. To teach their readers about the horrors of colonialism, about the trauma of feeling racially inferior, and you said that edict from half a century ago just basically doesn't hold up anymore. What's missing in that way of thinking? I think it's a thinking that captures his moment beautifully. In the sense that decolonization is a very specific kind of project. Achebe saw himself as at the forefront

of a cultural reengineering or revolution that needed to happen. But for somebody like me looking back at that statement, I bristle at it a little bit, right, because I am not in the eye of the war against colonialism in the way that Achebe was. It's possible that my problem is different. What keeps me up at night is different from what he bothered about. Again, I can sympathize with the ways in which realism came to be the right African form to pursue. And why this idea that we should all be on message, right, as we are fighting this really powerful cultural enemy. But today we are still fighting colonialism, but it's a different fight that looks differently. Part of the fight today is to be able to literally tell different kinds of stories. We are not trying to stay

on message, on brand. We are trying to literally break the frames of reference and open up a space where we can reach people through romance fiction, through science fiction, through graphic novels. And so that decolonization has created a space where we are able to resist the system or fight the fight by making a space where storytelling can proliferate in different forms. We could go on for a long time. This is really fascinating. I just love this conversation. Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. Yeah, this has been a great, great conversation. Wonderful. Nedi. Yeah. Nice chatting. Yes. You too. Always, always. Now it's Steve Paulson talking with Aina Hiadoro. She's a literary scholar at the University of Wisconsin -Madison and the founding editor of Brittle Paper, which is an online platform for readers of African literature. And we heard from Nedi

Akora for the celebrated African futurist author. Her most recent YA novel is Akata Woman. Her most recent novel for adults is Noor. But when she also wrote the Shuri comic series for Marvel's Black Panther Universe. Coming up, Jamaican writer Marlon James on his dark star trilogy looks so epic and so magical. They make a certain famous HBO series, pale in comparison. Now you've been quoted as saying that you wanted to write an African game of thrones. And I don't know if that was just a throwaway line or if you were kind of serious about that. If a throwaway line, it certainly hasn't died. No, it hasn't. I mean, I'm actually going to be talking to Target the Judge our Martin in a few weeks. He's probably going to ask me about that. So this does nothing like my book. The reason why I think I gravitated to Game of Thrones is

in a very, very different way from what I'm doing. He's also telling really, really adult stories. George is telling really, really adult stories while refusing to let go of the world I've made believe. Here are people dealing with some really complex, complicated, sometimes intricately layered things. But there's still ghosts. And demons. Monsters. People fly. And people shape shift. And people just disappear. A conversation with Marlon James. After this. I'm Anne Strange -Hampson. You're listening to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX.

And PRX. And PRX. And PRX. And PRX. And PRX. And PRX. In 2014.

Jamaica novelist Marlon James won the Booker Prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. It's about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and the book is all post -colonial fallout, geopolitics, gang wars, but for his next book, he went in a completely different direction into a world of African myth and magic. When I left my father's house, some voice, maybe a devil, told me to run, past houses and inns and hostels with tired travelers, behind modern stone walls as high as three men, street led to lane and lane led to music, drinking and fighting, which led to fighting, drinking and music. Cellar women were closing shops and packing away stalls. Men walked by in the arms of men, women walked by with baskets on their heads, de -riders with spears, in flowing robes, black armor and gold crowns, topped with feathers, mounted horses dressed in the same red. At the gate, seven

reds were approaching and the wind was a wolf. Black leopard red wolf was the first in Marlon James' dark star trilogy, a series that's been referred to repeatedly as the African Game of Thrones, although honestly that's selling it a bit short. Because this fantasy world is more like a multiple universe layered with witches and demons, shape changers and slavers, and all based on African myths and folklore. Steve Paulson wanted to know more about the character at the center of it all. This is such a great character, your narrator, who goes by the name Tracker. How would you describe him? Tracker is sort of rambling around the world, trying to escape story and escape purpose and escape meaning and all those things keep falling on him. He discovers things about himself. He goes on a mission to find somebody else, but it's himself he finds. He's not prepared for it because

he's a smart ass, he's a wise ass, and he's a he says he doesn't believe in belief. So he's a sort of cynical creature running around in a world that demands a lack of cynicism. And he ends up being surprised and being changed by things he just didn't expect to. And we should mention that Tracker has some particular talents. He has this incredible power of smell that just by smelling someone, he seems to know everything about them. Yeah, and he never really forgets him or loses track of them until they died. He used to cause him a madness before he learned to control it. I think that was me not being able to totally banish my love of comic books. That in a lot of ways, this is a story of a superhero team, right? So you grew up reading comic books, right? Well, that implies I stopped reading them. I still read them pretty regularly. But yeah,

a lot of my fantasy imagination was shaped by comics, not so much the sort of giants of fantasy literature because we're at our fondos in Jamaica, but I could find a new episode of, you know, the new issue of X -Men or Dr. Strange or Spider -Man. I'm so fascinated to hear you say this. I mean, you're saying that this novel, which has gotten so much acclaim in the literary world, is I mean, it's kind of like this grown up comic, in a way. Yeah, although I am a big believer that if you're going to read literature, you can't grow up. So fantasy to me felt like almost a logical turn. It didn't feel like a change of direction for me because I do believe, at least in terms of your imagination, you shouldn't grow up. I think we have this idea, and it's a very Western idea, that letting go of make believe and letting go of the fantastical and letting go of the spirits under your bed, and the things that go bump in the night is a sign of maturity when it really isn't. So, I mean, this is this incredibly fantastical world that you've created. I mean, there's a moon which, a leopard who can

transform into other animals, the talking buffalo of vampire, lightning bird, and lots more. How did you come up with these characters? Well, a lot of them, I didn't come up with them at all. I found them. A lot of it was discovering all these characters well, researching all these mythologies, all these things that I didn't know. I know enough about Greek and Norse mythology, maybe to write books on either. When it came to African mythology, I only knew what survived hundreds of years in the Caribbean, and a lot of that was more a hybrid between African and Black American and European folklore. So, a lot of those creatures I didn't know. So, when they discovered them or came across a lot of them, I didn't really have to do much work. As a writer, I was playing catch -up to stories that already were there. So, characters like the Ipandulo are a part of African folklore, and I really wanted to play in that universe. I really wanted to sort of

use the mythologies that were there in ways that I have never read before. I guess it would be sort of like Tolkien using elves or goblins. Elves and goblins are already there, but he phoned away to use them. So, what did you read to find out about all this sort of African folklore and mythology? Well, a lot of it would be stuff that's not even compiled in books yet. A lot of it is really contemporary research and a lot of contemporary information gathering. For me at least, when I'm researching, when I'm checking sources, I will read tons of books and then I'll flip right to the back and check the bibliography and read what they've read. And more often than that, there's articles, there's loose paper, there's stuff on academic websites. For a lot of it, stuff that's not even translated in English yet. So, a lot of straight information that I had to compile, which is why it took me two years to do it. Wow. So, why did you want to conjure up this mythical world

of Africa? Yeah. Well, at first I didn't conjure it up to write something. I conjured it up to read it because I just felt as a black person in the diaspora to often ground zero slavery. And I wrote a slavery novel and even I am tired of that. There has to be a story, a history, not even a prehistory. There had to be a history before something was interrupted. I wanted to go to African mythology in the same way, say, CS Lewis could depend on British. I give a lecture, I give the Tolkien lecture a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things I talked about is what a great thing it is to take mythology for granted. If you look at the UK, Britain, how Robin Hood, with his basically mythology, Robin Hood is essential to the idea of British independence and the idea of British justice. And King Arthur is essential to the idea of British civilization. There

must be a Camelot. Otherwise, there are a bunch of, you know, backward, barely in bread people who are living in dumb huts. I mean, this sort of family, you need those myths for a sense of national identity. Absolutely. And that's not always a good thing. You know, Hitler used myths too. Neo -Nazis are using mythologies too. So it's not always a great thing going back to the myths, but I still understand why for good or bad, you need an origin, an imaginary origin story. So I mean, obviously you are not African yourself. You're from Jamaica. And I guess I'm wondering, is any of this African cosmology that you've been talking about? Is that part of the Jamaican or the Caribbean storytelling tradition? Absolutely. We just don't know. It never occurred to me until Ganyans came to me. How much Tweet I was still speaking. A person from Ghana or from Kenya is stunned when they come to Trinidad or Jamaica, because I didn't know so much what it was written. So yeah, it was there. I just didn't know it was. I thought Burrabi, it was something Beatrix Potter

came up with. Burrabi is African now, and I see is African. But I knew that. The thing I didn't know was that there was also a lot of sophisticated storytelling involving these mythologies. And that's something that yeah, I had to find out. Well, I have to say the story just kind of explodes off the page. I mean, you keep coming at us with all of these amazing characters. And I'm struck by, I mean, you mentioned Lord of the Rings. Your story is so different than that kind of a fantasy epic. I mean, there's a lot more sex, a lot more violence in your book. There's also a lot more ambiguity about who's good and who's bad. Is that just your vision or do you think that's a particularly African sensibility? I think it's a combination of both. One thing is about Tolkien and I think it's important to remember is that he was responding to World War I. In a lot of ways, the this is good, this is evil, was almost a necessary thing he had to take to make sense of it. For me, and certainly one of the things that I connected to with African stories

was just how much a lot of that was up for grabs. It wasn't as clear cut. For one, a lot of the original African stories are being told by the trickster. So you already know you're being told a story band unreliable narrator. But that's a crucial part of African storytelling. In fact, it's a crucial part of oral storytelling because a lot of Indian stories and Arabian stories are led at as well. It raises this really tantalizing possibility that our ancient traditions are actually more sophisticated than ours because we treat literature like pre -tuned food. What does it mean to you to bring back these stories that, as you say, have largely been forgotten, this whole world of African folklore? I mean, there are still people, obviously, who practice in some of these traditions, but it's in the literary context. It's not well known. So what happens when you bring it back? Yeah. For me, and I can only speak for myself, it feels like something snapped into place. Give it a very concrete example. How I approach queerness. And African mythologies, the last place in the world I expected

to find validation as a queer person, last place, especially given the reputation that a lot of African countries are developing for pretty virulent homophobia, where it's outlawed in a bunch of countries. But when you come across the fluidity of a lot of these pre -Islam and pre -Christian religions, and the whole idea that say sugar, sugar wires, and sugar is used as a kind of pejorative in some countries now. But there was a time when that kind of warrior was ono warrior interested to say escorted bread to be to her husband, because everybody knew he was gay. So everybody knew nothing was going to happen. It's like, yeah, totally trusted my virgin bread, because we all know you're here for Chuck, can I hear from you? But that society phone was to absorb, utilize, even value. Those kind of people was shucking, and also very affirming, because I also drank the homophobic Kool -Aid about Africa, an African country's

rather, and to go back to the mythologies and finding a kind of validation was totally unprecedented. So you've been talking about being part of the African diaspora, and we're clearly seeing more of this, not just your novel, I mean, movie black panther, would be an obvious example. All the artists who've been embracing Afro -futurism, it feels like something new, something amazing is happening now. I mean, just really quite recently. Do you see it that way? I do. Even in the writers who aren't especially going back to African during their work, are still really, really touching on the sort of hyper -real or supernatural or fantastical, like Victor Laval, his narratives have always been playing with that. Yeah, it is a time, and it should be said that there's lots of writers coming from the continents as well, that's also responding in a lot of ways, more sci -fi and fantasy, which I also think is really, really

interesting. Afro -futurism in a lot of ways is as old as Sunra, if not older. And I just think it's retapping into this sort of vast reservoir of imagination that I know I never had before. I think for a lot of us, and I'm just speaking very blankly, I think for a lot of us, the reason why we're writing so much is that we're discovering so much. And maybe it's because it's the beginning of the century, maybe it's because I think we're still early enough that we can write proper narratives as opposed to always trying to figure out where is my space in the Eurocentric fantasy story. We can just create another space, but an open space. I love that readers of all races and nationalities find something in the book. That's Marlon James, the booker prize -winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and

the sequel Moon Witch Spider -King. Also co -host of the literary podcast, Marlon and Jake read Dead People. He talked with Steve Paulson. Thanks for listening. This hour was produced by the To the Best of Our Knowledge team at Wisconsin Public Radio. Our technical director is Joe Hartke, with additional sound designed by Sarah Hopeful, Extra Music this week, courtesy of Simon Servita, Rocky Marciano Makai Beats, Kevin McLeod, LT, and Clay the producer. Special thanks to Sarah Gaier and the consortium of Humanity Centers and Institutes and to the organizers and participants in the Africa as Method Conference in Addis Ababa. I'm Ann's Drane Champs. Join us again next time.