The Sword and Laser discussion

I'm going to start capturing things for discussion in some of the non-spoilery aspects and I decided to start with a long form "conversation" in which Nnedi Okorafor first speaks at length and then responds to different questions. "Writing for a Broken World" is a conversation series conducted by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University. The conversation with Nnedi Okorafor was in 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS0aY...

She describes a lot of her background and how she became a writer, which is a fascinating story in its own right. There's a point where she discussed the terms she coined for her work, africanfuturism and africanjujuism. Akata Witch is africanjujuism while Binti is africanfuturism.

The blog post she references that defines the term is here:

https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/af...

Interestingly, Sunny was inspired by and based on a real person, Sandra Marume. She describes most of her characters springing entirely from her imagination so that seems worth noting. And the story is worth listening to.

Nnedi's love of bugs (her original plan was to become an entomologist) and fear of spiders both come through clearly in Akata Witch.

I loved the conversation. It's well worth the time to listen. I'm curious to see what others take from it.

And since I shared her 2019 blog post in which Nnedi Okorafor defines the term she coined for her writing, africanfuturism, and why she uses that instead of afrofuturism it seems important to share this post, "It's Bigger Than a Label..." from earlier this year.

https://nnedi.blogspot.com/2024/09/it...

There's obviously context and backstory behind the post that I don't have.

But even without that context, I think I grasp some of what she's driving at. Human beings are complicated and words are never "just words". They represent identity, define intention, support self-understanding, and help us work out where and how we fit in the world. They can be used to wound, hurt, and diminish others both through direct use and by acts of verbal aggression that involve changing, withholding, or dismissing the words a person uses to describe themselves or their active place in the world.

It's not the same, but it is a similar mode of verbal aggression when, for instance, I consistently refer to myself as an autistic person but people in conversation with me insist on using euphemisms when talking about like "on the spectrum" or even a technically accurate term like "neurodivergent". (Yes, like most autistic people, I am neurodivergent in multiple ways. I almost certainly have dysgraphia and I have PTSD/cPTSD. But neurodivergent is not a synonym for autistic.) I've even had non-autistic people try to correct the way I refer to my own identity. And I encounter only the tiniest fraction of what non-white autistic people experience. Since I'm generally perceived as male presenting I also experience many fewer aggressive comments than autistic people who aren't do.

I see a similar sort of dismissive and verbally violent attitude in many places toward the labels people continue to develop in modern English for sexual orientation, sexuality, and gender identity. It's not that the experience is new. It's not. And many languages over human history have had very expressive vocabularies, so that's also not especially new. If you lack words for something, it doesn't mean your experience of being different in the world somehow goes away. It just makes it much harder to figure out for yourself and harder to communicate about it with others.

I appreciate the resolute and defiant statement with which Nnedi's post ends, "I don't do invisible." It's part of what I appreciate so much in the character of Sunny. She refuses to shrink back much of the time. Not all the time, because nobody realistic does that.

And this conversation with Nnedi Okorafor is even better in some ways but it also covers different points. I love the description of the editing process she uses and the story behind how she learned it. I love the deep dive (in non-spoilery ways) into her different books. And that includes the Akata books (there were only two in 2019). In fact, they dive into her choosing to use Akata Witch as the title of the first one. Anyway, strongly recommend. I enjoyed it a lot!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nanoQ...

Thanks for sharing these! I am disappointed that goodreads doesn't seem to be notifying me anymore, but this is good stuff. I'd seen the 2022 one before, but not the one in the 3rd post.

Glad you found them interesting too! (Or at least the one that was new to you.) Editing something after mixing up all the pages so the are out of order sounded like a pretty intense approach to me.