The Multiverse of Worlds in the Universe We Inhabit Together
by Andrea Hairston
How can we be different together?
That’s a question I keep coming back to as a theatre artist, professor, and a novelist, as a bit of entangled life on a tiny blue pebble hurtling through vast darkness. How can I make the journey from self to other, break out of my skin and appreciate living in someone else’s? How can I slip into someone’s scales, branching roots, feathers, or ooze, and experience their universe and treasure their spirit? When I drop into a book, play, or film, I want to experience a new world or the multi-verse of worlds in the universe we all inhabit together. (Read Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.)
These are trying times.
As far as I can tell, these are always trying times. So a few other questions: How do we survive ourselves? How do we let go of toxic mythology and take action to create and sustain a future that holds us all? And how did the old folks face the apocalypse and hold on to themselves as well as the future? How did they keep on keeping on through their trying times?
As a child in the 50’s and 60’s, I remember being told again and again: the big problem with backward, non-European cultures was a slavish adherence to (unscientific) tradition, to superstitions and absolute dictums from a savage past. I was counseled against listening to the Elders. I was told to ignore the generations who’d been lost in the jungle before modernity saved them/us. To reach the future, I had to check that backward African, African American, Indigenous science crap at the door! ‘Cause ancestor worship led to stagnation. Critical thought, experimental practice, and entrepreneurial savvy led to change, progress, and greatness. Indeed the world could/should transform at the speed of thought. Faster than thought. God was a speed demon.
I am now struck by the (almost) absolute faith our current society has in ancestors who worshiped speed, risk-taking, and the magic hand of the slaveholders. We honor those who believed might makes right and sanctify those who believed nothing trumps profit. The lives squandered and lost, the oceans, mountain, species eradicated, well, that’s just the regrettable, but inevitable collateral damage as we progress, as we careen into the future. To echo Gerald Vizenor, I ask: How do we not only survive the terror, cruelty, and oppression in these superstitions but how do we thrive? To call on James Baldwin, I wonder: How can we be enraged with the world but not consumed with despair? To riff on Alice Childress: How do we resist cutting ourselves in pieces? How do we hold all of who and what we are?
The artists on my list share the joy of feeling our complex world. They engage with these trying times. They celebrate the amazing entangled life forms. They examine the horror and the brilliance. And they do not despair. They invite us to hope.
Last Canto of the Dead, Outlaw Saints #2 by Daniel José Older is a polyrhythmic epic to all that we can be. Our flaws and the possibility of annihilation are on display. Mateo Matisse and Chela Hidalgo are two teenagers in love. They are also ancient spirits made flesh. They struggle to heal profound divisions in their diverse and complex communities in the lingering context of colonialism. This sequel to Ballad and Dagger is soul repair as is Daniel’s Sketchbooks & Scratchpads—a newsletter on substack.com.
In The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul contends that intelligence is always an interaction and mind is a community!
I reread Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring published in 1998. Talk about navigating the apocalypse with the wisdom and the idioms of the ancestors! See what happens when you (literally) steal someone’s heart! Afro-Caribbean ancestor wisdom rewrites the future.
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond is a devastating exploration of how we normalize poverty in America. Subsidizing wealth is our biggest priority, not eliminating poverty. The underpaid and overworked sustain comfortable middle and upper class lives. Desmond ruptures denial and complacency and points us towards what James Baldwin calls, “real change.” Real change is creating that future which sustains us all!
Rustin, a Netflix film starring Coleman Domingo and directed by George C. Wolfe was thrilling. The film focuses on civil rights activist Bayard Rustin who organized the 1963 March on Washington—a mammoth undertaking. Imperfect, complex people come together to make the world better. At first the other leaders, Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and others, sideline queer Quaker Rustin. But he’s got the vision and the skills to pull off the impossible. The leaders also sideline the women, refusing to let a woman speak at the Lincoln Memorial--Mahalia Jackson gets to sing, but women are denied a right to address the marchers. Big struggles in the struggle. As Rustin works to make their dreams a reality, the change makers don’t all get on, but he forces them to keep their eyes on the prize. Messy, hard, social change. Soul repair for right now!
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due was impossible to put down, not because of the brilliant dramatic structure, elegant characterizations, and lyrical language; not because of Due’s marvelous conjuration of the Jim Crow 1950’s. Her two young protagonists, Robbie and Gloria, must deal with restless spirits wandering the blood-soaked ground of our history. They must fend off monstrous men who torture children with impunity. I kept turning the pages because of Robbie’s and Gloria’s determination. They faced the horror of our world and refused despair. They gave me hope.
Andrea Hairston is a novelist, playwright, and scholar. Aqueduct Press published her first three novels, all of which are being reissued by 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. Master of Poisons, came out from Tor.com and was on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best SF and F list. Tor will publish Archangels of Funk in May of 2024.
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