The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 21: Andrea Hairston

2022 Pleasures

by Andrea Hairston

 

Remember that song, Last night, a DJ saved my life?

The books I read in 2022 were all lifesavers! Spirit medicine for trying times. Usually (as in before 2020), we’d all be running into one another. We’d share breath, inspire each other live, face to face. I ached to be present with folks, but no matter the isolation, no matter the mess going down right outside my door or all across the world, I got to read beautiful books. Great writers rescued me!

 Daniel José Older cleansed my spirit and gave me hope in Ballad & Dagger (Book 1 of the Outlaw Saints series). The pirate, Santero, Sephardic characters and communities he created were thrilling and so was his engagement with science and religion. Daniel asks how people who come from different stories and who organize the cosmos in different ways might come together without eating each other or blasting each other to bits. His delightful, complex world-building spoke to who we can be, who we must be, and also to how we will bring ourselves through. He explored the devastating challenges and generative possibilities of our diverse humanity.

In fact, all the books that saved me did that.

 Sheree Renée Thomas’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage captured the moods of civil war, of love, loss, and anguish as Wakandans face the enemies within. Sheree’s comparisons between Wakandan and African American experiences are revelatory. African Americans can love and ache for the Motherland and yet feel estranged from it when faced with the real thing, not the memories, dreams, and wishful nostalgia they might wrap Africa in as they wander the diaspora. Panther’s Rage is right on time for a world caught up in civil struggle and unrest. Nobody wins a Civil War except the guys manufacturing the guns. The fights we have with ourselves are exacerbated by unscrupulous players who capitalize on exaggerating difference. These dodgy characters keep us at each other’s throats while they steal the world. They turn us into zombies who can’t tell anymore what it means to be alive and feel empathy. Sheree breaks this down for us in the Black Panther world. High adventure—the villains’ asses get kicked—but more importantly, Sheree’s action-adventure poetry is about changing ourselves so that we might be stronger together.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is an epic tale, jammed full of insight, analysis, speculation, and hopeful possibilities and dreadful necessities. Divided we fall—without question. However, humanity has tragic, self-destructive tendencies. So in the face of radical climate crisis, who will take the first steps to bring us together and save tomorrow? Like all the books that saved me, Ministry for the Future engages the utopia/dystopia spectrum. Robinson wants to explore what we do after the apocalypse. He asks what can we make of ourselves. Can we make a better world? Is there a post-capitalist existence, an alternative to profit as our central human value? Can we have joy, fun, love, friendship, kinship? Do the people who count run in the billions or just in the thousands or… Spoiler alert: this book is not tragedy!

These are also the questions Pan Morigan poses in her poetry book, Five Spirits in My Mouth coming in spring from Querencia Press and her forthcoming novel, The Wheel and the Song. She transports to us another world, shakes our minds loose of the indicative case and gets us to ask: What does the future we’re making look like? What if the world could be different? Who would we be? Her imagination takes us beyond the empire’s standard heroes, the ones who excuse atrocity by declaring it progress or who mock sentimentality because it’s not profitable or rational. Pan celebrates science and spirit, music and math, hope in the face of devastation.

 

I finally had time to binge on the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells from All Systems Red to Fugitive Telemetry. Thinking what you want to think is hard. We all have “governors” in our heads, programming beyond our control. We, like Muderbot, have to figure out how to hack the social programming and be who we want to be, our best selves, and then we can shift the shape of reality. That’s the program for 2023!

 

Andrea Hairston is a novelist, playwright, and scholar. Aqueduct Press published her first three novels, all of which are now forthcoming from Tor: Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Otherwise and Carl Brandon Awards; Mindscape, winner of the Carl Brandon Award. Aqueduct also published Lonely Stardust, a collection of essays and plays. “Dumb House,” a short story appears in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. Andrea has received grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her latest novel, Master of Poisons, came out from Tor.com and is on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best SF and F list.