Pamela Mullins's Blog

Jesmyn Ward is an artist of words. She wields her visions into searing stories of the Black contemporary south. Complex, heartbreaking and bleak narrations that seduce and sway you into the Black bodies born of love and pain and hunger and beauty that will make you tremble with rage and cry in horror; that will make you love with a passion and toil alongside to fight and demand justice. Words like the sun that beguiles you into the burn of suffering while wrapping you into the warmth of other.

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Sing, Unburied, Sing

I became a fan of Nora’s after reading The Inheritance Trilogy — a brilliant trilogy that deserves its own accolades and review. This fourteen-hundred-page collection is gorgeously written and an amazing read.

Admittedly, I’m relatively new to the genre having only read maybe a dozen or so fantasy books. They’d all pretty much been consistent (read: white heteronormative bland European stan-fests), but this? I love Nora’s sly wit and imagination and those characters — characters she wrote with such originality, empathy, and yes, a woman’s perspective — a black woman’s perspective and awareness that brutally lays open oppression and otherness; such a refreshing disruption to the entire realm of the white male-dominated literary fantasy world. I was shocked this series didn’t win any awards.

Well, then I read The Broken Earth Series.

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The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season / The Obelisk Gate / The Stone Sky

Prepare to feel discomfort and all manner of emotions reading this book, and it is for that reason I urge you to read it unaware of any of its many stunning attributes—stop reading this now and go read it then come back; to do anything but would do the story a disservice. I went in knowing nothing about it and thought it was a romance.

It is a stunning piece of feminist literature. Written in 1940, du Maurier pens elegant prose around a stilted quaintly world of the British patriarchal rich—what we plebs call the aristocracy—written from the perspective of someone who is not. The gender issues alone will make you grind teeth; there’s even some racism in the form of black and brown face discussed briefly; classism is a major theme and a vague illusion to queerness hides in plain sight. Eloquent in its writing style, Rebecca bears witness with far more awareness and atmosphere to how much space women make for men, oftentimes at the expense of our own—in all things, even our very lives. It’s quite infuriating and thorough, but beautifully and remarkably rendered. This book is an entire semester of gender studies—possibly two. I went in search of the many feminist essays afterward and wasn’t disappointed.

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Rebecca

When I began devising A Mirror of Me, I wanted a character that erupted occasionally to the world around her with a rhymed poem. I did not want her to be that poetically skilled, but authentically awkward and passionate—though brilliant at most everything else, her poetry is meant to be an aberration to all her scientific-techno genius that comes off quite clumsy at times, but endearing. I dunno if I succeeded since I’m not finished with the story yet—we’ll see. I knew she was always going to be a black trans woman—this in honor of someone very dear to me from my past that is no longer with us that will always hold a special place in my heart. At the time, I was studying the ongoing effects of colonization and racialized terror and out of this evolved a philosophically speculative story and ideas—that was, of course, after the mushrooms, and another essay altogether.

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A Memory Called Empire