For this A Long Talk, Shingai Njeri Kagunda and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu talk about Voodonauts, a summer workshop for Black writers of speculative fiction, AfroSurrealism, their relationship with time in fiction writing, play as hope and craft, writing under and out of capitalism and so much more. 

Clarie: Hello! 

I’m so happy to have you in conversation. I’ve been meaning to do this for a Long time—I was just waiting for Yvette’s book to be out in the world. Congratulations on both of your books! But before we get to that and the intersecting themes and motifs, can you talk about Voodoonauts—inspiration, intention, the journey so far, etc. 

Yvette: Thanks Clarie! Voodoonauts is a grassroots collective that hosts summer fellowships for Black speculative fiction writers and poets across the world. We also love doing side quests like publishing an anthology featuring the works of our first cohort of fellows. We founded Voodoonauts in 2020 when we were MFA students at the height of the pandemic. So much was going on in terms of inequality and the disregarding of Black life. We were kinda disillusioned with the whiteness of workshops and publishing spaces so one day over our Zoom writing sessions, we said why not build our own space and make it as Black and radical as we want to! We sometimes joke that Voodoonauts is like a Black MFA with the energy of a cookout. Our intention is for Voodoonauts to be anti-capitalist and rooted in mutual aid and sharing of resources. We do not charge tuition for our cohort of 25-35 fellows each year. If someone has a skill like editing, organising, or teaching or vlogging on Tiktok, they can bring that skill to share with the community. The people make the space what it is. One of the things I love the most about the workshop is seeing how diverse Blackness is. We’ve had fellows from Guyana, Nigeria, Norway, Burundi, the USA, Germany, and Jamaica etc. coming together and sharing space. 

I guess I like to think of Voodoonauts as our Afrofuturist dream. What does Afrofuturist dreaming mean to you, Shingai? 

Shingai: Ooohhh Yvette hit the nail on the head with that answer. Over the last couple of years we’ve been asked to talk about Voodoonauts in several different places and I think our vision has evolved and grown while simultaneously sticking to its roots, which was building a Black diasporic community of storytellers. Using the resources from predominantly white spaces that we had received access to, and finding ways to make them accessible to folks who were not in those spaces. Freeing the knowledge that institutions tend to gate-keep.

To answer your question Yvette, I think Afrofuturist dreaming for me is generally creating the worlds we want to be alive in and more personally centering the needs of the most marginalised of us in the worlds we imagine. I think Afrofuturist dreaming is a call to push past the limitations of what we’ve been told “just is what it is” and insist on uncovering and discovering what could be in the Histories, spiritualities, lived realities, and possibilities of Black life. 

Something that Yvette, your work has explored a lot. Especially in Drinking From Graveyard Wells where you reimagine immigration, Black women’s worth—specifically in a Zimbabwean context—and wealth disparity. 

I would love to know how you stay true to the realities of this existence while working in the realm of the speculative? 

Yvette: That’s such a great question! I think my work draws from the well of the fantastic to speak to truths about our world.  I often struggled with how to think about my work, what style or genre did these weird stories fall into? Recently I’ve been falling in love with the genre AfroSurrealism, a term coined by D. Scott Miller. For me, AfroSurrealism is about telling the narrative of the contemporary Black experience, these experiences being oftentimes so absurd and horror-inducing that they seem surreal. The AfroSurrealism in Drinking from Graveyard Wells leans into that absurdity to speak to the larger truths about the marginalisation of African and Black women living under systems of patriarchy and capitalism. I’m inspired by AfroSurreal works like Jordan Peele’s Get Out, anything Boots Riley makes, Lesley Nneka Arimah etc. so my work recently has more absurdist horror elements. Another reason I’m drawn to AfroSurrealism is its insistence on examining the present, the Right Now and naming the absurdities and horrors of the contemporary moment and their relationship to the past. I know you engage with presentism and the past in your work as well, playing with and bending time. Time is even a narrator in your novella And This is How to Stay Alive! 

Yvette : We really have put the “long” in A Long Talk because I’m asking this question  a whole year later haha but what is time right? Time  happens to be one of your obsessions. Talk to me about time and how your work plays with non-linearity and East African conceptualizations of time? 

Shingai: We have. The sweetest things take time though, no? I would like to answer your question by talking about my relationship to time, because it is always in flux. This is mainly because it is a relationship. When I first became preoccupied with East African conceptualizations of non-linear time, I was trying to remove myself from the trappings of analysing time from a linear framework that benefits capitalism and not relationality. John Mbiti, the Kenyan philosopher and historian offered me language to articulate what felt true in my body and our culture even in the neo-colonial era. Time is not an external object that we can bend or control at will. Time is a relational way of being in the world. History has shown us—as well as a myriad of idioms and sayings such as “there is nothing new under the sun” or “the more things change the more things stay the same”—that time is circular, wriggly, all over the place; time is returning to something that was, time is moving quickly sometimes, time is moving immensely slowly, time is non-binary and contradictory, more spacious, more forgiving than the limited prescriptive past to future line that insists on a type of exponential progress and growth at all costs including (especially) the cost of care and relationships. When we’re just moving moving moving in time dictated by capital, we are not paying attention to the harm caused to ourselves, each other, and the earth. When we’re working with and in relationship to a circular framework of time, say for example as Mbiti offers, that time is moving backwards towards zamani, then we have no choice but to be in conversation with the ancestors even as we pay attention to our now. Our “future” which Mbiti names as “potential time” and not actual time, then becomes dependent on our ability to be in relationship to those who were before us and those who are here now with us. All of my writing concerned with non-linear time is concerned with shifting the goal post from production to relationship, which is how my ancestors moved through the world. This brings me back to Afrosurrealism which is a genre we both at this point in time strongly identify our writing in. I know you’ve talked a lot about the concept of “presentism” and how important that is in your work. Could you talk about it a little more? 

Yvette: Spitting so many bars!! I love the way your mind works. I’m interested in Mbiti’s conceptualization of the future as potential time and not actual time and how it centers the present. I’m thinking of the ways that AfroSurrealism is a present-centered canon. In D.Scott Miller’s “AfroSurreal Manifesto”, which I return to a lot to ground me, he talks about how AfroSurrealism is about RIGHT NOW. AfroSurrealism is concerned with the present, in my work I use absurdism, satire and horror/fantasy to critique capitalism and the systems of oppression at work right now. For example, in Drinking from Graveyard Wells, houses disappear in a low income neighborhood in the middle of the night never to be seen again. That cosmic horror is an entryway for me into talking about gentrification. You mention centering relationships, relationships with those who have come before us and those who are here with us now. I wonder what is your relationship with those who don’t currently exist, those who reside in the  “potential time” of the future? In a sense AfroSurrealism lays the groundwork to make Afrofutures possible because us who exist in the Now are responsible for laying the groundwork for a better tomorrow. I love the saying “we don’t inherit this earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our grandchildren.” It’s a reminder to me that although I live in the present I am touched by the past and my actions in the present will also in turn touch the future, what worlds do I want to create in the Now and safeguard for the next generation? We’re all stewards of the present, what are we going to do with that time? Speaking of stewards, I had the pleasure of seeing a copy of the AfroSurreal Manifesto at a museum in Oakland along with Octavia Butler’s handwritten journal notes. I’m always in awe of those journals, when she repeats  “So be it! See to It! in bold ink and writes down all the ways she wants to move through the world, all the plans she has for supporting other Black writers in the future. Whether you want to call those journals a manifestation, a prayer, a worldmaking spell, I’m deeply inspired by that faith. I’ve been listening to a lot of Doechii lately, her EP Alligator Bites Never Heal has been on repeat nonstop! Doechii said something really interesting about faith recently, that faith “is being grateful for a reality that doesn’t exist yet. It’s about being excited for a future you don’t even have yet and being content in that stillness.” I think Butler’s journal notes embody both that stillness and excitement for a reality that didn’t exist yet.  You’re currently living a future that Octavia Butler dreamed up in her present, you’re one of the beneficiaries of the Octavia Butler Scholarship that she dreamed up in her journals for supporting Black writers. Her potential time/ future is now your reality and it’s so mind blowing to think about that. Tell me about that, being touched by the past in that way, about lineage and inheritance, and the literary ancestors who’ve blasted doors open for us? Lately I’ve been thinking about If I leave nothing else behind when I transition, at least let me leave behind an open door. I want my legacy to be an open door.

Shingai: I love how you answer your own question about being in relationship with those who reside in the potential time of the future, and the reference to the indigenous saying that we are borrowing our now from our grandchildren! It makes me think about the conversation we had earlier today about Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ story, Evidence, and how there is a section where the narrator/author’s descendent writes a letter back in time to her ancestor who is living in the present age, concerned with the present world’s problems. This feels like a game of tag we’re playing with time which I read in your work and in your answer about presentism. 

Mmmh, and to answer your question, one of my favorite pieces of jewelry that I own is a silver chain with a dangling owl pendant. The owl was Octavia’s totem and the gift every Octavia Butler scholar at Clarion receives. Yes, it is deeply mind blowing to read Octavia and know that she was thinking about me. Two other terms I loved from Alexis Pauline Gumb’s story Evidence is “kinship descendent” and “kinship ancestor” because of the ways these terms open doors for lineages that aren’t limited to blood. I think of myself as Butler’s literary descendent and by extension her kinship descendent. The weight of this awe is also tied to a sense of responsibility, especially when working in the realm of the imagination. My deep awe and respect for the literary and kinship ancestors who imagined more possibilities for themselves and for me insists that I also must imagine more, both for me, and for those who come after me. Speaking of Butler, one of my favourite literary quotes of all time is, “Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change changes you. God is change.” On our whatsapp chat we’ve talked about how we’ve both changed over the course of the last year, since we first began this long talk. I would love to hear how the way you think about the world has shifted over the last year, and how that has affected your writing?

Yvette: I guess I’ve been thinking about ageing and disillusionment. How do you maintain a sense of wonder, hope, and curiosity as you age and continue to witness all the ways the world can be cruel? How do you not become cynical? I’ve been grappling with the ways grief can harden your heart—you can’t get hurt by the world if you have zero faith in it right? Can you even work towards a different world if you can’t even imagine it or believe it’s possible anymore? I’m deeply inspired by abolitionists like Harriet Tubman because they could imagine a different reality in which they were free at a time when freedom for Black people was an impossibility. Enslavers even invented a medical condition for Black people who wanted to be free, they called it “Drapetomania.” If you craved liberty you were diagnosed as insane, you were diagnosed with Drapetomania. This world pathologizes and punishes those who seek a different reality and I think as we get older and shoulder so many responsibilities and disappointments, systems like capitalism and racism chip away at our capacity to imagine something else. I think fiction is a space to put the imagination into practice and to stretch that capacity for curiosity and hope. I’ve been working on a project that’s forcing me to imagine a different reality for my country Zimbabwe. With language can I unmake all that has happened to my people? Even as I worldbuild this version of Zimbabwe, cynicism creeps in, an inner voice saying “this is impossible…this would never happen….I will never see this in my lifetime…” A Ursula Le Guin quote comes to mind when confronting my doubt and disillusionment:  “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.” I often teach Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” in conversation with NK Jemisin “The Ones Who Stay & Fight” and the ways Jemisin imagines a way out of the dark basement for the child in Omelas upon whose back the city prospers—a community stays and fights to liberate the child rather than walking away. We’ve all probably felt at different points in our lives like the child chained in the dark basement and art for me is the tiny sliver of light penetrating the darkness. Mariame Kaba says, “hope is a discipline.” Seeing the little thread of light is a discipline and I think I want to write towards that light. 

Shingai: Wow. Yess. As you know I’m currently teaching a class called Writing Revolution which I have taught a different iteration of to different age groups for the last three years. I think a big part of teaching this class for me has been trying to come to terms with how to write through my own disillusionment with the oppressive systems we have inherited. It’s funny because you and I are at the cusp of thirty and already exhausted with the world. Then I think about our grandparent’s generation and living through active British colonisation of both of our countries when they were thirty. I think about the poem by Nayirrah Waheed often. “I don’t pay attention to the world ending. It has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.” I also think about the ways we talk about African horror and dark speculative fiction being different from white western horror and dark speculative fiction. In many ways we (African/Black/Indigenous people) have already lived through the apocalypse. For generations, the world has ended and begun again in the morning, and somehow even in the middle of the world ending there have been writers, organisers, and culture workers who have insisted on a different kind of world. I think the kind of hope that you talk about when you quote Mariame Kaba is fueled by learning the ways our radical ancestors resisted the world ending by creating new worlds as templates for what could come next. I think about my grandmother, Cucu Njeri here, who was an English teacher during the colonial era in a town called Tumaini in the Kenyan highlands. After my grandfather passed, right after my dad was born, Cucu Njeri who I am named for became a single mother of eight children in a colonial patriarchal regime. One of the stories I heard about her growing up was the women’s communities she fostered, creating solidarity networks and systems of care for those who didn’t have the privileges of protection in her village. She saw the world end and created pockets of new worlds, visions of something else. If she could do that, then I often think how can I not? You know? I do think that makes me hopeful, to know that my knowledge that capitalism’s power is not inescapable as Ursula says, comes from a lineage of people who believed that the “divine rights of kings” and in extension colonialism were not inescapable, and because of that belief they resisted against those powers and planted pockets of other worlds in the gardens of ideology. One of the other big differences we have today is that we are massively connected to the ideas of those all over the world who are naming and dreaming more just iterations of this world. We have language for the ways our oppressions and our freedoms are interconnected and I think that solidifies our hope, turning it into something tangible. I have also been thinking about how play fuels the imagination. I always feel more grounded, more rooted in what exactly it is I am dreaming up and envisioning when I allow myself to play. You already know I am absolutely delighted by the ways you play both with ideas and language. I am curious if you could share how play enters your craft decision making process?

Yvette : Cucu Njeri was a badass! Now I want an entire epic trilogy about Cucu. I feel like the heroism of women is not celebrated enough because that heroism is quieter. Where would our communities be without the unsung labour of women like Cucu Njeri holding down the community? 

I love your question about play, I try to centre play in my writing process. When I approach a project, I try to let go of the need for everything to fit perfectly and to leave room for discovery even when I have a detailed outline or plan. Play is the space where unexpected connections emerge. I like to go down “What If” rabbit holes to create space for the absurd. What if questions are where the magic of play really begins for me because they open up a sense of wonder and possibility. The story “Ugly Hamsters: A Triptych” started as a what if question as I was mauling over the phrases “rest in peace” and “ancestors working for time.” Whenever someone is doing exceptionally well in life people tend to say that person’s ancestors are working full time to ensure their descendent is taken care of. So I thought to myself what if ancestors did actually have to work full time with no rest in the afterlife? What if the afterlife was a capitalist hellscape and gods ruled over this corrupt system like corporate overlords? Playing with the idea of a capitalist afterlife led me to my main character who would navigate this horrific afterlife. I teach a unit called Turning the Mundane into the Uncanny where I tell my students to play with the familiar and the strange. I ask my students to come up with a list of the most boring, mundane, ordinary/familiar things they can think of such as a pencil, a bagel, McDonalds, a classroom, a grocery store etc. When they are done with their list of mundane things, then I ask them to make that ordinary thing uncanny using a “What If” question. A regular McDonald’s turns into: What if there was a McDonalds where you could order a big mac that lets you forget your most painful memories when you eat it? There is always a lot of chatter and laughter when they do this activity and their ideas become more and more absurd. Some of my AfroSurrealist stories borrow heavily from horror and I think horror is one of the most playful and fun genres! I see horror and comedy/ humour as two sides of the same coin. That’s why I find Jordan Peele so interesting  because he is both a comedian and a horror filmmaker and my hottake is that you have to be funny to write horror or the absurd. Isn’t Get Out just as funny as it is incredibly scary? When done well, both genres elicit a bodily response from the audience: screams/ fear and laughter/joy respectively. Those genres are so fascinating to me because we feel them in our bodies, our bodies cannot help but respond to them: we jerk out of our chairs when the demonic entity shows up on the screen/page or we slap our knees in laughter at a good punchline. Not many genres have such an intimate relationship with the bodies of the audience.

Speaking of two sides of the same coin, I want to ask you about how poetry and prose feed into each other in your work. I’m particularly interested in the hybridity of form in your work. Some of your stories play with indentation and language, sometimes looking at a page of your work, the words move so fluidly on the page, I’m struck by how the prose is broken up with these sections that look like poetry to me.  So how do you think about form when you’re working on a story? 

Shingai: Hmmm. The idea that horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin is so yummy. I want to read a whole paper on this! I love the observation that the similarity between the two is how they both invoke embodied reactions. I think to answer your question about play I must start with space. The page is at first mostly empty space that our words fill up and when I was in my MFA, one of the things that a professor taught me to look at was the ways in which a canvas has the potential to invoke feeling just as much, if not more so than the content of the story. My personal writing history, similar to yours I know, traces back to performing spoken word as a young adult. Spoken word isn’t as concerned with hybrid formatting on the page because the goal is more performance oriented. Though, I do think my experience with performance poetry trickled into pacing and breath on the page. When performing poetry, you are constantly thinking about where to pause, when to breathe, what to repeat, how to emphasise. Having engaged with a lot of non-performance oriented poetry as well, I find these patterns translated into the spacing, indentation, and placing of written words. One of the differences between fiction training and poetry training is that fiction writers are taught to fill up the page, crowd the space with your imagination. Poetry is slower, more sparse. It asks the writer to consider how space makes what is said that much more powerful when used intentionally. So to answer your question, as a speculative fiction writer who dabbles in poetry and learns a lot from poets, form for me is playing a game of tippo with breath and space and words, letting each of them have their turn if I can get away with it. A lot of it is feeling too. One of my favourite compliments that I’ve ever gotten was when a reader friend told me my sentences had intonations of jazz. Thinking about writing like jazz means thinking about using both improvisation and repetition to make music with the relationship between language and silence, finding and naming meaning between them. This kind of play informs a hybridity and experimentation that adds texture to the work. 

Okay here’s my last question. Earlier on the phone today we were talking about the way Toni Morrison didn’t publish her first book until she was 39. Right now with the speed of publishing, the influx of new writers all over the world, and the demands of capitalism, it sometimes can feel like we are getting left behind. How do you protect your peace and keep writing in the midst of this?

Yvette: I love what you said about poetry allowing you to slow you down. I try to keep up a weekly writing practice of writing a poem a week. I think of it as kind of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” so a poem a week for me keeps the mind sharp, it keeps me in touch with my love of language, I can just have fun with words with none of the concerns of fiction like plot, worldbuilding etc. It doesn’t have to be a complete poem, sometimes it’s a fragment of a line or a couplet. Sometimes I’m too busy to write anything at all. 

Ohh that’s a really tough question about protecting your peace. I’ve been asking myself that for a while, I don’t know if I’ve found the answer yet! Because of the Amazonification and Tiktokfication of everything, I think it has warped our sense of time. Everything must be fast and flashy. Writing is supposed to slow you down, it’s quieter. I spend a lot of time thinking about a story before I even get to writing it. I don’t think that time spent just thinking is a waste of time but again capitalism tells you that if you are not producing everyday and don’t have a product to sell then you’re worthless. Like you said, Toni Morrison didn’t publish her first book until she was 39, the filmmaker Ava Durvenay didn’t pick up a camera until age 32. Recently, I went to a museum exhibit of a Black artist Lorraine O’Grady who pivoted careers and found her art later in life and did her first exhibit at 40. When you’re watching everyone else figure out their careers quickly, it can feel like you’re being left behind. It’s okay to have feelings like professional envy from time to time, those are human emotions. Acknowledge those feelings and then get back to the work. All that is in your control is the work. Award nominations, book deals, bestseller lists etc. are all out of your control, those things are in the hands of institutions and sometimes these institutions will not see someone like you. What can I even expect from an institution that would have considered someone like me not even fully human less than a 100 years ago? So how to protect our peace? I remember I took a poetry workshop taught by Ocean Vuong. Ocean would start the class by playing a Tibetan singing bowl and guiding us in a meditation. He would tell us to conjure the younger version of ourselves into the room, the younger you who didn’t know or care about awards and institutions, the younger you who just loved stories and language, the younger you who didn’t centre institutions. That was such a refreshing way to start a workshop, to ground us in the reason why we write in the first place. I think that’s one way to protect your peace, to remind yourself of why you write in the first place.

This conversation has made me soul-search a lot! I’ve enjoyed picking your brain and figuring out how to move through the world and approach my art with intentionality. Thank you for this conversation, Shingai!

Shingai: The invitation to invoke your younger self as you write makes me think about how we started this conversation with an acknowledgement that part of the work we are doing is invoking our ancestors. I wonder, if using Octavia Butler’s prompt that “everything you touch you change and everything you change changes you”, we can think about the past versions of ourselves as a type of ancestor. A type of guide. When I was a kid all I did was read. Then as soon as I had a grasp on language, I wrote. Stories unlocked the universe for me, and there is something so beautiful about the surety that younger Njeri, granddaughter of Cucu Njeri had. That past version of me who like you said just “loved stories and language and didn’t centre institutions”. 

Thank you for always reminding me to look back and forward and all around me. I can’t wait to look back at this conversation down the line, and see the ways we are already guiding our future selves. Thank you for also being my sister writer friend in this incredibly absurd life journey. 

Big hugs Yvette,

Talk soon.

Shi.