Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Home, 2017

[yatima]

This series grows increasingly dear to my heart. "Binti" is an Arabic word for "daughter" (as "Yatima", which I stole from Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, is an Arabic word for "orphan".) Okorafor's books stand alone as excellent stories, but they're vastly enriched by the fact that they are engaged in intense conversation with other texts. There's a book about post-colonialist literature with the fantastic title The Empire Writes Back, and that's a useful shorthand for Okorafor's larger project.

Lagoon, for example, was born from Okorafor's disgust at the treatment of Nigerians in the film District 9. It's probably my favorite first contact novel. In the same way, the Binti series takes on the particular space opera genre where humans have learning experiences among aliens: Have Space Suit Will Travel, A Wrinkle in Time, A Fire Upon the Deep. In the first book, Binti travels to Oomza University, the first of her people to do so. This book describes what's probably the definitive experience of exile: returning to your birthplace utterly changed.

“You’re too complex, Binti,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away. You’re my best friend. You are. And I miss you. But, you’re too complex. And look at you; you’re even stranger now.”

It works perfectly because it isn't a metaphor. I'm Australian and I like to joke that I grew up on a mining asteroid, but it's not really a joke. I went to graduate school in Ireland and even with a shared language and colonial history, it was like visiting another planet. Okorafor's genius is teasing out the ways in which people of Earth are alien to one another, as well as the ways in which the terrifying Other, if we can only see past the terror, may turn out to be an ally and friend. She is a vitally necessary writer and we are lucky to have her.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845

[yatima]

This deservedly acclaimed masterpiece is a coolly intelligent book, all the more devastating for the precision and detachment with which it describes its horrors. Frederick Douglass was probably his master's son. His white brothers and sister inherited property: Douglass was property. Between the facts of biology and basic human decency, everyone involved in the slave trade must have been in a constant state of extreme cognitive dissonance. The descriptions of the floggings and murders are terrible, but the descriptions of the psychological consequences of slavery upon both slave and master are more terrible still.

...slaves are like other people, and imbibe prejudices quite common to others. They think their own better than that of others. Many, under the influence of this prejudice, think their own masters are better than the masters of other slaves; and this, too, in some cases, when the very reverse is true. Indeed, it is not uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among themselves about the relative goodness of their masters, each contending for the superior goodness of his own over that of the others. At the very same time, they mutually execrate their masters when viewed separately.

The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.

The coldest part of the book is Douglass's care to list the exact names of each perpetrator of an atrocity, and the date of the atrocity as closely as he can calculate it. He wanted his account to be unimpeachable. He succeeded. Historians have verified his facts. When speaking truth to power, bring receipts.