Returning Home and Claiming the Center

(all quotes are from Akwaeke Emezi, "claiming the center: Akwaeke Emezi," Locus: the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field #773 June 2025, pg. 58-59)

In terms of talking about my work, people often take the spiritual side as an allegory or a metaphor for something else--sometimes for queerness or transness, but for me, it's not. [...] When I use Western language to describe myself, I'm translating. Even when I call myself queer, or I call myself trans, I'm stepping away from my actual Igbo spiritual center, and using Western language, and translating to make myself more accessible. It's honestly a form of masking, because indigenous spirituality is illegible in a Western context. Because of white supremacy, but also because the West does not acknolwedge indigenous realities as real...

( On returning home, and how the work of Akwaeke Emezi opened the door for us. )

More Neat Finds in the Sci-Fi Library

We're sorting the boxes of magazines now! And found neat things, including...

• Original black and white WaRP floppy comics of Elfquest, #9-20. (We put them in plastic sleeves, but them in binders corresponding to omnibus volumes, catalogued them, and added them to the color omnibuses of Elfquest vol. 1 and 3 we already had.)
• A card with poem and letter in it from 1971. (Asked the senior members, they figured out who "Chris" and "Wendy" were, and we're mailing it out to someone who knew them, since at least one of them is now dead.)
• Some weird anthology of comics from 1971 with Wally Wood and stuff in them. (And Neal Adams who... dude was weird even then. Added to the "catalog me" pile)
• A 1999 multimedia e-zine of music, poetry, art, and fiction... on a CD! (Put it in a proper container, labeled its contents, added it to the "catalog me!" pile)
• More stuff for the pluralstories catalog, mwahaha!