Brooks - Sycoraxs Daughters

Boundless gratitude to:

John Jennings for bringing publisher Rochon Perry (Cedar Grove Publishing) to us.

Rochon Perry of Cedar Grove Publishing for her belief and enthusiasm for our project.

Walidah Imarisha for taking time from her schedule to write an extraordinary Forward.

To all the authors that contributed to the volume. Thank you for sharing your extraordinary work with the world.

To all the little black girls who love zombies and monsters and were disappointed when Kendra, the black slayer, died after only two episodes.

To my Husband, who remains my anchor. To my Mother, for encouraging my love of reading and my Father, for encouraging my love of horror. And to my Sisters who always help me keep it together to face another day.

Kinitra

I first met Sycoraxs Daughters co-editor Kinitra Brooks at a conference called AstroBlackness II in March, 2015 that impacted deeply how I think about horror, oppression and Blackness. Organized by the Black sci fi visionaries John Jennings and Adilifu Nama, it was the second conference of its kind, and the theme was The surreal, the speculative, and the spooky.

The conference was just a few months after the non indictment verdict against Darren Wilson, the white police officer who murdered 18-year-old Michael Brown, a young unarmed Black man. Between Browns murder and the time of the conference, countless more Black people had been gunned down by police across this nation, and we see that catastrophe has not slowed. Neither has the outrage, organizing, and resistance led by Black youth under the banner #BlackLivesMatter.

As part of his testimony to the grand jury who found he should not be indicted for Michael Browns murder, Wilson said, [Brown] looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it , it looks like a demon, thats how angry he looked (emphasis added). Much of our conversations at Astroblackness II centered around three main ways horror relates to Blackness in America: the ways Black people are portrayed as the ultimate evil to justify historically and currently our exploitation, containment, and murders; the fact that for Black people and

other people of color, the history of slavery, genocide, white supremacy, and colonialism is the only true horror story, and it is one we continue to live every day; and the fact that resistance of the oppressed to these structures has always been seen as the most frightful abomination that could be birthed.

Through these lenses, we see that horror as a genre often explores how we deal with those pasts that are not past, those corpses that refuse to lay quietly in their unmarked graves, those creatures born of pain, abandoned, who refused to die. In horror, we see the present through the eyes of the past. Sycoraxs Daughters allows us to explore our own connection to history, as individuals and as a society. Horror, as these stories intone, is collective trauma compressed into one tangible form that can reach out and touch you. Ghosts are the past that is not past.

I appreciated greatly Kinitras work at the Astroblackness conference, as it focused on the pressing intersections of both race and gender, highlighting the ways Black women are present or absent (or both) in most mainstream horror narratives, and what messages that sends about society, about Black communities, about Black women themselves. I am so thankful she and the other co- editors Linda Addison and Susan Morris have continued this work not just as analysis, but as a visionary space where Black women explore horror on their own terms.

Sycoraxs Daughters fundamentally shifts the ways horror stories are told even when using familiar tropes like sirens, zombies, ghosts. Through nuanced story-telling that eschews cheap fright, the reader explores the textured reality of terror, the human in the horror. This collection allows us to challenge the notion this nation holds that Blackness, and therefore Black people, are the ultimate horror. By engaging Black women as both the authors of these stories as well as the majority of main protagonists, we finally hear the so-called demons speak.

These writers seamlessly weave together threads of race and gender into a beautiful tapestry upon which lay these haunting stories, challenging how one of the mainstays of our society is the cautionary tale of the monstrously feminine and the ways women with agency become the worst evil. In these stories Black peoples, especially Black womens, liberation torment white society in a cold sweat. We see that Americas nightmares are not just raced; they are gendered.

In many of these stories, the Black women in them would be categorized as the monstrous, but the narratives exist through their eyes. These tales breath humanity back into the masks of horror society have stitched onto our faces. Even living in lands of evil, mutilated by leviathans, most of these characters never become monsters themselves - even when they take life - and perhaps even more importantly, they never become victims. And through this centering of Black women, our understanding of what the real horror is transforms as well.

The backdrops of these fiendish tales are landscapes of gentrification, white supremacists, brutal cops, and the ultimate horror story, slavery.

Next to these, devils and vampires are almost banal.

These tales are also rooted in resistance, in cultural, social, and political histories and conditions, like the early 1980s South Bronx as hip hop is birthed. They happen next to books by Black anti- colonial leader Amilcar Cabral, to a soundtrack of unruly jazz, in the midst of protests against police brutality.

This collection blends poetry with these horror short stories in a way that challenges our understanding of the monstrous, because every one of the poems is about the reality of Black womens lives. here is nothing magical, fantastical, or otherworldly about these poems, which are Frankensteined together from the daily wickedness Black women endure. From a blues poem about police violence to one about sexual violence, placed next to these supernatural tales, we see the real everyday terror as the most horrific of them all.

Sycoraxs Daughters also shows the different relationship Black people have to the supernatural created of sorrow. While the larger white society lives in terror of liberated Blackness, of the demons unleashed coming after them, we know many of our spirits haunt us out of love, out of a desire for all that was unfairly stolen from them. And we need them, because sometimes all we have is our ghosts. As hip hop emcee Khingz said, Im happiest when Im haunted/It means Im not forgotten.

Even when the stories hurt, we know it is not intentional. We know this because Toni Morrison wrote in her haunting story Beloved, Anything dead coming back to life hurts. Blackness is massacred in the streets every day, and every night we perform the alchemic necromancy to bring it back from the dead. And we pay the horrific price.

Reading this collection, I breathed in these stories and the monstrous resurrection they carried inside them. They have stayed with me, haunting me, some of them hurting me. And I do not want them to leave, because they bear witness to the ways we live with the past that is not past every moment of the day.

We Black people cannot outrun our demons. Nor should we ever want to. We will embrace them as our lost Beloveds, and listen to the songs they sing to bring us through the darkness.

Walidah Imarisha

Co-editor of Octavias Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements