note for potential readers: this year I’m challenging myself to create and release work consistently with all its imperfections. i’m sure i’ve made some misspellings despite my best efforts and missed some points i meant to touch but nonetheless i am adding my voice to a conversation and I hope you’ll join me with grace.

As I dredge through cups of coffee, job applications, and Pinterest boards detailing dream IKEA rooms, I also contemplate myself as a writer in the broad realm of Afrofuturism and surrealism (or speculative fiction to some) and the fiction I have yet to write. For a few years now I’ve been in a constipated vacuum, void of stories I couldn’t release into the ether though they haunted my mind and tore me apart inside. The stories that I couldn’t imagine telling, not even in a private doc, were a kind of subconscious self-policing, to survive, I thought – if I didn’t write them down they held no substance (a lie) though they affected my moving through the world. It’s timely that as Black History Month 2021 rolled around I was scrolling my way through the last chapters of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture while commiserating over my status on several old novels and toying with the idea of a queerer, more diverse The Great Gatsby. The book, in conjunction with a lot of other reading I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, challenged me again on how I write: what I say, what I don’t say and what I ignore. For a little while now, I’ve had a specific scene of a diverse group of various genders in an aesthetic af ‘20s enormous house party a la Gatsby. But as I explore what blackness means across contemporary issues and the walls that define my personal life – I found myself instead drawn into a side quest (or perhaps the real quest all along) on what it could even mean for the ‘20s party culture to be diverse, and queer as a status quo instead of as underdogs or castaways.

In this scribble I’m mainly exploring the racial components of the multifaceted ‘issues’ I’m encountering while contemplating what I need to write this story, but there are also many gendered and sexuality-driven concern.

While this story idea started as a Great Gatsby rewrite, I cannot neglect the inspiration I found in one of my chief complaints (of which there are a few) surrounding the Bridgerton Netflix series that I binged in two days: how they handled the creation of a color-blind society (though *ahem* our contemporary blinders around colorism and giving speaking roles to POC, as well as sexual assault *wince*), namely that one conversation where it’s explicitly laid out that this society was possible because of a black woman and a white man falling in love that I think many of us wish they’d tossed out on the editing room’s floor. 

For the past four years (though I suppose I could argue that it’s really been since ’12) I’ve specifically been writing in the AU (alternate universe) subgenre of sci-fi or speculative fiction. Mainly because I want to explore sci/fantasy themes and stories without having to world build from scratch. An idea that seems to have backfired on me with this story in particular, as you will soon read. Usually, I change a singular thing and ride out the consequences in my story. I have a few what-if-we-had-superpowers-stories that follow POC girls, a what-if-the-world-was-actually-a-game/video-game story that is not very well realized, and a series with a what-if-I-changed-a-bunch-of-things-like-technology-and-a-few-wars. But for the most part, I’ve never really delved into the bubble of ‘what if racism didn’t exist’, instead employing a writer’s toolbox favorite, creating a random ‘color-blind’ cast, and ignoring things. 

But this story if it were to happen would require meaningfully dealing with the issues of race, white supremacy, and the legacy of slavery in order for me to even begin sketching out the story’s beats. What would a world look like for POC where transatlantic chattel slavery never happened or if the reconstruction post-civil war was successful and lasted over 12 years affecting meaningful change? How wholly would the world I’m working in change and can I recognize it or even imagine what it would be like? It even bears to mind where great Gatsby esque circumstances, namely if the prohibition, post-war culture, and impending depression could even exist, to begin with (in which case do I go full-AU SciFi where anything goes).

What does a world look like where the cemented yet fluid divisions between the races never become the white supremacy we know today, never covalences beyond the normal distrust and prejudice we humans have against foreigners before we get to know them? A world where African maintains control of its own wealth and governance, its nations gaining global footing and becoming superpowers to rival the US (would the US ever become an imperialist superpower bent on shaping the global shape?)? Would the USA even exist? If it did, it certainly would not be tormented by the same traumas and ills – though it would have its own. Would this change affect how we treated sovereign indigenous nations and states (to follow that question: what would change how we treated sovereign indigenous nations and states because a diverse Great Gatsby story needs the voices of indigenous peoples within its midst.)? Would that US govern side by side with indigenous nations?

The political systems that could’ve been created and the nations that would rise and fall under circumstances not governed by white men but on the democratization of information in the rise of industrialization are vast. But even if I were to curtail my imaginings to an America where the reconstruction took place and it won, the ramifications for our America are still endless. And in the end, it all comes down to this: I do not know if I can imagine a black or multicultural America where we are not shaped by the traumas and triumphs that we grasp in our hands today. I cannot imagine an America with fewer lynchings, black men who could vote, black women in society, without our three wars on drugs, without our massacres, without lands beings stolen for the development of white wealth, wherein the south and north don’t/or repaint differently their complicity in slavery, without mass incarceration, without the same radicalized ghettos, and without our nations first feature films being one that glorifies the KKK. This America though it’s one I desperately want, it is not one I can yet imagine –

– when the dust settles on this story (either complete or abandoned), I wonder now how different I will be: having examined narratives, histories, and what the present could be. What mistakes shall I make? What mistakes from my predecessors will I learn from? What will I learn about what it means to be a queer woman of color in the reality I live in?

I am choosing to rewrite time.

Time is a fickle and delicate mistress.