Writing authentic stories may require you to make the same sacrifice. This is not a question of whether or not you are ready to write indigenous literature, but whether you are willing to do so. Whatever your decision, continue to be kind to indigenous writers. Do not ask us why we are not famous or complain about why we are not getting support for our work. There can only be one answer to that: people are too busy to care. At least you care, and that should be enough to keep my culture alive.
At this point I don’t bet against Ann Leckie, and though Translation State doesn’t have many of the elements of space opera, it’s still a thoroughly compelling sci-fi tale.
Miles Davis, the Prince of Darkness, made his name in the frenetic world of bebop by playing his trumpet as little as possible, emphasizing not a constant stream of notes, but the gaps between them. “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play,” he was fond of saying. Robert Aickman, who started publishing his “strange stories” not long after Davis’s first recordings were issued (1954 vs. 1945), once said that an effective piece of weird fiction “must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and at the end, leave it open, or, possibly, ajar.”
By incorporating relevant lexicons—such as those involving martyrs, street battles, marches, protests, sit-ins, trials, fatwa, and so on—her novel resonates powerfully with the present experiences of some regions of the Middle East and North Africa.
When the collection delves into the systemic forces weighing on Zimbabwe, from colonization to extractive capitalism, Ndlovu fuses tradition with collective resistance.
