Amplify Black Voices - Andrea Hairston

Welcome to the fourth post in a series devoted to amplifying the voices of Black creators in fantasy and magical fields. My guest is Andrea Hairston, author of the forthcoming Master of Poisons, and here is her story.

Andrea Hairston is the author of Will Do Magic For Small Change, finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards, and a New York Times Editor’s pick. Other novels are: Redwood and Wildfire, Otherwise and Carl Brandon Award winner, and Mindscape, winner of Carl Brandon Award. She has published essays, plays, and short fiction and received grants from the NEA, Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. In her spare time, Andrea is L. Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith and Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre. She bikes at night year round, meeting bears, multi-legged creatures of light and breath, and the occasional shooting star. Her next novel, Master of Poisons, will be published by Tor/Macmillan in September 2020.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you write/do, how you got started?

I am an Afro-futurist keeping company with Indigenous Futurists. Stories that have been erased, stolen, or hidden call to me.

In 1995 I was a guest artist/professor at the Universität Hamburg in Germany when I decided to write sf & f novels. I felt like an alien and not because I’d journeyed across the ocean and left the USA behind. I was in north Germany not Bavaria, not MY Germany. North Germans complained to African American me about Bavarians being fast Italienish—practically Italians! My “German Family” is from Bavaria and along with learning the language, I had absorbed their values, gestures, and prejudices. While in Hamburg, I taught classes on black women playwrights and did theatre with Bosnian, Sudanese, Sri Lankan, and Guatemalan refugee women. I helped them storyweave their truth and claim the world stage.

I also attended conferences on African culture, history, and the future. A big question was should Africans write in their native tongues. So many people were eulogizing Africa, proclaiming her demise, mourning the impossibility of any sort of indigenous African survival. Africans would have to give up their particular heritages, write in European languages, and then they would enter the modern world. Decolonizing the African (native) spirit was a hopeless futile fantasy. I wanted to imagine something else.

Inspired by all these experiences, That’s when I invented the Afro-futurist world of my first novel, Mindscape. I worked on that novel at the Clarion West 1999 Writer’s Workshop. The fabulous instructors and workshoppers helped turn a drama queen into a novelist. I have been writing speculative fiction ever since.

What first drew you to the world of magic, wonder, and enchantment?

There’s more to the world than we experience. There are many worlds in this world.

If we change perspective, if we make the journey from self to other, we can experience these other worlds. There is more to the world than our conventions, our frames. Realism is just whatever we are willing to believe.

We live at level drastically reduced from what is possible. I wanted to focus my attention not just have it focused and framed for me by status quo conventions. Too often Realism supports what goes without saying. Fantasy can make the invisible visible. That’s what I wanted to do.

Imagination is the bridge from the known to the unknown. All storytellers connect us with the invisible, the impossible, with a time before this time and a time to come. Storytellers let us feel our cosmic connection to all things, to all of our relations. So staring at the night sky, we imagine riding on a photon, streaking from the big bang toward infinity. Surrounded by slavery, we imagine freedom and take a ride on a Saltwater Railroad to the Bahamas like African Americans and Seminoles in the 1830s! In the crush of empire, we imagine that just, sustainable future. 7-generations thinking is science fictional, fantastical. It’s a projection of this moment and all the ancestors we carry with us into the future.

What are some of the stories and who are some of the authors that inspired and influenced you?

This is a list of writers who got me to dreaming and scheming when I was first beginning to write plays and then later to write fiction.

Playwrights Alice Childress, Bertolt Brecht, Lorraine Hansberry—who wrote several speculative plays, Les Blancs for one, Lynn Nottage, and Pearl Cleage. In Flyin’ West, Pearl Cleage imagines an all-black utopian community in Kansas in 1898. Many more playwrights: Wole Soyinka, Tess Onwueme, Derek Walcott, Jean Anouilh, Caryl Churchill, Femi Osifisan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Githae Mugo, Aimé Césaire, and more names than I can call out. Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote Decolonizing The Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature.

As I was going from drama queen to novelist these novelists and short story writers worked their magic on me: Octavia Butler, Michael Ende, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sheree R. Thomas. I would just say pick any of their books and dive in!

Are there any stories you want to share about the difficulties you may have faced as a Black author and creator in a genre historically largely defined (in the Western world) by white stories and mindsets?

NASA and the Library of Congress gathered scientists, scholars, and one artist (me) to discuss Astrobiology and our possible encounters with extra-terrestrial life. Life is the great puzzle! How did it come about on Earth? Has life happened anywhere else? All over the world there are stories/fantasies about encounters with life forms not from this Earth.

During a public symposium, several people spoke reverently about the ancient Greeks. I brought up exhibits right down the road at the Museum of the American Indian—Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World. These exhibits focused on indigenous cosmologies—Quechua, Anishinaabe, Yup'ik and others. I urged everyone to go to the museum and listen to stories about the cosmos and see weavings, musical instruments, pottery that embodied the cosmic stories. I also mentioned Dogon (West African) ideas of the cosmos. Some symposium participants and audience members thought I had lost my NATURAL mind. What would Dogon or Quechua stories have to offer to us astrobiologists?

Now the ancient Greeks and their folk tales, their mythologies are proto-scientific, rational, civilized! The Greeks are on the way to Geeks. They are honored ancestors not inferiors. We are SUPPOSEDLY in a direct line from them to the future. But Anishinaabe or Lakota or Dogon or Yoruba (West African) tales? Sacred universes? Thunderbirds, Dog Stars, and encounters with the impossible? Was I kidding?

We can enjoy folk tales, fairy tales, fantasies—they’re entertaining, but part of the deal is we know better. We know the magic isn’t real and thus isn’t true. (From real to true is quite a leap of logic!) So how could I, who had discussed physics, uncertainty, and expanding universes, engage Indigenous or African wisdom as we considered the future, as we contemplated what to do when we encounter microbes on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, planets named for Roman/Greek Gods.

One person in our symposium discussions gave a cynical but realistic forecast for our encounters with alien others: Scientists will colonize these new-to-us life forms; they might even weaponize alien microbes then lie to the public about their true nature or very existence. And woe to us…

The Empire colonizes the future. Dystopic destruction is/seems inevitable. That’s a dominant story/myth. I want another narrative. Eshu, the Yoruba orisha, is a master of uncertainty—many things at once, but not any one thing, challenging us to engage perspectives beyond our own, to dance with the other. As I write, I always pour libation to Eshu. My great aunt was a back country hoodoo conjurer. Her insight and wisdom helped me survive, thrive. I was a dream she had. I have to get all that in my novels.

Engaging indigenous science and fairy tale wisdom requires a polyrhythmic sensibility, a code-sliding metaphorical mind. I want to write characters who resist empire colonial mindsets, who resist the supposedly inevitable colonization of the future. A difficult task. So I set out to write novels where a community of characters, human and non-human, has to find that way out of no way. They have to create the impossible path through dystopia heading for the futures we want.

What do you love about being a Black fantasy author? In what ways have you found joy from the spell of fantasy literature?

Writing fantasy, I try to conjure lost or forgotten stories. I try to get African and Indigenous ancestors talking to the future. Characters, particularly women, who got left out of the action, raid my mind.

That’s how my latest novel Master of Poisons started. Tricksters and sacred clowns, griot storytellers and conjurers woke me up at night. Bold characters in the midst of wild adventures—I couldn’t shut them up! They wouldn’t let me sleep until I started writing their stories down. I also had animals prowling my dreams: crows, bees, horses, and dogs. Trees and rivers were talking at me too. They were urgent and funny, and made me do a lot of research!

I’m a playwright and director. I do theatre exercises where you try to wrap your tongue/mind around a language you don’t know; you try to play music with intervals and rhythms you can’t parse or see colors you can’t name. In rehearsals, you’re always trying to embody values and perspectives that aren’t your own. So I tried imagining trees, dogs, and bees as protagonists in their own stories.

As I wrote Master of Poisons, climate disaster and folks trying to colonize the future, challenged me and my characters, but… I have South Carolina hoodoo ancestors like my great aunt who refused to entertain despair. Their conjure is still working through me. I want to pass that on. The power of hoodoo is the power of a community, living and ancestral, that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow.

Master of Poisons is about denial and the empire of lies we’re willing to believe. It’s about tricksters who sing, dance, and clown to decolonize the mind and celebrate our spirits. I wanted to write myself out of the hopelessness we feel facing devastation. Master of Poisons is about the stories we tell and the communities we make to do the impossible.

The Black Lives Matter Movement is extremely important. Do you want to share any thoughts about it? What do you want to see white people who want to be real allies do better?

I have spent my entire life on Black Lives Matter. And I am getting to be an old lady! See everything I have written above.

Black Lives Matter is about conjuring a new world, about making visible what has been invisible, what has been erased, stolen, lost, buried. For hundreds of years Black Lives didn’t matter to everyone, and that was just how it was. It went without saying. It was terrible but what could you do?

It is amazing to me how much pain a society can ignore, but now we’re saying no to that! It is amazing how much joy, insight, wisdom, and beauty a society can repress and ignore—and now we’re saying yes to the bounty and brilliance of who Black People are and have been and will be!

VOTE!

GET OUT THE VOTE!

What will we be seeing from you in the future? What are some of your dream projects?

My next project after Master of Poisons will be a book about Circus-Bots, ghosts, and the Baron of the Boneyard.