How did “Let the Star Explode” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story originated during a Clarion Workshop deadline looming over me in 2020. I was thinking about grief and sense-making and our contemporary desire to make sense of everything. I say contemporary because there are many historical indigenous perspectives that use stories and faith to explain the metaphysical in a way that seems to suggest the lack of a need to categorize and itemize everything about being alive. I think there is something really cool and beautiful about that. I drew on lots of Kenyan mythology for this story, specifically Gikuyu mythology about Mumbi who was the first woman in the world. Her name literally means Creator and is a common name given to Kikuyu daughters.

I also was thinking about optimist nihilism, and Swahili conceptualizations of time. There is a saying we have “Haraka haraka haina Baraka”—“Hurry hurry has no blessing.” Slowness is a value in Swahili cultures that I wanted to bring to the forefront, a value that offers more space for concepts like play to be prioritized. And of course, there is a critique of the exploitation of capitalism which shows up often in my different pieces of work. What if our purpose is relational play and our work is relational experimentation? What if capitalism is deeply anti-play? Anti-slowness? Anti-relationship? These are the questions I think this story is wrestling with along with grief. Grief as a window into life.

Where are you in this story?

Everywhere. I am in the learning to play, in the realizing how free it is to recognize how small I am in the grand scheme of everything; I am in the desiring a world where play is as valuable as work.

My baba wanted to study astronomy in America but ended up studying Math as his undergrad in Nairobi. He is still (thank Spirit) very much alive, but there is an ode to him in the protagonist’s father, as there is also an ode to Uncle Kim who passed away unexpectedly with no rhyme or reason just before this story was written.

So I also show up in the grief of his daughter, Kim-small after her father died, when I held her devastation and could only agree that it did not make sense. None of it did. I am also in the knowing God as a lover of play and laughter and children who have conversations with the soil. I show up in the ways I have been learning that meaning is in the fact that we exist and maybe that is enough?

What led you into writing genre fiction?

It came incredibly naturally to me. Speculative stories are the realm of the imagination where anything and everything is possible. I think now of the thing Ursula K. Le Guin said about speculative fiction: “the realism of a larger reality.” A lot of my friends see me as a glass-half-full type of person and I think that comes from both my ability to imagine and my ability to believe in what is possible even if it is not here yet. Genre fiction, and especially speculative fiction is ultimately about offering alternative ways of being and expanding limited worldviews. I think Black folk and Africans historically have always looked for a larger reality, living in the contours of the metaphysical. Sasa in this moment there is something to be said about what the larger reality offers us in an inherited imperial world.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Read and pay attention. Pay attention to the world around you. Observe what people are feeling, thinking, struggling with. I will quote Nina Simone here, “The role of the artist is to reflect the times.” Your writing is so much bigger than yourself. Let it be, and trust that if you are listening, truly listening that you will capture what is needed to be said. Also, be patient with yourself. Our kind of work takes time.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I have been reading some nonfiction lately. Shout out to Adrienne Maree Brown’s emergent strategy series and especially Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black Undrowned: Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. I have also been reading some Palestinian work as well like the collection of essays, Light in Gaza, and I want to name specifically Rafaat Alareer, whose essay I read before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. There is a passage from his chapter that I saved in my notes, a reminder of why I tell stories and why I want to continue telling stories. “Telling stories was my way of resisting. It was all I could do . . . Writing is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival, and of hope.” This essay was probably the most inspiring thing I read last year when I felt incredibly disillusioned with the ability of words to make a difference. I was reminded that they do, so I continue to write.

I also have been reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower duology and my God, they hit different right now. I also just picked up the Toni Cade Bambara book, The Salt Eaters which starts with, “Are you sure sweetheart that you want to be well?” and has not stopped kicking me in the gut since that first line.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I see speculative fiction being a tool of liberation. I think what needs to gain popularity is stories righting history’s dominant narratives of oppression. Using the likes of LeGuin and Butler as guides. Listening to the speculative storytellers on the margins, and insisting on the destruction of oppressive modes that aren’t working in the world we live in, while offering that we can build new worlds, that our work is a portal to more just societies. These are the trends I think are necessary.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I am working on so many different things: revisions on my first novel. I also have a couple short stories coming out in the next few months. I have a chapter on Black Futurisms vs. Systems of Domination being published by Bloomsbury Academic in Afro-Centered Futurisms in our Speculative Fiction, coming out later this year. I have a novella out in the world called & This Is How to Stay Alive if you would like to read some longer work of mine. I am also working on more Voodoonauts collaborations after our first anthology Voodoonauts Presents (Re)Living Mythology came out in November 2022. I have been teaching classes at the intersections between creative writing and political education, and I am the co-editor of Podcastle, so always looking for phenomenal stories to share. I can also be found on the online socials as @Shingai_be_like.

Thank you for engaging with my work.