(no subject)

Slowly going through more of Akwaeke Emezi's work, including their essays (which are linked on their personal site), and their writing continues to be brilliant and gorgeous.

Here's an excerpt from This Letter Isn't For You:

I listened to her, to you. I wrote an essay disclosing that I wasn't a woman, that I wasn't even human, explaining some of what an ogbanje is. We started press for Freshwater. I made NPR acknowledge my multiplicity of self on air, made the press use plural pronouns, centered Igbo ontology as a valid reality only made unreal by colonialism. I repeated your words, the quote I hunted and wrote down, in every interview I gave. I taught it in indie bookstores, at book festivals, in the New York Public Library and the Schomburg. Publicly and privately, I amplified it until those lines took on a beating heart of their own. Let the world move over, you said, and I obeyed. The unspoken part of that is that it means I cannot move, I cannot give ground or go to them. I must hold.

It is so much harder than it sounds.

What are the costs? I wonder what you paid for that lesson. I might never know some of what has been levied against me for claiming these centers. But I believe that our centers matter, that there were readers out there who needed to know that their centers mattered. Readers like me: embodied but not human, terrified that they're going mad, unable to talk about it, and estranged from the indigenous Black realities that might make some sense of it all.

It's driving me absolutely livid that they've been doing this kind of work since at least 2018, and yet only recently did we learn about them - and through a post on Dreamwidth at that, a platform that gets hardly any traffic compared to the likes of Tumblr and Twitter. They're laying all of this amazing ground, challenging the singular human norm and rising on their own terms. Yet the only thing we ever see when we step into the bigger plural spaces are the same tired pissing matches about origins and words and what Western doctors say. We haven't been in otherkin-et-al spaces as much recently, but I don't have high hopes for those, either.

I'm livid, and I'm tired, and I'm going to keep posting about them.