Tomi Adeyemi: ‘We need a black girl fantasy book every month’

Author of Children of Blood and Bone says her debut novel was a response to genre fiction in which the characters were always white It has been called the biggest fantasy debut novel of 2018, drawing comparisons with everything from Game of Thrones to Black Panther, and has netted a movie deal reported to be […]

Author of Children of Blood and Bone says her debut novel was a response to genre fiction in which the characters were always white

It has been called the biggest fantasy debut novel of 2018, drawing comparisons with everything from Game of Thrones to Black Panther, and has netted a movie deal reported to be worth seven figures.

But Tomi Adeyemi, the 24-year-old Nigerian-American author of Children of Blood and Bone, says that such success was the last thing on her mind when she sat down to write her epic tale of an oppressive world where magic has been outlawed.

“For the past 10 months I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, is this for real?” she says. “I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. Children of Blood and Bone is a chance to address that. To say you are seen.”

Adeyemi is the middle child of three – her brother is a musician and her younger sister still at college. Her father is a doctor, while her mother runs a group of hospices outside Chicago. She studied English literature at Harvard before heading to Brazil on a fellowship to study west African culture and mythology. It was in South America that the seeds of Children of Blood and Bone, the first in a trilogy, were sown.

“I was in a gift shop there and the African gods and goddesses were depicted in such a beautiful and sacred way … it really made me think about all the beautiful images we never see featuring black people.”

She describes the story – which follows fisherman’s daughter Zélie and an unlikely band of allies and enemies on a quest to reawaken magic in the country of Orïsha – as “an allegory for the modern black experience”. It draws inspiration from both west African mythology and the Black Lives Matter movement.

 It makes my blood boil that it’s totally fine to have a queen of the dragons but you can’t possibly have a black person

“Every moment of violence in the book is based on real footage,” she says, explaining that an early scene in which Zélie is attacked by a guard was inspired by the notorious video of a police officer pushing a teenage girl to the ground at a pool party in Texas. “It’s not my intention to be gratuitous but I want people to be aware that these things are happening and that the actual videos are much worse.”

Adeyemi is not the only young author using fantasy to meld personal stories with political themes. Justina Ireland’s hugely anticipated Dread Nation, an alternative US civil war story with added zombies, is published in the US next month. Dhonielle Clayton’s The Belles, a dark story of beauty, obsession and magic, came out in the UK in February.

Meanwhile, the conclusion to Daniel José Older’s acclaimed Shadowshaper trilogy, which follows a diverse group of Brooklyn teens as they fight dark forces, both magical and human, is expected next year.

“In my perfect world, we’d have one black girl fantasy book every month,” says Adeyemi. “We need them, and we need fantasy stories about black boys as well.”

Does she feel that Children of Blood and Bone is a necessary corrective, given how white much current fantasy is? “Oh yes,” she says with a laugh. “That does make my blood boil – the idea that it’s totally fine to have a queen of the dragons but you can’t possibly have a black person.

 “That’s why the success of [the recent Marvel movie] Black Panther has been so significant – black and marginalised audiences have the chance to see themselves as heroes depicted in a beautiful and empowering way, and white audiences get to see new stories told, and it becomes easier for them to picture a black superhero. Imagination is a funny thing – we sometimes need to see something before we can truly picture it.”

She is clear that the film version of Children of Blood and Bone, which has been chosen as a Waterstones book of the month for March, must have a black director: “It’s a deeply, deeply personal thing – there are parts of the book that black people get instantly because they’ve lived it.” But, she warns, it’s important that people don’t use young adult fiction as a quick-fix cure-all.

“We can’t Obama this, where we have a black president, so suddenly racism is cured, and then eight years later Nazis are marching and people start saying, ‘Maybe we have a race problem’,” she says. “Our books aren’t there to magically fix publishing but maybe they’ll start the changes moving so that in six months we’ll have even more great stories, where we see ourselves and are heard.”

Source: theguardian.com