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Kiini Ibura Salaam

ANCIENT, ANCIENT

Stories

Annunciation

by Nisi Shawl

Be not afraid.

Angels of longing arise from these pages, tugging at your heart, your tongue, testing your nerves, teasing your brain. Bravery is the best way to meet them. I know this from experience.

In 2001, Kiini Ibura Salaam attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle. As a classroom volunteer, sorting and collating participants’ manuscripts, I interacted with her, for the most part, on the surface of things. I retain an impression of her physical presence as a serene steadiness. A beautifully embodied author-in-training, serious of mien, she wore the poise of a poet, the quiet calm of a traveler who knows she has reached a new land and waits expectantly for surprise.

But in a way I was acquainted with Kiini before this face-to-face encounter. We shared the Table of Contents of the first Dark Matter anthology, which was published a year earlier. So I had read her Dark Matter story “At Life’s Limits,” and I was quite aware that deep down, this calm held surprises of its own: strangely refracted glimpses of—of what? Smoke more dangerous than fire? Moth-winged vampires, gentle yet implacable, tragically susceptible to poisonous disbelief? And dance as speech, and orgasm as an alternative to murder—was that really—

When I opened up that anthology and came across what Kiini was doing, I had had to look unflinchingly. I’d had to grasp what she was saying. I’d had to feel it, to know it. Feeling is more powerful than fear. Knowledge is joy.

“Ferret” appeared on the Infinite Matrix website in 2003. Its depiction of a generation ship guided by gut-dwelling oracular animals proved to be just as simultaneously unsettling and enticing as that earlier story.

In 2004, my work kept company with Kiini’s twice more. Mojo: Conjure Stories’ editor Nalo Hopkinson published her “Rosamojo,” a ghost story that continues past the point where the heroine avenges herself on a father she knows will never stop hurting her.

In Dark Matter 2, Sené, the heroine of “Desire,” is a crack-skinned mother of twins set suddenly, magically afire, burning with rekindled sexuality; her adventures alongside a goat-legged sub-Saharan Pan and a seductively crocodilian Venus remind her—and her audience—of the power of fleshly gratification. Let us never forget it.

That same year an interviewer asked me what changes I predicted in sf as a result of the recent influx of Afro-diasporic writers. “Everything is going to get a lot sexier,” I said. Was I thinking of Kiini’s work? Not consciously. I could have been, but I had responded without thinking.

My answer disturbed me even as I gave it, even as I knew it was right. Sexualized stereotypes of African-descended peoples abound. Was I internalizing and validating our exoticization? Was I glorifying our oppression?

I have had seven years to consider what I said. I stand by it, and I recognize Kiini Ibura Salaam as an excellent example of my meaning.