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

Photo credit: Scott Stewart

Yep, tomorrow marks the release of the new Bad Rabbits album.  Hard to believe it’s been almost four years since this Boston-based crew dropped the Stick Up Kids EP and then hit the road hard.  As the Boston Globe notes:  “In that time they’ve found their way onto the stage with everyone from Mos Def and Wu-Tang Clan to the Deftones, so at this point in the game, it almost feels like a formality to finally usher in the finished product.”

So, tomorrow, it’ll be, as P.O.S. says, “in ya iTunes/out ya mouth”.  In the meantime, check out the video “Can’t Fool Me” for a taste of what’s in store:

Additional link:

• Bad Rabbits official
• Bad Rabbits on Facebook

 

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of essays by guest contributor Karen M. Thomas as she explores life with a mother suffering from a debilitating disease.

My mother has Alzheimer’s disease. Those five little words have dramatically changed all of our lives – hers as she battles this extremely cruel disease, her three children as we struggle to care for her, and her friends and extended family who continue to love her even if it is now from afar.

I already know how this story will end. It’s not pretty. But the facts are there in black and white: Mom has a fatal disease that is stealing her away brain cell by brain cell. What I didn’t understand, what I couldn’t know at first, is how we would all learn to live with Mom’s illness. And we are living. Yes, there are days when the grief comes in waves, leaving me drowning in sadness. But there are times, too, when I have learned to steal right back, snatching our joy.

Mom lives in a Texas memory care facility near my house. I took her from her New Jersey home more than a year ago after my brother spent nearly a decade caring for her. It’s my turn to soldier her battle. But life is never that simple. I’ve also had to learn how to parent my two girls as I tend to my mother. I have five new words: I am the sandwich generation.

It looks something like this. On a recent night, I took my youngest daughter, 13-year-old Brooke, to family Hawaiian night at Mom’s facility. In the community room, residents and their families sat at long tables festooned with tropical fruit centerpieces, and we placed plastic leis around our necks.

Then dinner arrived, plates piled with rice and chicken kebobs. To my left, Brooke struggled to get her chicken off the sharpened stick. To my right, my mother attempted to place the sharpened end in her mouth. As I toggled back and forth un-spearing meat and taking away spears, I began to get angry. Whose brilliant idea was it to serve dementia patients dinner on a sharp stick and then invite their grandchildren along for the fun?

Suddenly, at the front of the room, music started and Polynesian dancers bounded into the room, their bare feet pounding the floor and their grass skirts swaying with the motion of their hips. Mom clapped in delight. Brooke giggled. And before I knew it, Mom and I stood at the center of the room with the dancers, trying our best to imitate their moves. Brooke, at 13, was too cool to dance. But when I looked at her, we both dissolved into laughter, lost in the silliness of the moment.

When I hugged my mother goodnight, she smiled and patted my back. She was tired and happy, ready for sleep. Brooke chattered beside me as we drove home, her smartphone eerily silent. As I drove, I realized that during the spear debacle, I never really ate. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry. Somewhere deep inside, I was already quite satiated.

Karen M. Thomas teaches journalism at Southern Methodist University. For more on Karen go here.

My mother was the first writer I ever knew.

For as long as I can remember, Mama worked on a project she called “my book” — a story entitled 617 Crawford, written in careful longhand with changing colors of ink on unlined white paper kept in a 3-ring black binder. She was excited to discover the term roman a clef, because it described what she was attempting — a novel with real events and real people assigned fictional names. She wrote her book off and on for many years, in her so-called free time.

There was very little of that in my mother’s life, as she was the quintessential matriarch: running a household while married to my father and then my stepfather, and raising five children as well as her grandson. She worked both inside and outside of the home — a housewife who managed rental properties — and somehow still found time to offer guidance and counsel to a plethora of friends and family who steadily streamed through our side door.

And so, it was usually when she went on vacation — to places like Miami or Aruba or Las Vegas — that she took with her that black binder, and while sitting at a hotel-room desk, worked on her book. Over the years, she accrued a total of 43 handwritten pages.

In nearly every way, Mama was an improbable writer. Born in 1928 in Nashville, Tennessee, the ninth of 10 children, she had no more than a high school education. She was a mother and wife by age 18, and had three children by 1955 when she and my father migrated to Michigan. They had lean years while my father tried to find steady work in Detroit’s auto plants, and along the way had two more children, myself the youngest. When life improved, we moved to a four-bedroom brick Colonial house in a good neighborhood. Still, she certainly did not, as Virginia Wolfe advised women writers, carve out “a room of one’s own”. There was no time for that. Mama often said of her life that she had to “make a way out of no way” for her family. Writing was a luxury.

Still, as I look back, I realize she had all the qualities that good writers possess: She had a clear point of view about the world, and well-honed debating skills. She was a voracious reader with a wide berth of interests. She loved history, facts and metaphysics. Our den shelves were crowded with everything from World Book Encyclopedias to W.E.B. Dubois (her favorite writer), to books by psychic Edgar Cayce, to the holy Bible.  Every day, she carried the morning’s Detroit Free Press from the front porch where it was delivered to the kitchen to the bathroom to her bedroom — reading it front-to-back in the process.

And she was certainly a magnificent storyteller, keeping listeners enthrall as she shared some tale about so-and-so that left us shaking our heads in disbelief or laughing with incredulity. She enjoyed holding court, often from the kitchen table and just as likely from her king-sized bed. Usually, hers were cautionary tales, and she knew how to gesture with expressive hands to dramatize a point, pause for emphasis, then say, “And you know what happened, don’t you?”, as we all leaned in to hear the end of the story. Mama’s natural sense of suspense and pacing was impeccable.

The other key writer’s skill my mother possessed was a keen understanding of what makes people tick. She was intuitive about others, could judge a person’s makeup after a first encounter, and understood the psychology behind human nature — great insights for character development.

While the world never knew about Mama’s novel, its presence remains more valuable to me than any one of the hundreds of books I’ve read in my lifetime. That story, and knowing my mother was working on it, gave me permission to become a writer myself. There were other validations: she bought a writer’s desk and bookshelf for my bedroom when I was 10, gave me my first journal when I was 12 and later, didn’t flinch when I chose an impractical English major in college. But it was the magic of what lay within the pages of that black binder that set my own course in life.

A few months before she died, when she knew her cancer was terminal but we did not, my mother sat at the kitchen table, put on her reading glasses, and read her entire story aloud. It was a private reading for just my sister Rita and me; I still remember, 21 years later, that Mama recited the words she’d written in a low, confident voice. Her story began:

“As the bus rolled along the Kentucky road nearing the Tennessee borderline, many thoughts filled the mind of Rose Miller, fifteen years old, beautiful, pregnant and running away from home.”

I marvel that my mother, who never took a single writing class, crafted an opening sentence that defined the main character, established the setting and dropped us into the action, complete with complication and suspense. You want to read more.

Thursday would’ve been my mother’s 85th birthday. Had she lived, I have no doubt she would’ve devoted time to completing her book. That soft, black binder now sits on the shelf beside the desk where I write. Its back cover is torn off, pages stained, ink starting to fade. No matter.

Today as we honor our mothers, I thank mine for the gift of a writing life — for showing me through example that it’s the process and not the outcome that matters, that many years spent telling your tale doesn’t lessen its value. And that writing — putting down one word after the other — is a drumbeat toward eternity. Words live on. And through lovely cursive handwriting that moved across dozens of white pages, so does my mom – Fannie Mae Drumwright Davis Robinson. Writer.

On the song “Warrior Bones,” Tamar-Kali closes with the telling lines: “These warrior bones ache for revolution, but the people ain’t ready.”

So it seems that Janelle Monae’s solution is to be a time-traveling rebel from the future so that she can impact and change the present.  Smart, right?  After all, history is filled with artists who weren’t fully understood or appreciated in their own time.  Painter Vincent Van Gogh, Arthur Lee & Love, and Detroit punk rockers Death, to name a few.  And the video is also a subtle exercise in manifestation.  By that, I mean, Janelle projects a future in which she and Wondaland are such infamous subversives they have to be imprisoned.  Check the voice over in the beginning where it talks about Project Q.U.E.E.N. as a “musical weapons” program that was so dangerous it’s still not understood the video’s dystopian future.  In fact, authorities are still “hunting the various freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs, emotion pictures and works of art.”

Yeah, bravo, Janelle.  We’re glad you’re back.  And we’re pulling for you to have that much impact in the world today.

Hopefully by now, those of you in the NYC area got a chance to see Terence Nance’s debut feature, An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty, which began its platformed release here this past Friday. Guest contributor Aisha Cousins chatted with the director, and an edited version of their conversation follows here.

So, you’re on the road to Sundance Film Festival and you’re thinking “I’ll be sooo happy if _______.” What were you hoping for and how did it compare to what actually happened?
Funny enough, I don’t actually remember. I had so little sleep in the leadup to the festival that I don’t think I was capable of having whole, coherent thoughts. I guess I would have been happy if people liked the movie and it seemed like they did.

You must have met some amazing filmmakers along the way.
There are so many, but a few of my favorites on the circuit were Kahlil Joseph (Until the Quiet Comes), Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds), Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere), Benh Zeitlen (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Marialy Rivas (Young and Wild), and Kevin Jerome Everson.

Who would you say influences you most as a filmmaker?
Most of my influences are novelists. Writers like Roald Dahl, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison were definitely influences on me as a writer. I think my filmmaking is sourced in prose.

Speaking of prose, can we talk about editing? Those who caught the Sundance premiere will notice An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is now noticeably shorter than its original version. What did you cut and why?
I cut out stuff I thought slowed the film down. It was all “a second here a second there” rhythmic editing. I think it’s a more engaging movie watching experience now, so I’m excited to see how viewers respond to it.

So a musician, a comedian, and a filmmaker walk into a bar… what’s the story behind Jay-Z and Wyatt Cenac coming in on the film? How exactly are they involved and what has it been like working with them?
One of our executive producers showed it to them and they came to the film after seeing it. I think they really should be celebrated for their support of the film. It goes completely against the narrative that Black celebs don’t invest in emerging filmmakers. Their support has been invaluable. Their names alone make the film visible to new audiences and raise the profile. It’s been over a year since we premiered at Sundance. I don’t think our film would have stayed in the public eye and continued to draw new supporters for this long without them.

You actually started An Oversimplification… seven years ago. Since then, you’ve started work on a second feature The Lobbyists, that just won The Creative Promise Narrative Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Has your vision as a filmmaker evolved since learning more about the process of bringing a film to theaters? Any hints for our readers about what we can look forward to seeing from you in the future?
Darker films.
Artier films.
More music.
Absurd films.
Installations.
Performances.
More acting.
One or two documentaries.
One or two TV series.
A few children -one named August, haven’t decided on the other yet.

Anything else Bold as Love’s readers can do to support your work?
Take a friend to see the movie in a theater near you! We’ll be screening around the country through June. If your city’s not on the list, contact us and make it happen.

Additional links:

• Terence Nance official
• ofherbeauty.com
• twitter.com/ofherbeauty
• facebook.com/ofherbeauty

Aisha Cousins is a visual artist who writes performance art scores (instructions for live art projects), proverbs, short stories, and the occasional dream log. Her score “How to Listen to Lil Wayne: For Nia, Nya, and Kamaria” was recently published by MoMA PS1 as part of the catalog for Clifford Owens’ abstract compendium of notable black performance artists, Clifford Owens: Anthology. She is currently working on a do-it-yourself curriculum designed to meet the needs of black youth whose schools have lost art funding titled SAY IT LOUD!: Performance Art Scores for the Young, Gifted, and Fabulous.

• http://www.aishacousins.com
• http://dearmlk.blog.com
• http://sayitloudguide.wordpress.com

Rapping, singing and live instrumentals? You might be tempted to call Oxymorrons a hip hop group. Or a rock group. What they are are two talented brothers from Queens.  Some of you might remember that we first saw these guys at the 2012 Afropunk Festival.  As we wrote then: “And a shoutout to The Oxymorrons, the Queens duo of brothers K.I. and D.  Great flow, songs and incredible energy.”

Great to see two guys coming at the music scene with inspiring, heartfelt, and honest music.  Case in point is their latest video, which was written to honor a friend who committed suicide.  (Side note: Suicide is a serious problem. For youth ages 10-24, there are over 4,600 suicides every year. Additionally, there are 157,000 reported injuries from attempted suicides.)

The new project from Oxymorrons, 4 Fun & Games, is expected to be out this summer.

Additional links:

• Oxymorrons official

It is so rare that we see representations of a man’s emotional life.  And it’s even more rare to explore that of a man of color.  But that’s exactly what director Terence Nance has done with his award-winning film An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty, which opens tomorrow, April 26 in NYC with additional dates around the country to follow.  Here’s the brief synopsis of a film that mixes live action and animation to stunning effect:

With arresting insight, vulnerability, and a delightful sense of humor, Terence Nance’s explosively creative debut feature, An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty, documents the relationship between Terence and a lovely young woman (Namik Minter) as it teeters on the divide between platonic and romantic. Utilizing a tapestry of live action and various styles of animation, Terence explores the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through his mind during a singular moment in time.

Here’s the trailer:

More info on the film is here.

“Gotta testify /’cause the booty don’t lie.”  This’ll probably show up on t-shirts soon.  So, here it is, fam.  Whatch’all think?

 Additional link:

• Janelle Monae official