The thing about love is that it is addictive. Like all addictive substances, everyone has a different tolerance: some have a low or higher tolerance, others crave a fantastical high and will do whatever it takes to get a hit, find themselves unable to handle even a minor dose without wanting more. Love is like a drug, and we all have taken some variant of it. I have to emphasize that drugs are not inherently bad or immoral - all drugs exist for valuable purpose. The metaphor of Love should hence be applied that way as well when engaging with this piece.

Do you know the source of your loving? Where it came from, how it grew and how it evolved with every person you experienced or every thing you cared about?

There’s nothing wrong with loving openly and genuinely but in a loveless world, when administered incorrectly, love can be deadly to both the giver and the receiver - but not in the way you might think it does.

When I talk about Love, I’m not referring to the butterflies in your stomach or the warm sentiments you might feel for another person. I’m referring to Love as a philosophy of power, and its capacity as a transformative agent to heal communities, institutions and individuals. This is based on bell hooks’ all about love: new visions, which offers a groundbreaking analysis of love and lovelessness in culture, relationships, religion, institutions and community work. It is in all about love that bell hooks asserts “love and abuse cannot exist.”

Love can shatter your reality and sense of comfort. Love is pure and true, and so it will reveal that truth to you no matter how hard you try to resist. People walk around with their guarded emotions , trying to be “hard” or “cool” or to embody whatever sociopathic characteristic that our capitalist society values more than compassion, consideration and community. Some people have their ego convince them of a specific narrative about who they are and what people ought to give them because of it: admiration, reverence, endless grace. They do this because they don’t believe they are real or worthy unless a person reacts to them and their performance. It confirms to them that their chosen persona is good enough, strong enough, powerful enough, convincing enough. Once a person does this long enough and consistently enough, their coping mechanism may morph into narcissism that manifests through reactive abuse.

Love can be terrifying when all you’re taught is to love violently (and possessively). It shatters your very self and asks for you to live outside this violence. Can you imagine what it takes to rebuild a soul conditioned to violence when it has never known peace?

A soul that is conditioned to violent love can look like:

• Being obsessed with someone who repeatedly rejects you because you learned early on that love is to be earned and that maybe one day, when they choose you, you will feel real love (you won’t)

• Staying quiet in your pain and discomfort because you want to avoid conflict and maintain the peace, because love can only be attained through your silence and complacency (you forgot your voice is the most powerful love you have)

• Chasing different people to hook up with, keeping hoes in different area codes so you can feel the intensity and validation of being wanted, because someone taught you that loving too openly, too sincerely, too passionately was too dangerous and too demanding for them to handle (you’ve never been too much and you always deserved to receive what you gave; your intensity is godly)

• Playing mind games, creating false illusions of who you are, setting up the next date before breaking up with your current partner because you’re afraid that the grief of heartbreak will break you like it did the first time (it never did)

• Believing there is always a better option, a better partner just waiting for you so you refuse to commit to the people who already choose you, because you don’t want them to leave you before you can leave them; because you learned partnerships never last (even though your endless love endures)

Like all drugs, we all find ourselves at some point in our lives using them for either recreational or medical uses. We aspire to it for the same reasons that we fear it – it’s why serial monogamists can’t stop their addiction for discovering themselves in other people over and over again. It’s why romantic partners betray themselves for cheap thrills and excitement after prolonged bouts of comfort and complacency to one another. It’s why a lover will forsake themselves and their desires by surrendering to the expectations of their community. It’s why people will make goal posts out of people, chiseling their future husband, wife, counsellor, wallet, baby maker, looking to find a perfect love crafted in their image.

This is all so amusing, to live in a world that values these acts of discovery and adventures with other people while keeping you blind to the fact that love cannot be planned. Love happens to everyone every day because that is the natural way of life.

Love, unfortunately, is not grand. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s exciting. It’s not a sweeping event or emotion. It’s also a choice rooted in action. Love is who you are and what you choose to be: you’re not eternally broken and no one ever broke you.

I am Inanna, the Queen of Heaven. I am the Goddess of War, Divine Justice, Pleasure and Power. I am Inanna and you're bearing witness to my journey into the underworld and how I rose anew…

The most liberating events happened to me over the past five years:

• Friendships I'd nourished for over ten years came to abrupt, painful endings

• Friends whose resentment, disrespect and disregard became undeniable

• Lovers turned spiteful and cruel

• Betrayals from friends and family were abound

I was cracked open like a pomegranate and my seeds scattered everywhere. I needed antidepressants for a while, while my body responded with anemia, fatigue, migraines, high cortisol, insomnia and erratic, irregular menses.

I was scattered, but I was also sent into the vast expanse of Self. Ordinary language couldn't capture my dilemma, so I reached for myth.

I repeatedly asked myself what I did wrong, what I overlooked, what I misunderstood or why my ancestors would punish me that way. I needed to know what exactly was wrong with me, broken within me.

I journeyed into my inner unknowns, the Underworld, with all of these questions, threads of inquiries that seemed to get more tangled with every inadequate answer I found. I needed to understand what about me was so broken to have attracted such a humiliating, dishonorable experiences. I meditated, performed cord cutting ceremonies, committed to sobriety, filled my honey jar with dreams, left offerings alongside my wishes and prayed to all the Goddesses who would listen.

All the answers took me to me a graveyard…

I reached the Underworld, and unmarked, uncovered graves stood before me. It took silencing my fear to actually sit and comprehend where I was: at the site of my shame. Before me were unnamed losses, forgotten selves, abandoned hopes, unspoken and unmet needs.

A lifetime of grief gone unacknowledged. A lifetime of dissociation and numbness I had mistaken for living.

It made sense now why my fear had always held me back from going there, to that intimidating darkness. Fear is so much louder that Shame, which whispers. Fear demands protection, a plan and a strategy. Shame asks to be hidden, to not be seen in its nakedness.

Yet Fear sits next to Grief which will not beg for anything, but need everything…

I visited each uncovered grave and grieved. Tears couldn't spring from my eyes but my spirit held the phantoms of all the pieces of me that had died and not been mourned:

• The girl who grew up too fast,

• The teen who felt too much and too intensely,

• The woman who thought her goodness was enough,

• The lover who thought her devotion proved her worth,

• The friend who believed loyalty would earn her community

So many shattered pieces of me that I believed I had moved on from, but whose voices had come together to birth my Shame. That shame asked for so much without demand. Shame asked me to undress and be as naked as she was, and to sit in that darkness with her. I was terrified, and in my terror realized that's how my shame had always felt: terrified and alone.

I mourned to set my ghosts free. I mourned to welcome back more life into my spirit. I mourned so my shame did not have to fear me abandoning myself again, as I had done so often over the course of my life.

As I mourned, my tears finally emerged like a cleansing balm to wash over me and sanctify my grief. I looked at the tapestry of my pain and was surprised I found beauty in it. I saw a picture of my younger self, my first incarnation to die, standing next to my mother. As my finger traced the image, I remembered how I first died at the hands of my mother…

"I am the God of your life," my mother said to me once. I was greening out in my college dorm room in attempt to medicate one of the many stresses of young adulthood. yet her words pierced through the haze so sharply I felt lucid. Her words echoed in my head for a long time afterward until they finally imprinted on the wall of my memory. She had always been adept at inducing fear, anxiety and trepidation in me but until she named herself as the God of my life did I truly fathom that deities could be cruel too. Indeed, she had always been a cruel God.

My mother was the Goddess of Lamentations who had seen so much strife and death, she was in perpetual grief of people and events that passed before she could fully mourn them. She was a goddess whose face was eternally buried in her hands; her tears spilled through her fingers like an bursting river flooding its banks. And like all mothers, she was a being of concentrated complexities and multiplicities.

I was conceived through violence and birthed in shame, and so when she held me in her arms, she had but one proclamation: she finally had someone to love her.

I was born to witness her eternal grief. I studied it so well I had became proficient in the language of melancholy. I was intensely aware of all the folds of her face, the glare in her eyes, the quiet yearning in her heart, the fire in her throat that she doused with silence and occasional red wine; a conspiracy of cluster headaches tormented her occasionally and restrained her to the dining table, where she would proceed to battle her demons with a wine glass and a stubborn, solemn silence that threatened to transform into anger if disturbed. I often wondered whether my mother recognized me in those moments as her child or one of the demons of her past that haunted her so ardently.

I came home one day, jubilant and ecstatic with childish glee, to find my mother seated in the living room. It was a beautiful sunny day, but a storm had cast over her face and she'd transformed into the Goddess of Lamentations. I saw the groves left by her eternal river of tears. My joy evaporated and I knew I was not her child in that moment. She saw something else, one of the demons that haunted her. Before I could move, she had forced me down onto the carpet, stripped me and began to beat me with a belt. She screamed a lot of things, but I was screaming too and so her words drowned in my tears. I was in pain and my body called for my protector.

"Mom! Mom!" I cried, snot bubbling on my nostrils and running into my mouth with a sweet-salty tang. My mother did not hear me, could not hear me. I was being punished by a Goddess who kept screaming that I was a whore. The Goddess pointed her finger at my naked, five year old body and screamed that I was a whore.

I grew up in fear of the Goddess of Lamentations such that melancholy became a lifelong companion. A deep profound sadness that permeated every facet of my life. So when she sent me to boarding school for eight years, it was both respite from her anger and a rupture from everything I had ever known.

The Goddess of Lamentations approached me after many years of not showing herself to me and demanded deference and affection. I was 27 years old and I found myself bereft. I showed her my grief and the scars I had received over the years. She looked at the wounds, sneered and demanded her offering, as she always had. Affronted and incredulous, she let her fury be known - that I wasn't her child but a being corrupted by malicious forces intent on starving her off her right to my eternally compliant devotion. For who was I without a mother, the being who had brought me into the world (and had also threatened to take me out of it multiple times)?

I found my salvation by severing the tapestry of pain that connected us, this umbilical cord that tethered us. I stood before my ghosts, the various incarnations of me that had died, and offered the umbilical cord as penance.

Together with my Shame, we buried the umbilical piece in the graveyard and sobbed together. We sat there, on the mound, as the sun began to rise in the horizon and I thought to myself, this is where my life begins anew. Feeling unafraid, unencumbered and untethered. Liberated…

This was an inspiring novel that I couldn’t put down. As the title suggests, Dream Count is an accounting of various wins, losses and dreams of four West African women and the challenges they have overcome in that pursuit. This story was also an autopsy uncovering all the ways in which men have destroyed many of those dreams, if not hindered them. Some events were a little too harrowing for me, which were so raw in their depiction of male violence that I had to put the novel down for those scenes. Readers should approach the novel with discretion as there are graphic depictions of sexual assault.

More than just about men, Dream Count is about camaraderie among women and the power of self love and self discovery as we age.

Have you ever read a fictional story with a character that seemed so real, it’s like a person you knew in real life had been transcribed onto a page and inserted into a story? Well, for the first time in a long time I felt immersed into a story; especially when one of the main characters, Chia, recounted her experiences with men like Darnell and Chuka. They’re equal parts funny and cringey because of how real the experience sounds.

All women have met a Darnell - the man who secretly hates you and envies you, and lets that out in passive aggressive and abusive ways; he’s always a fuse short of an explosion over the most trivial of matters and conversing with him is like walking on eggshells.

The novel isn’t solely about one woman and her romantic adventures, but also explores the intricate lives of three other women: Zikora, Kadiatou and Omelogor. Women from different economic backgrounds, religions, customs and upbringing. Women who have such contrasting identities yet whose lives are intricately interwoven. Best believe every single time a man comes into the picture, into these women’s lives, they always end up being deterred from whatever dream it is that they had.

Zikora had dreams of motherhood and matrimony but the man she trusted made a different choice. Her character is an intricate case study on how cultural conditioning, especially one with religious undertones, can lead young girls to overprioritize a man for the sake of an ideal. It is in the ruins of her fallen dreams that Zikora looks at her family, and the dreams of her mother, and comes to a profound realization that changes how she sees herself. It turns out she never needed a man after all.

There is Omelogor - the “strong” and self-possessed friend, the effortlessly confident woman who seemingly has it all. She navigate a man’s world with ease and calm that leaves characters like Zikora slowly burning up inside. A sociologist at heart, she runs a Bank that launders corruption while funding ambitious market women on her weekend errands, and all that in addition to running a sex blog that advises men on sex and relationships. She was a morally enticing character. She was blunt, direct and deliciously complex, a character who refused to be liked by the audience. Goodreads reviewers did not find her character appealing at all, while I found her uncompromising character charming in its refusal to be boxed in by convention.

Then there is Kadiatou whose story broke my heart.

Chimamanda Adichie was indeed inspired by a true story for Kadiatou, and addressed this inspiration in detail, citing the urge to give life to an invisible woman whose horrific experience went unacknowledged. In 2011, the head of the IMF and French presidential hopeful, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested in New York and charged with the brutal sexual assault and rape of a hotel maid. I won’t go in detail about that case, but Chimamanda’s writing definitely accomplished in giving attention to the machinations of power and their deliberate obfuscation of violent crimes against working class women. Nafissatou Diallo, the victim whose story inspired the creation of Kadiatou, is barely mentioned in the media accounts of the case, as the emphasis is solely on the impacts of the allegation on Dominique Strauss Kahn’s reputation. There was no way to read Nafissatou’s and Kadiatou’s stories without being angry. There are thousands of poor, hard working women who endure traumatizing and humiliating violence at the hands of powerful men but become invisible because the world would rather protect power than confront the reality of these powerful men represent: that they are harmful people and by extension their policies, laws and outlook harms everyone, not just the invisible poor.

Lastly there’s Chia, the narrator of the story, who’s dated African Americans, married men, European men, and Nigerian men. None of them made her happy, or at least none of them seemed close enough to fulfil her dream of a grand, consuming love. I don’t think a man could have fulfilled Chia’s dream of love, as she herself hadn’t defined love for herself. It’s easy to consider her character an idealist, but what makes her a great narrator (besides being a writer - an echo to the author), was her love of life and people.

Dream Count felt incredibly intimate; a culmination of lessons, joys and experiences that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie chose to share in brilliant narrative prose. It definitely felt like a gift from an elder to younger women and I cherish it for arriving at an auspicious time in my life. Books have always had a way of imprinting themselves on me over the course of my emotional and spiritual development, and Dream Count meets me on the eve of my Saturn return in the most synchronous way.

"There is always violence, Mama. I didn't cause it. I found it there…. I give myself the right to re-member. The memories are mine. Mine! You never have to constantly look at the violence. You forget it easy. You close your eyes and turn the other way and receive the mercy of forgetting. For me, there is never any mercy. Never forgetting…. So if I have to see the violence, and wear it under the skin of my eyes, then it belongs to me too and I have the right."

It is said that children are like sponges who absorb everything and anything around them, and in Things They Lost Ayosa Ataraxis Brown is a young girl blessed with the gift of remembrance: she can remember people and events that occurred long before she was born. A living archive of her family history, Ayosa is burdened with the weight of all the generations of women who came before her and is compelled to make a decision that either breaks or compounds the cycle of pain.

Things They Lost by Okwiri Oduor is the first novel by a Kenyan writer that I've read in a while and I enjoyed the magical realist style coupled with the particular way Kenyans speak (starting sentences with Me, I or Because). We all have been little Ayosa's and come to witness the narratives that shaped the people closest to our livet: we saw how certain narratives continued to influence them or hurt them. As adults, we have come to experience and create our own stories and narratives that continue to shape who we are - there are some stories that are not spoken of, some stories that are buried and others that have been deliberately re-written for a variety of reasons. Oduor's writing is riveting, as it reflects back the complexities of our personal histories and their interconnected relationship with the world around us, both past and present.

All major characters are women and by that account this novel reads much like a retelling of the matriarchal history of a town in Kenya; in this case Mapeli Town, which was founded and named after a British settler woman named Mabel Brown (as is common for some African towns and cities, their current names are phonological adaptations of francophone or anglophone names. This is how Mabel became Mapeli).

The matriarch of this story, Mabel Brown, was an indifferent settler and mother to her daughter, Lola Freedom Brown, who grew up to become an alcoholic and absentee mother. Lola went on to birth three children, a son, Maxwell Truth, and twin daughters, Rosette and Namumbo Promise Brown. Much like her mother, Lola was neglectful of her children, being emotionally withholding and tolerating nothing but their absolute silence.Silence is in fact, a major motif in the story. Namumbo Promise Brown, the mother of the protagonist, Ayosa Ataraxis Brown, was also neglectful of Ayosa and for most of the story Ayosa lives alone in her ancestral home, haunted by grieving spirits and surviving only though the generosity of her neighbours.

Namumbo, the protagonists mother, also suffers from dissociative spells throughout the novel, which are probable symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder. This condition is a shadow of her troubled childhood that further strain her relationship to her daughter, Ayosa. It's also meant to speak to her fractured sense of self and disconnection from her community.

In Western Kenya, where the story is likely set, there exists a superstition that twins are a bad omen, and through the respective fates of Rosette and Namumbo, Oduor reiterates the complexity of how inherited trauma affects multiple members of a household differently, and how this trauma is often compounded by social-cultural expectations.

In many Indigenous communities around the world, including African communities, a person's name is a blessing and an embodiment of their purpose. Through magical realism, this quality shines through in many of the characters names, particularly in the Brown women's middle names: Freedom, Promise and Ataraxis (in reference to ataraxia, the quality of pure tranquility and peace of mind). Brown, embodies her name in that she is the tranquility that her mother and her mother's mother sought after years of endless grief.

When it comes to magical realism, the natural world and the immaterial world are treated as co-existent, a facet that is inherited from African traditional belief systems that sees the natural and spiritual worlds as intertwined. This is to say that names, events and even natural phenomena share a causal relationship. Incidents are therefore never a coincidence, and are often informed by each other, even if parties involved may never truly understand why or how. So, this is how memory becomes a living artefact in Things They Lost. As a stylistic choice for magical realism, memory is used to showcase the history of Mapeli Town and the Brown women across time and space.

I say that memory is a living artefact because in the novel it often takes various forms such as that of the phantom like beings called wraiths. Memory also manifests as supernatural ability, like Ayosa's gift that allows her to remember events that occurred before she was born. Another character, Sindano (meaning needle), has the ability to identify and hold these wraiths. Overall, these wraiths add an element of fantasy to the novel that is both poignant and intentional to the themes of the story: these ghosts are neither living nor dead, disconnected from time and space and are either unknown, unseen or forgotten by the living. These wraiths are a form of living memory. It's why throughout the novel some wraiths are constantly grieving victims of tragedy while others aim to steal the bodies of gifted humans so they can be alive again.

Okwiri Oduor does not shy away from explicit themes of grief, emotional abuse, abandonment and neglect, substance abuse and murder. In fact, it is made clear that healing from these grave spiritual and emotional wounds takes community work and that silence only exacerbates these challenges. Case in point: Namumbo and Rosette are shown to have spent a literal, quiet childhood not speaking or being spoken to by their mother or others, which leads to their dysfunctional relationships with themselves and others. In contrast, Ayosa is cared for and loved by a community of loved ones such as Mbiu, Sindano and Jentrix, who is specially noted for "pleading for Ayosa's life" after Namumbo threw her in a river as a babe.

Mkono mmoja haulei mwana is a Kiswahili proverb that means one hand cannot raise a child. It takes a community to raise a child, in as much as it takes a community to establish a village such as Mapeli Town and its haunted grim beginnings as the home of a troubled white settler. There is much to be said on Kenya's colonial history and the subtle ways it has informed the narrative of this story, but I thought it best to center the women characters in this story instead, who are more than just victims of their circumstances. Like all women, especially African women, they were surviving deeply unequal odds in the best way they knew how with the limited support available to them.

It will scare you when it happens again. Even now I can sense the apprehension and fear: you’re afraid you’re not thinking clearly; that you need to run away. You’re afraid of the kind of person you are when you like someone.

You worry if the next person you fall for is another pattern of avoidance, self-betrayal and unworthiness wounds. You wonder if once again they’re your pattern of falling for simple words with no action (manipulation) so you can prove yourself worthy, or whether they’re the pattern of stifling your true wants, needs and intuition for their acceptance. Your silence will not protect you from their cruelty

I can assure you that anyone whose energy constricts your soul into silence is not for you. You will likely be tested by more experiences in the future. You can trust that you’ve learned all the ways your negative patterns and conditioning let themselves known.

When it’s meant to be it will be calming and reassuring. You won’t feel butterflies and anxiety. You won’t feel excited. It will feel so aligned with you, you won’t have to overextend or go outside yourself to experience it. Your soul will be as loud and as natural as the thundering waterfall.

You deserve genuine and transformative love. It will come and you’ll recognize it. Allow it.

I initially had my qualms when reading the first few pages of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde because I anticipated the recycling of the tropes and styles in her previous work. I enjoyed Seven Days in June and Accidental Diva but after reading two books with the same plot, setting and characters I felt apprehensive about A Long Song for Ricki Wilde.

I realized half way through, however, that what fascinates me about her style of romance, what keeps me coming back, is that Williams excels at playing with tension; she knows how to time moments between characters' introduction and eventual meeting, she understands the subtlety of teasing and making the reader yearn for the lovebirds to interact. The payoff is often sweet, sometimes devastating but always rewarding because as a reader, when the lovebirds meet, their interactions - no matter how minute - are charged with emotion that feel intimately personal, as though you were an integral part of their story. Williams has shown that the inexplainable magic of human connection is quite simple: it's the moments that bring us together.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is about the timelessness of love, the weight of time the burden of expectation and how our legacy endures through others. It's a modern fairy tale that is a love letter to the City of Dreams, New York, and the history of music and Black artists.

The story is written to reflect modernity and the past: Ricki's story is set in 2024 while Ezra's story is set in the 1920's, during the Harlem Renaissance. With each chapter, we get a bit of popular culture from each era, as well as nuggets about music from rthe 20th century through Ezra, who is a talented musician. Where it gets fascinating is that Ezra is revealed to be 100 years old when he meets Ricki. He has not aged one bit. But he's not a vampire! He's a perennial.

A perennial is someone who is cursed to live forever but will never be remembered. It's how Williams brilliantly showcases that love is all about how we are remembered. In his anecdotes about helping influential Black musicians of the 20th century, Ezra states that he was not credited because he was cursed to be forgotten within a week by every person who met him. Ricki Wilde, is a clumsy, free-spirited woman whose dreams go against her family values. She is made out to be a disappointment to her family, whose business dabbles in literal death - her family owns funeral homes. Ricki Wilde is the only one who does not forget Ezra after she first meets him.

They are two characters from disparate moments in time, fated to meet and conquer the supernatural. In many ways, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a chronicle of inherited, generational pain and triumphs. That's what makes Ezra and Ricki story feel real.

What I appreciate about A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is that Williams has shown that she is aware of the successful formula she's utilized in her previous books, notably Accidental Diva and Seven Days in June (my favorite). Her characters are often intensely, desperately in love and fiercely codependent. The male leads are always deeply traumatized while the female leads are often quirky, eccentric and/or naive women who are sheltered. The cliché of good girl meets bad boy is apparent but well executed.

Tia Williams is also quite self-reflexive in her writing. Her female protagonists share her predisposition to migraines, a writing career, Creole heritage, a precocious pre-teen daughter and a deep appreciation for the City of Dreams, New York.

She makes you care for her characters who have a richness, texture and depth to them. She imbues her characters with history that feels real. Both leading characters undergo a journey of self-discovery of sorts.

As mentioned earlier, Tia Williams never fails to highlight intricate elements of Black American culture, particularly as it pertains to Black women's history in America, to which Vodou is no exception. In A Love Song, the spiritual legacy of the American south plays a key role in the plot of the story, as is the acknowledgement of the 'lost' women whose stories and dreams have been drowned by the tides of time. There is a recognition that many of these women, who greatly contributed to African American culture, have been unnamed, unclaimed, unacknowledged, uncredited. Many of these women were ambitious, they were dreamers who had to resort to desperate tools such as Voodoo or Hoodoo to carve space in a world that didn't want them to take space. It is thanks to some of these women that we can celebrate women like Beyonce today, or even remember Josephine Baker.

A love song to New York, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is an impeccable culmination of Tia Williams' writing career: a wonderful historical romance novel that celebrates Black arts and culture, Black women and Black spirituality. I'm glad I did not put this book down. I'm very excited on what Williams will write next.

“Everyone runs from pain towards the pleasure, but they get there only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain.”

- The White Lotus (2025), dir. Mike White

We all have a perverse relationship with our pain and savor it in unconscious ways: like picking on a scab till it bleeds, biting on nails till they’re raw to the finger tips or bursting a particularly stubborn pimple. It’s disgusting, but there is something sensual about pain and the ensuing pleasure around it. The experience of pain/pleasure carries variable feelings of disgust, shame, irritation. The point is that these feelings, these undesirable emotions that accompany the ying and yang dynamic of pain and pleasure, can be heavy and unwanted, leading many into repression, fear and dissonance.

There is a certain joy and entertainment in consuming and witnessing horror media, not only because horror and fear are universal primal experiences but also because media are a safe expression of our most buried, shamed fears. Horror, in this writing, exclusively refers to the intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust, which is not to be conflated with violence, the act of causing intentional harm to the detriment of a person’s physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.

I’ve always enjoyed horror media, for their stylistic elements as well as their provocative themes which tend to put societal taboos, superstitions and fears on a microscope to be observed and enjoyed (safely). For example, horror classics like Carrie explore female teen angst (especially with the scarlet red motif designed to echo period blood) and the Alien franchise is an allegory for reproductive justice and body autonomy; Alien succeeds as a feminist film by subverting gender through body horror experienced primarily through male characters. If you have never watched Alien, it’s about a matriarchal alien race that forcefully implants its parasitic offspring into human hosts without their consent. It’s victims often happen to men while the heroes who save the day are women.

What do horror films have to do with our personal relationships to pain?

It was Train to Busan that truly made me a fan of the zombie genre. I was both terrified but also fascinated by these undead apparitions that insisted on being alive and consuming the living who wanted nothing but to defend their love and liberty; people who would go to extreme lengths for their self-preservation. When I unpacked my fascination with the undead, I discovered that they speak to my own inherent fears around losing my sense of self and being taken advantage of by someone I care about, of being utterly consumed. It was liberating to see my fears take the shape of these monsters, which in turn made it easier to confront the roots of my fears in the first place.

Accepting my love of zombies was admitting to myself that a part of me enjoyed fearing my capacity to be fully present for myself and others, and to share myself openly and vulnerably. My therapist once observed that I “was very good at finding ways to prove to myself that I was un-loveable”, and she was right, because that was how I fed my zombies. I relished in the belief that no one could ever truly love me like I deserved to. Convention would have you rule this as self-loathing, but in actuality it was grandiosity: I believed I was too good to be loveable and my existence was beyond human foibles such as love. So, I fed my zombies by erecting emotional walls, finding emotionally unavailable partners, pushing away anyone trying to get close and when they inevitably left, I could cry, “woe is me, I was right!”

Pain gives us meaning, control and motivation. Yet, we are destined for more than just suffering. In a world that often seems blind to our pain, our suffering feels like a debt we pay to keep on living but I would argue that is not the case at all. We are not solely built for suffering even when pain seems inescapable. Pain is a mirror to our pleasure, and as Rumi poetically put it “the wound is where the light enters you.” Pain shows us where the wound is so we can acknowledge it, drain it, clean it and dress it. This process is easier said than done because it is shocking and horrifying to look at the bleeding, gaping wounds some experiences have wrought on us. So, if we are to learn anything from horror films, it’s that looking at the horror that is our wounds can be courageous enough, and that asking for help doesn’t make is weak – it makes us and our team stronger.

Why is it difficult to see our own pain sometimes? For the same reason a fish doesn’t know what water is, only that that is its home – we don’t recognize pain as pain if that is all we have known. It’s why sometimes being told to ‘heal’ can feel like a hurtful accusation from which we have to defend ourselves. To name some of these patterns more clearly, let’s look at attachment theory which names four types of relational wounds: secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized. These wounds can grow and evolve as we experience relationships and new relationships. When looking at anxious and disorganized as relational wounds, we can discuss a pattern like people pleasing as a way in which pain transforms into a sense of stability, security and even pleasure. People pleasing as a behavior rests on the belief that a person’s emotional response can be manipulated to accommodate your safety and every time this tactic works, there is a sense of validation. It does not feel like abandonment or being invisible, because this is a way in which pain gives a sense of control and meaning. However, when we look at people pleasing as a way in which pain transforms into pleasure, we can see that it is a pattern of pretending not to be seen, a belief that becomes an addictive ritual of self-abandonment because the pain at the root of it keeps promising safety and every time someone is blind to that behavior it only further reinforces its success.

It's why I think calling such patterns coping mechanisms is reductive and mars the complexity of the anatomy of pain. They obscure the lifetime of work and intricacy that has gone into giving our pain shape and form in a world that often cannot -and does not – want to acknowledge our hurt. These maladaptive strategies are testimonies of courageous self-preservation built over time.

But just like the monsters in horror movies, once you see the pain, you will be able to name it, take responsibility for it or heal it. If you want to that is.

Systems and how external pain becomes Internalized

As human beings we are more than just collections of our traumas and pain that we have spent our lifetime alchemizing. We are also repositories of stories, joy, beauty and resilience.

The pain we experience in our lives is often out of our control and often inflicted by institutions with power over all aspects of our lives. These institutions often demand blood sacrifice to prove our worth, in turn promising to reward us for having suffered enough: are you marginalized enough? Are you too privileged? Is this enough trauma to convince the committee to approve your application?

This constant process of proving ourselves and our pain becomes habitual because it means we are visible to the world. Visible pain means being a perfect victim, which translates to a person deserving of care. It’s why ‘strong’ people often get overlooked as people needing care. However, the caveat in all this is that only certain expressions of pain and certain bodies can be considered ‘perfect’ victims – Black women and Indigenous women, for instance, seldom are.

There’s a sharp contrast between the pain we carry internally and how it is publicly consumed. This often leads to a disconnect—a split between the self we feel and the one the world reflects back at us. A disenchantment of sorts that fractures how we see ourselves from how the world sees us. Here we witness pain get transformed into pleasure as it manifests into sexual kinks, fetishes, intrusive thoughts and habitual vices, which ironically are also laden with shame. By turning our pain into tools of connection with others, we further valorize our pain and that of others, especially when their wounds match ours.

No one has ever said they’ve discovered life’s pleasures by indulging more of their pleasures– they found it through adversity and pain. Pain is an inevitable guarantee and there’s a security and comfort in that. This is not to say we don’t deserve pleasure – on the contrary, it’s also an inevitable experience albeit one we often mistrust unless we feel we have given it to ourselves. Again, I want us to apply our understanding of horror media to our own experiences of pain: who or what is the big monster in our life? What makes it so scary? How did it arrive? What does it seek to accomplish? How do we save ourselves and those we love from it?

By answering these questions, we may synthesize our pain into pleasure, and hopefully, into fulfilment without fear, for pain is a map that shows where we have been, where we are and what we are capable of. It’s why our scars itch sometimes and healed bones ache with the rain.

Every morning I wear my body anew because every night I die. My bones crack and snap as I rise from my Queen sized grave. Loose skin and muscles are strewn all around me like viscera. I am inside my body looking at the outside of it, a hollow shell looking at its cover. The act of wearing my body is a sacred ritual that requires skill, it demands attention and accuracy. It’s a sensual experience of acquainting myself with a holy object.

I start with the face and apply the foundation gently. I place a sheet of Frontalis from my scalp to my brow bone. Temporalis to cover my temples and support half of what will be my cheeks, the masseter muscles. I make sure the zygomaticus attach themselves gently to the smooth curves along my cheeks. I look carefully at the mirror.

Naked eyeballs stare back at me with intense hazel eyes. Clear mucus glistens on the surface as I place the circular orbucalri oris. I always wonder at what point they transform into windows into my soul. The first time I wore my body I quickly I learned not to place these pancake-like muscles directly over my eyeballs if I did not want dehydrated eyes or eye sockets that looked too swollen from being misplaced on my face. After the face, every other muscle, tendon and sinew is easy game. I just have to be sure to throw those lats and traps in their proper place before proceeding. There is an order and design to all this, otherwise there are aches and pinches all over. The worst that can happen is that this body no longer feels like mine- or refuses to work. A body that can work is a useful body, a valuable body.

Next up are the blood vessels: from the small capillaries, to the slim veins to the even larger arteries which form an intricate network for blood to flow from the heart to the face. In a drunken stupor I once cut one of my arteries and to my surprise no blood spilled out from it. When I looked at that fleshy pipe, the blood inside had just coagulated into a shiny, crystal purple-like mass. I never drank wine again, convinced that the sinful liquid had transmuted my blood. I picked up the artery network, making sure I could locate the functional aorta that would connect my heart to my other organs.

The only piece of this body that could not fall apart, or at least ensured I awoke every day, was the Heart. Besides the 206 bones, this little sack of muscle could not be removed. I know because I’d tried, and the sensation itself felt worse than when my skin peeled off my body and my organs dropped out of me every night.

Once all that is done, all the organs within the digestive, respiratory, urinary and reproductive system are put in place and then covered by the skin. Squeezing the uterus between the bladder and intestines is an awkward process I had to get used to over time; I nearly sprained by pelvis in the process. I laid out my skin in front me. A material so taught yet sensitive it could tear at the slightest mistouch. It had a good and healthy layer of subcutaneous body fat, was the colour of roasted peanuts on the external side and was about 5 feet and 6 inches in length. I traced the small scars across the wrists and on the thighs that were marked like little exes along the fleshy fabric. I could never explain how they got there, or how they looked like a prisoner’s tally scratched along the wall of their cell, impatiently waiting for the day of their release. It didn’t matter to me as long as they were not too visible. This body had to look perfect; great products always come with some small mistake. The tiny ends of the capillaries dangled here and there from various points of my bodily frame – these would have to be clipped into place with the current capillaries on my organs and muscles. They were only slightly larger than the more intricate nerves.

Diligence is advised in this body wearing process because one small misstep and it would cease to function completely. Bodies are expensive and limited.

Once I’d clipped and connected the capillaries, smoothened the edges where skin met muscle, particularly at the complicated shoulder, elbow, hip and knee joints, I could tie my skin at my nape. This is why I have to start with the face because pulling my skin all over it, with all of its hair on my scalp that I did not want to tangle and knot, could shift everything out of place if done carelessly.

Once everything is in place, I move my shoulders, shake my legs a little and look everything over to make sure nothing was out of place. There are laugh lines along my cheeks and small folds on my forehead from scowling and frowning. My neck had beautiful rings like Saturn around it. There were acne scars from too much hormone production all over my chest and face. Remnants of animal bites also populated my hands and legs. I cannot explain how some of them got there, but it’s rather amusing to imagine the story that bore them.

I turned to look at the mirror once again, and this time a naked reflection stared back at me. The rich brown melanin did not glow as it usually did because I had not turned my heart on just yet and so the blood had not begun to flow. I could see the coagulated deep magenta frozen on my hands and feet. My fingertips, toes and lips were a slight blue. And because the Heart was not on yet, I could tug at the tight muscles that made up my biceps and not feel a thing. I could stretch out my hamstrings so straight they became as thin as toothpicks, only to spring back to their full shape once I relaxed my body. I could do a 360-degreee backbend where my forehead touched my heels and the twig-like snapping of my bones would not be a dire concern. The body is a body, and pain is more of an experience than a simple event like a morning stretch. I never believed the sounds of my body, so long as it awoke functional and in good condition.

If there are concerns, the manufacturers will make the necessary repairs.

It’s always good to run a diagnostic of all minor reactions and gesticulations such as a laughs and winks. When I laugh, I feel the muscles on my cheeks tighten and loosen as I open and close my jaw. I let out a ‘ha ha ha’ but it does not quite sound the like the laugh I had expected – it’s important to note your voice sounds different in your head from what external organisms will register. This two letter word is a simple and energy efficient way to test the body’s emotive capabilities, as the larynx is a powerful little box with strings that can replicate a musical instrument.

I glanced at the time. 7:30am. The realization of impending purpose on my day brought out a smile. Most internal organs did not have oxygen yet and in order for the fabric of the skin to remain healthy and steady, the heart had to be turned on. It was the most excruciating process of all this. You’d think paving an intricate road for blood vessels was hard enough, but the heart could be one stubborn organ. And there is just one of it!

It was such a complicated mechanism, and needlessly so. It required both physical dexterity and mental conviction to turn on. I had to convince my own heart to turn on. I had to convince myself that I was alive, take a deep breath and clear my mind until I saw a light in the back of my mind. My opinion is that the manufacturer or engineer of this particular organ had done an awful job. It should be able to turn on automatically as soon as it was worn, but according to the manufactory, this act of convincing was key in invoking spirit, the energy that powered this body even while on stand-by.

I took a deep, deep breath and whispered the password, “I am alive.”

Nothing but darkness responded. And so, I continued to wait while trying to clear my mind.

“I am alive,” I said, again. I noted the hint of irritation behind my own words and so was not surprised when only darkness responded once more. I sighed and looked down at my hands, where the tips of my fingers had slowly turned blue. I didn’t have much time before the rest of my body followed suit.

I therefore put my irritation to the side and decided to honour this body as it clearly demanded. I had to go to work, but this body demanded to be seen as more than a tool. This heart, in particular, demanded worship and acknowledgement for the work it did to drive this body. The more I fought or resisted or denied it it’s power, the more it would prove to me it didn’t care what I had to do for that day. And if I wanted power over my heart, I had to surrender.

I quietly cursed the Creator.

I closed my eyes, which only moments ago were naked white balls but were now like fluttering petals gently grazing my cheeks. I ran my hands across my face, felt the thickness of my lips, the width of my nose and big forehead where moments ago I had attached the fine layers of facial muscles. Then I traced my chest, my stomach and felt the dip where my hips emerged to connect with my torso and my legs. It was a beautiful machine of work, a beautiful canvas. Where it deserved warmth, it was only cold. It had to be lit up to be even more beautiful.

I took a deep, calm breath.

“I am Alive.”

I felt the light first before I saw it. It was warmth that glowed from my chest and spread to the tips of my toes and ended on the centre of my forehead. I saw constellations and felt my body react to more than itself, reacting to the world outside itself - goosebumps and hair rose on my skin. My fingers tingled. My toes curled.

Breath entered my lungs like an answered prayer. I felt power fill my belly, rise to my chest and proceed to bless my entire being. I observed my fingers, brough them to my face and smiled.

This body would take some time getting used to, as wearing it always felt like being plugged and unplugged across various systems. I looked at the digital clock: 0700 hours.

The communicator is attached to your tragus, and when it’s time to begin your workday, it will chime gently.

_______

On behalf of Steinhauer Inc, thank you for purchasing one of our Synthetic models. We guarantee the highest quality in sentient machinery that is indistinguishable from a real human. Contact us for any malfunctions or bugs such as violent behaviour, physical and/or mental disabilities or impaired cogntivite patterns. We hope this guide offers insight to how a Synthetic model ‘thinks’ and interacts with its physical body in a manner that is ‘relatable’ to you. Whether it’s for play, work, conversation or intimacy, you’ve chosen the perfect partner. We hope you go enjoy your smart toy - don’t forget to give it a cute name!

Everyone in the surrounding villages believed Nekesa to be a witch. A girl born with eyes as blue as the sky and skin as light sun stones could not be normal in any way. Yet, no one could deny that she was the greatest Farmer any of them had ever known. Whether it was through witchcraft or skill, thanks to the food she grew the people of village became healthier and stronger every year. Even the sickly District Commissioner who many thought was a djinn, with his pale skin and green eyes, purchased all his vegetables from her because they made him feel more invigorated than the food he was used to. According to Grandmother, The DC and the Governor had been on a campaign for years to destroy what they called ʻindigenous plants consumed by the backward nativesʼ in favor of tea, kale and flowers because they made more money. Entire family gardens were uprooted to make space for cash crops, and as taxes rose, so did the number of starving families who couldnʼt afford to buy nor grow their own food. After the DC and Governor finally contracted malaria, it was only Nekesaʼs vegetables and herbs that successfully weaned them back to health, bringing an abrupt end to the campaign. They never talked about the campaign after that, and never really bothered to compensate any of the communities theyʼd destroyed. What had been a nightmare for many was treated as a minor oversight on their part. Grandmother seethed and cursed them whenever government officials came to their home to collect taxes.

Still, the villagers feared Nekesa from the moment theyʼd first seen her. It was when Grandmother took to her to the market for the first time when she was a little msichana. For the next couple of weeks people refused to buy anything from them, even when Grandmother had built herself a good reputation at the market for years. Up until Nekesaʼs undeniable talent emerged, Grandmother had been the best Farmer in the surrounding villages.
It wasnʼt until Grandmother unintentionally left Nekesa at home one day that people finally bought her greens again. That was the first and only time Grandmother hadnʼt chided Nekesa for oversleeping. Since that day, however, there was an unspoken agreement between them that Nekesa would tend to the shamba while Grandmother sold whatever she produced.

Today, Nekesa had overslept and woken to the sound of bellowing and bleating livestock. She jumped out of bed in fear and met her furious Grandmother by the door with brows furrowed into a knot on her forehead and arms akimbo, wielding a mwiko like a sword. Nekesa should have been up before sunrise to fetch water from the river, plough the shamba and let out the livestock to graze. Judging from her Grandmotherʼs silent and smoldering fury, the old woman had already done this herself.

Nekesa gave her a nervous smile as she darted between the old womanʼs legs just as she was about to whack her with the mwiko. Grandmother hurled unpleasantries at her as she ran. She smiled victoriously. The old woman was too old to run aer her and would be too tired to

punish her later in the day. Her Grandmother was a loving, caring woman, but she was strict. She considered laziness a vice in her household, and that rest was only afforded aer a good day of work.

As expected, Nekesa found half of the shamba neatly ploughed and watered, while the other half, filled with greens in need of attention, was untouched. Nekesa usually did the entire shamba by herself, but this was Grandmotherʼs ironic and spiteful way of teaching her responsibility. Nekesa felt the heat of shame creep up her neck – letting your elders do heavy manual labor was a sign of disrespect. She would have to work the entire day, not to mention make lunch and dinner, fetch water from the borehole and then collect firewood to make up for it. She was already tired just thinking about it. Grandmother always took care of the domestic chores. Nekesa sighed in exasperation but she only had herself to blame.

In her shamba, Nekesa grew Terere, Managu, Mrenda, Kunde, Nderema and Seveve of various growths and sizes that were the envy of other farmers. They were so lush and vibrant they seemed to glow. They sold so well at the Saturday market that people even paid Grandmother in advance. Even though mrenda was generally disliked due to its bitterness, Nekesa had found a way to make it taste better by cooking it with various other greens like terere. Together, both plants aided with headaches, digestive problems and relieved womenʼs monthly bleeding and restored energy and strength. Managu and Kunde were also beneficial for those ailing with anemia while Nderema revitalized pregnant women and young children. All these greens needed to be watered, pruned, weeded and fertilized. Aerwards, she would mother the seedling nursery and check on the fruit trees that demarcated their home. Naughty little vijanas were always climbing them to steal their mangoes and avocadoes.

Farming was Nekesaʼs pride and joy, and her secret mostly involved talking and singing to her plants. When she did, birds would also perch themselves on or around her to listen to her. This didnʼt particularly aid her reputation as a witch, but she had come to care less about what people thought of her. Grandmother had always urged Nekesa not to fear or worry about the villagers, for human beings always needed a scapegoat for their fear: “People will always fear what they donʼt understand. Donʼt worry about people who are dedicated to misunderstanding you.”

She rubbed her fingers on a big Managu leaf and began to whistle a melody. A tinkerbird caught her rhythm and joined with a whistle of its own. Nekesa chuckled as she continued to fondly pet her plants.
“Nekesa, Nekesa,” a whispery voice suddenly called out to her, “Nekesa, Nekesa, my daughter you are so beautiful and strong.” Startled, Nekesa looked up and around her. She saw the distant figure of her hunched back Grandmother sweeping the patio of their hut, lost in her own thoughts. She shook her head. As a small msichana she thought she could hear her plants speak and ask her for things like chicken bones and cow manure. Grandmother had dismissed her experiences as the wanton imaginings of a child. As she grew older, theyʼd

stopped talking to her but she had continued the conversations. She told them stories, praised them and in turn they grew bigger and leafier.

She must have imagined the voice but then she heard it again, this time from the ground. It came from the Managu. She lied its leaves to find a small silver snake with red eyes looking up at her. Its scales gleamed and shone in the light. It was beautiful. Awed, she watched it open its mouth and speak to her: “Nekesa, Nekesa, come close my daughter.”

She wasnʼt afraid, and she looked at the little snake with a childish curiosity. It was so short for a snake, barely the size of her forearm and with a head too big for its body. It looked like a living rungu. Without thinking, she reached out her finger and screamed in shock when the snake suddenly bit her. As she screamed and convulsed on the ground, only gurgles and chortles came out of her mouth as her body transformed into stone. She heard fast and heavy footsteps rushing towards her as everything turned black.

She opened her eyes and found herself lying in shallow waters. The sky had turned black with blue, red and purple clouds. There was no sun and yet she could see. She was surrounded by big, thick barked monkey bread trees with networks of branches that seemed to stretch into endlessness. One-eyed monkeys and mandrills were hanging from the leafless branches while three-eyed crows looked at her quizzically. A giant imbongo with magnicifent antlers held an omnipresence around her. Wherever she looked, she saw the majestic waterbuck that was indifferent to her. Where was she? One of the birds with a crack in its beak flew towards her and Nekesa covered her face in fear it would peck out her eyes.

“Look at this girl!” the bird spat. “You think youʼre protecting yourself from me? What descendant of mine canʼt respect her elder?”
Nekesa peeked out to look at the creature without dropping her arms. Another bird came fluttering towards her. A monkey with no teeth and tongue laughed.

“Maybe we called her here too soon,” another bird said. “She is as timid as a mouse.”
“This is what we get for soiling our ancestry. She is pathetic,” the first bird said. Several monkeys laughed and jeered at the comment. A faceless mandrill appeared out of thin air and drank from the pool she was sitting on. She was incredulous at the sight before her. She must have gone mad.

When Nekesa finally found her voice she tried to speak but only water poured out her mouth. The birds flapped their wings and the monkeys cackled as if it were the funniest thing.
“Here, my dear, you speak with your spirit and not your tongue. Do you know your spirit?” the first bird asked her in a stern voice. The voice was oddly familiar but she couldnʼt place it.

She was shocked and scared, but screaming only made it worse.

“Child, you need to find out who you are before you can come here again,” the first bird said, exasperatedly. The other birds, monkeys and mandrills were still laughing. The faceless mandrill raised his hand and everything went quiet. In a deep, somber voice it said:
“I offer you this wisdom, my child. You were named aer the harvest for you are a daughter of the earth. The land will always feel at home with you, but, like a firm tree you need to stretch your roots to find your stability. Itʼs good to be grounded, but it even better to grow.”

When the mandrill finished speaking, the first bird flapped its massive wings and the water beneath her began to rise. As the world around her became smaller, she saw a phantasmagoric human face behind the wings: it was an old bald woman with a permanent scowl and serious eyes like her Grandmother.

Nekesa opened her eyes to Grandmotherʼs wet face. Her eyes were red so she must have been crying for a long time. Nekesa felt as fresh and clear headed as day, which is why Grandmother was startled when she rose up easily from her bed.

“Grandmother, Iʼm sorry I worried you and I think we need to talk, but first, will you come with me?” Grandmother wiped her eyes and caressed Nekesaʼs beautiful face.

Nekesa took Grandmotherʼs wrinkly dry arm and together they walked towards the monkey bread tree, also called a Baobab. It was at the bottom of the large hill behind their hut, a hill bedecked by giant rocks that appeared to grow out of the ground. Sunlight fell like a sheet upon the hill, making the rocks as shiny as bald heads.

Nekesa proceeded to tell Grandmother about what she saw and what she was told. Grandmother was at first surprised but grew somber by the minute.

“Our ancestors come to us when they think we are stuck in a moment. I urge you to think about the wisdom you received,” she finally said in a small, dry voice.

Nekesa felt apprehensive. She gripped her Grandmotherʼs hands even tighter as she looked up at the hill. She took a deep breath and savored the smell of nature, of her home and Grandmother. Her legs wanted to run past that hill, through those rocks, past the valley and into the end of the world, no matter how infinite. .

Originally written & published in 2020

Black is King appropriates the stereotypical images of Africanness and transforms them into consumable commodities. From the cultural adornments and customs to the diverse ecosystems that constitute the second largest continent in the world, Beyonce strategically manages to contain this vastness in a 1 hour, 25 minute film. The novelty of Black is King is because of Beyonce, but not anything that hasn’t been seen in Out of Africa or The White Masai which are western white supremacist fantasies of Africa and its people.

Misplaced and Misunderstood Context

Despite the rich tapestry of the East and Southeast African setting and languages that informed the original The Lion King, neither the album nor accompanying visual album make an effort to feature artists from these places and instead centers the more popular West African acts. This is deliberate, for it centers only that which has already been embraced as the norm by the west while conveniently omitting that is which is yet to meet abstracts standard of American recognition. Not a single East African artist was featured on the album, and that reigned in the idea that African countries, people and cultures are interchangeable and substitutional. The film itself accomplishes this in a myriad of ways without the music: West Africa is merely a fictional place where Nigerian, Ghanaian and other countries meet, while the diverse tribes, languages and traditional beliefs are collaged together to sell a utopia of West Africa that does not exist. The film makes no effort to distinguish between ethnicity and nationality, despite co-opting their politically charged meaning to create riveting aesthetics.

Beyonce does not accomplish anything novel or unsettling to the status quo – representation politics is currently a profitable ideology in the American media market. What this project succeeds in well enough to elicit praise is in its exhibition of nature, the immaterial (spirituality, cultural practices, customs) and the material (African dance, attire) as a commodity.

Oversimplification: One People, One Place, One Body

There is a disconnect between the relevance of African cultural elements and its purpose in the film. What on the surface appears as glamorous, enticing and celebratory is in fact a process of wakandanizing the continent and its people. The African Royal, so heavily pandered to in this project, is an image that is praised and indicative of the African American imagination. The African Royal is sovereign, humble, beautiful, confident and, most importantly, wealthy. The African Royal is on par with western royals, if not in greater standing. Black is King is not the first film project to do this, Coming To America with Eddie Murphy was the blueprint. These projects use African bodies and cultures as props to their western-conditioned visions of Africanness. The African body in the African American imagination is both caricature and godly, depending on utility. The African body is both an unwanted reminder of a traumatic past but also a necessary conduit to an imaginary future – like Wakanda. Because there is no Blackness without Africanness, in all American articulations of Africanness, the African body is a convenient canvas.

The romanticization of African traditions, histories rituals and practices obscures their complicated, and sometimes violent, origins. In turn this diminishes our capacity to appreciate the forms of living, resistance and resilience our ancestors adapted over the centuries in spite of colonialism and imperialism. The release of Black is King was accompanied by a plethora of social media think pieces attempting to name, categorize and archive the African communities, objects and practices featured in the film. This exercise mirrors archival practices used in museums, colonial institutions of knowledge preservation, and also communicate that the creation, naming and dissemination of African artefacts, relics and people will always be subject to American visions. Thus, the onus is clear: African communities, traditions, customs, artefacts cannot exist if they are not acknowledged by the American market. What is known about the continent and its people is limited by what America knows and chooses to know.

African people are not celebrated for being the progenitors and co-creators of popular culture (rooted in American nationhood) – they are core ingredients. African people, their cultures, traditions, customs, languages and spiritualities are consumed without wanton - no different to how Africa's natural resources are treated. Where Black is King has failed African people, it has succeeded in commodifying the African by conveniently stripping it off its individuality and putting a large price tag on it called Disney.

Black Capitalism is still Capitalism

Beyoncé’s emphasis on wealth, especially intergenerational Black wealth, contributes to the active capitalist erasure of the nuances that form African culture – ironically most communities prior to colonialism embraced a communal sense of living. There are 54 different countries on the continent, each with diverse ethnic groups, customs and languages. It would obviously be a challenge to capture the complexity of just one of these groups, and that is where the issue comes in. Beyonce’s project commercializes the imagination of Africa, features African designers, creatives, singers in the name of exposure but does not directly target Africans as a market. It cannot be ignored that all of her 8 world tours have always excluded all African countries except for South Africa – a country whose apartheid regime took inspiration from American racist segregationist policies. What are Africans in the diaspora and the continent to do with a glamourized depiction of their cultural and ancestral heritage? Less than half of the continent has access to view the film and the countries which did offer it on DSTV and other local media services have subscription costs of up to $80 a month. The class disparity is made obvious, and so the cultures and people being celebrated don’t even get to see themselves represented.

More importantly, it is reductive and infantilizing to all Black people to limit liberation to capitalist articulations of freedom. This is an aspect that Beyoncé’s art is repeatedly complicit in – the commodification of feminism in 2013 and again the aestheticization of black struggle and activism in 2016. Beyoncé , much like her husband, is a capitalist and her work conveys this socio-political mantle. The consequence is that although packaged as a ‘win’ for Black people everywhere it is first and foremost a win for her and her family, in her quest to establish intergenerational black wealth on par with that of whites, also begotten through violence and erasure. The popular belief that we should celebrate all small wins, such as Black is King, often fail to acknowledge the fact that these wins often do not have a universal cultural effect – someone somewhere is always missing out while someone else is profiting. What is there to celebrate in that? It all feels like gaslighting through a plasma screen.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now