Selected Non-Fiction

God and Horses at the Pre-Apocalypse

“I am sometimes asked, “Why horses?” regarding my novel “Goliath.” The question concerns a subplot in a book set in the aftermath of climate collapse and nuclear fallout, where a group of Black and brown brick stackers in New Haven must contend with gentrifiers from outer space. During a supplies run to Fairfield, Conn., where the stackers can redeem vouchers for food, one of them takes her partner on a trail through irradiated forest to reveal a small herd of horses she discovered some time ago. Shenanigans ensue. Where the horses came from, how they got there, both are unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions. But there they are, a miracle of life amid dead and dying things.”

Fine Weather, Isn’t It?

“Prison, police, rule-breaking, conflict, these things have so pervaded cultural consciousness that one could be forgiven for thinking that the entirety of human relation was nothing more than omnipresent criminality. Post-apocalyptic fiction is often presented as the landscape upon which the worst consequences of prison and police abolition rampage. Chaos, wanton violence, perpetual danger. But what if the true post-apocalypse is the 8.5 ft by 10 ft cell in which you’re forced to spend twenty-three hours a day, because you lacked the requisite amount of deference when responding to a corrections officer? There is more to human experience than the making and breaking of rules, and there is more to the world than the protection and violation of property.”

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The Duty of the Black Writer During Times of American Unrest

“Since before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, narratives by Black Americans about Black Americans have performed a sort of zoological function. In conjunction with or perhaps with utter disregard for a work’s literary merits (depending on its audience), a reader might approach such a book the way they might watch a documentary. Smooth narration, structurally sound. A chance to learn something new about seahorses. “A window into the condition of contemporary Black America” reads the breathless blurb or pull-quote on the cover. And in that book are likely breathtaking sentences, arresting paragraphs, gorgeous scene-endings depicting the worst day of a Black character’s life. The sentences will sing in a story about slavery. The hunger for this sort of story exists outside the Black writer. After all, it was William Styron, descended from slaveowners, who won the Pulitzer for The Confessions of Nat Turner. But publishing is so often a closed ecosystem, and when that hunger is in the air, that air cannot help but enter the lungs of a Black writer let in through the doors. The White Gaze is the Eye of Sauron twice. Whether or not as a conscious decision, you write in or through or around that hunger. And maybe you give them Illmatic. You give them reportage in the form of fiction. You give them drama and beatific prose and, for the non-Black audience, that transcendent sense of transport that good fiction always offers. You also give them an education.”

Why war stories could reinjure those affected

“In conversations with my Somali-American friends, my Vietnamese-American friends, my Korean-American friends, my Palestinian-American friends, there are shades of that same admixture of feelings. But another colors the underbelly of the thing. In so many of our stories—that is to say, our parents’ stories—is war. Calamity. Our parents were refugees or war orphans or collaborators or freedom fighters or witnesses to untold horrors. Sometimes their parents were. Which makes our fascination with these all the more macabre. Therein lies the plight with which so many first-generation American writers suffer: are we exploiting the trauma our parents and grandparents endured for profit or fame or whatever it is that drives a person to write a book? Are we re-injuring them?”

Greatest City On Earth: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

“As much as we may think of cities as organic things thrumming with life, they are manufactured entities. The Roman Empire’s aqueducts and Forum Romanum, the construction and organization of madrasas in Askia Mohamed I’s Timbuktu, the brutal Opium War-fueled forging of the Kowloon Peninsula into Hong Kong. Capitalism has bludgeoned many of the aforementioned and others like them into what we see now, and its deleterious effects are not absent from Jemisin’s novel. In fact, one of the most stunning features of this book is its positioning of capital waging war against the human beings of a place as a sort of Cthulhu. Gargantuan claws that rake expressways through neighborhoods, multifold human forms insinuating themselves piecemeal as the proprietors of new coffeeshops or as real estate developers or as disembodied city agencies expropriating land for condos. The source of mankind’s constant, subconscious anxiety, commanding perhaps the largest cult in the world.”

“Where in your affidavit does it say you’re Black?”: Why Worldbuilding Can’t Neglect Race

“Books do not exist in a vacuum. If they are published in the United States, they exist in a context where the majority of publishing house presidents, acquiring editors, agents, publicists, production editors, prosecutors, judges, state and federal legislators, grade school teachers, high school principals, university professors, police officers, and librarians are white. They exist in a context of officer-involved shootings disproportionately affecting African-Americans and a higher maternal mortality rate among African-American women and a gender pay gap and an epidemic of violence against transgender people. They exist in a context of Muslim bans and microaggressions, terrorist attacks and someone stepping onto an elevator or subway car before you’ve had the chance to get off. They exist in a context of someone touching your hair without your permission over and over and over. And no matter how much the world we create may differ from our own recognizable reality in its physical laws—its moons, its architecture, its quantum mechanical legislation—we take our world with us when we build another. Drew Walton was Black because I am.”

30 Minutes Till Madness: Power and Male Derangement in The Wheel of Time

“I think of Jean Grey wanting to save the lives of her friends and being granted the power of a god. And then I think of Lanfear wanting to recapture the affections of the lover who spurned her and being granted one of the most prestigious posts among the Forsaken in the War of Power. She spends the rest of that life hunting Rand al’Thor, sensing him to be her once-lover reborn, seducing him with her beauty, with the promise of power and glory, visiting him in his dreams. But power breeds addicts. Jean tasted it. Lanfear had as well. The Shadow offered access to an energy source that operated beyond the restrictions of sex, a promise that there existed a roaring ecstasy too angry and powerful for the prison of a gender binary. The Forsaken became the Forsaken for diverse reasons—avarice, nihilism, jealousy—and they warred amongst each other and schemed and plotted in order to become the one whom the Dark One would choose as Nae’blis and allow to touch the True Power. How that must have looked to Mierin.”

My Gift Was Memory: On Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer

“As The Water Dancer was a decade in the making, any timely resonance with family separation in the context of the current political landscape speaks less to a conscious authorial reaching and more to the fact that government policy at its most injurious has often targeted the family. But the novel does stand out for training its trenchant eye on that aspect of the peculiar institution rather than bringing into stark relief the beatings and mutilations, the cotton-picking, the sexual violence, the corporeal punishment and physical danger thickening the air breathed in every second by every single Tasked person, all of which are still very much present in the novel. Whether because of the novelty of that aspect being made the focus in a piece of mainstream literature or whether because of Coates’s heartrending depictions of enslaved families in extremis, or perhaps because of both of those things operating in tandem, the horrors depicted never felt rote or part of any genre rulebook. In highlighting families, Coates made his characters individuals. All of the Tasked thirst for freedom. The water from that well is especially sweetened when one can bring one’s beloved with them.”

Select Difficulty

“The game also lit a more primal light in my body, the same set of neurons fired up by gunning down aliens or enemy soldiers in a first person shooter. Only, instead of the thrill that attends the realization of invincibility, the heart trip-hammers in your chest at the subversion of that realization: you see, there were eight Marauders fanning out to circle the car behind which I hid, as well as a sniper in a house down the hill, my ultimate destination, and I only had three bullets to my name.”

White Bears in Sugar Land: Juneteenth, Cages, and Afrofuturism

“The previous month, Jemisin had won her third consecutive Hugo Award for Best Novel, making history twice over as the first author to threepeat and the first to win for every novel in a series. For a series of novels quite explicitly about injustice and un-freedom, into which can be read with remarkable ease black anger and black pain and so many of those other complex weavings of emotion that stem from having buried somewhere deep in one’s genealogy that primordial wounding. In short, a series of novels that not only stars black people, but that thematically concerns itself with the business of being black in the United States of America. A series of novels about having too little and too much power simultaneously, about loving in the face of loss, about the separation of families, about containing in one calcifying body both God and woman.”

Invisible

“My first exposure to this rarefied world was through my school’s summer reading assignment. One required book and two of the student’s choosing from a capacious list spanning many subjects. I don’t remember much of what was on the list that summer before I began high school, but I do remember that the required reading was Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. As the oldest son of a widowed Nigerian immigrant, enamored of anime and epic fantasy, I’d long grown accustomed to reading and caring about characters that in no important way resembled me. But, for whatever reason, this time I couldn’t. It is one of the only books I have never finished. I remember there were wolves in the book, or bobcats, or coyotes. And white people. With no superpowers or bloody revenge quests or any other compelling accoutrements. Just regular-degular, boring white people, and a pack of coyotes I seemed more interested in than did Ms. Kingsolver. A harbinger of what lay ahead.”

Pretty Woman: On the Allure of Androids

“Initially, Edison’s android Alicia is only able to repeat information that has been “programmed” into her circuitry, the parrot of other men’s thinking. She is so perfect a copy of Ewald’s Alicia that she replicates the very problem that necessitated her creation. But by the novel’s end, Hadaly generates different patterns of speech and shows evidence of a “spark.” Touch the air for but a second and face a level of complexity sufficient simply to become.”

Homo Duplex

“What often makes literature meaningful is that the reader can see themselves in the text, whether through a skin tone they share with the characters or a temperament or a locale, whether a particular familial dynamic, or even if they find in the text a simulacrum of their own psyche. To see oneself twinned, depicted, described, articulated, explained. Which is perhaps why few pieces of literature that I’ve ever read depict with more terrifying familiarity the interiority and exteriority of alcoholism than Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”

The art of the drug deal: Kanye West, ‘Daytona,’ and the exploitation of addiction

“Missing from drug rap is the banality of the whole enterprise. Taking its place are the industry of dealers in the kitchen, the lavishness of their celebration, and perhaps the occasional thought given to their victims. But so much of the addiction that fuels the drug economy is built on “hurry up and wait.” A flurry of violence, lies, robbing then quiet, very much like modern warfare. Dealers work and wait for sales. Their customers work and wait for the hit. Time collapses, existing only as the interstitial space between episodes of (self-inflicted) violence. For whom in the ecosystem that Daytona describes is time a luxury?”

Where Do Scalia's Come From?

“In law school, you are taught the law. Which isn’t even really true, because you aren’t taught the law as it’s practiced on the streets of Chicago. You aren’t taught the law as it’s been practiced by banks in collusion with housing authorities to deny loans to aspiring homeowners of color. You aren’t taught why we have the carceral state we have. You are taught the law in all its sterility, so when you learn about Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Number 15, you can amend a pleading once if it’s within twenty-one days of originally filing or within twenty-one days of a responsive pleading. You don’t learn about the dude who got jacked up by police who refused to give their names when he asked and got his arm broken for it. You don’t learn about the excessive force suit he tried to file against the police department. You don’t learn about how the suit failed because he didn’t sue the officers by name and didn’t learn their names until after the amendment deadline had passed. And, if you happen to learn about those things, the message is “follow the rules,” not how the color of your skin or the amount of money in your wallet often determines the contours of your experience as an American. What you absolutely don’t learn is how to do anything about it.”

From Scalia and a White Supremacist, a Victory for Prisoners’ Rights

“Samuel Johnson was an avowed white supremacist who was under investigation by the FBI since 2010 and was suspected of preparing to commit acts of terrorism. He revealed to undercover agents his cache of AK-47s, semi-automatic rifles, and ammunition. He told them he had manufactured an explosive device meant for specific “progressive” targets.

And he may have provided a new avenue of relief for thousands of inmates of color nationwide.”