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KADIJAH NDOYE
WORLD AND LOCAL EDITOR
KNDOYE@SCMAIL.SPELMAN.EDU
KADIJAH NDOYE: How did you feel about joining TheGrioTop 100 Class of 2014?
DR. TANANARIVE DUE: I am thrilled about that. I was on the Ebony List, not last year I don't think, but the year before.
That was a total shock and it was very exciting when I heard from the editor that that would happen. I am just com
pletely gratified and thrilled to be on that list. I admire many people on that list. It is wonderful.
KN: What influences your writing style and the type of genre you are in?
TD: Ok. That is a very good question. From a very young age, I have always liked horror stories. My mother, my late
mother, who died in February 2012, was a big horror movie fan. In later years, I have come to understand that she
used that as a kind of escapism from real-life horror. My mother was a civil rights activist. We co-authored a civil rights
memoir together, Freedom in the Family. Some people might have been surprised that this very, staunch fighter for
social justice loved Frankenstein, Dracula, and werewolves, but that was my childhood. As I tried to find my voice as a
writer, I just kept coming back to the supernatural and to fantasy. I think part of if is it is difficult for me to stare unblink-
ingly into the real-life horror. It’s easier for me to process mortality and loss through the realm of fiction in a way that
feels safe to me as the writer and gives me the nutrients and the strength to face whatever my real life demons and
battles will be. That has always been my hope and to help other readers do that One of the best letters I ever got
from a reader was one who told me that someone who invaded her home confronted her. She thought about my
character in a book called The Living Blood. She gets strength to fight him off. It was amazing. I have never had that
experience.
KN: What kind of connections do you have to characters in your stories?
TD: That is a great question. The connections I have are very interesting. I am known for my work, My Soul to Keep,
which is the beginning of a four-book series about the question of whether there were immortal blood that could heal
any ailment. So what would it be like to be an immortal? What would the world look life if immortals existed? My Soul
to Keep is a love story, [Jessica] met her husband when she was only twenty-years-old. He was her college profes
sor. After she was in her class, they started dating and she married him right out of college. She was very young and
very naive, which represented how i felt when I wrote the novel. I was in my twenties, I was young and I was naive.
I was making poor choices in relationships because I would not see what was right in front of me. His character is a
500-year-old immortal named Dawit and he is a part of a secret brotherhood of immortals who do not reveal that
they have this blood for fear of being captured and drained. I am telling you, a drop of it would hedl almost any ail
ment. It sounds great except if you were the one that has that blood then other people would be coming after you.
They have kept themselves separate, but he has fallen in love. He has this wife, he has this child, and he would go to
any lengths to preserve that family. That story and all of its complications best describes my relationship to all of these
characters. I am bouncing somewhere in between Jessica and Dawit in many of the stories I write. It is a journey from
being naive to being empowered. It is a story of a tragic flaw like Dawit who a terrible tragic turn because of the
things he does and the decisions he makes. What does it mean to be human? What is the cost of immortality? What is
the price of loss? All of those questions recur in my work. Secrets recur in my work. To some degree, all of my charac
ters wrestle with love, life, death and loss. I could not be the child of John and Patricia Due without infusing a little bit
of history in almost everything I write.
KN: Which work are you most proud of?
TD: In some ways, I have always thought Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights
was my most important book. Since my mother’s passing, I definitely feel like it is my most important book because it
is very true that you cannot understand the present or shape the future unless you understand the situation. So many
of us: I am no different; never say a white-only sign or a colored-only sign. There was a sharp divide between my
parents’ generation and mine. Had my mother passed away just a few years earlier, she would not have seen Barack
Obama on the horizon. I am just so excited that she lived long enough to see his election and attend his inauguration.
I do think Freedom in the Family it feels like my most grown-up work because it really forced me to sit and kind of be a
grown up and not escape into fantasy world, but look at what it was. The activists were around your age. My mother
was twenty-years-old the first time she was arrested. The price they paid the post-traumatic stress, and the pain some
of them felt. The family ties that were severed and destroyed after what happened. If you watched The Butler that is
one of the things, I really appreciated about that film. It was true. Those parents did not want their children going to
jail, what parent would. It created issues that have been long-standing issues that people don’t even understand. If
you were out in the streets all day, you are not at home with your family. What is the cost?
KN: How did the initiatives like Black to the Future work to reinvent black people into the science fiction genre?
TD: I am fortunate to be a part of a movement that is now calling itself Afrofuturism. Like all movements, it goes by
different names. Some people call us black speculative fiction. Speculative fiction just means science fiction, fantasy,
and horror. Octavia E. Butler was really at the forefront as a black female writer in helping to create what we know
now as Afrofuturism. For a very long time, she was the only voice out there and woman of color certainly. She was a
pioneer in the purest sense and Dr. Stanley who is the English Department Chair here is also president now of the new
Octavia E. Butler Literary Society which is an effort to make sure that in the academy and also just among readers
and fans that her work is not forgotten. There are many lessons about how to create a better world in her work. There
are a lot of Octavia fans on the faculty here. Atlanta had a black speculative fiction conference back in 1997.1 met
Octavia there and I met my husband there. This area, not just Spelman, has had a love affair with black speculative
fiction long before it was en vogue. For ail those reasons, I wanted in my first year as Cosby Chair, to recreate that spirit
and to harness that energy here at Spelman. We couldn't bring Octavia, but everyone who knew her [attended]. It
was almost a remembrance or a reunion. This year, in 2014, because of the popularity of last year’s event, I wanted
to go back to Octavia but to add a new spin on it... Having been raised by civil rights activists, my mother, Patricia
Stevens Due and my father John Due, a civil rights attorney, I am very aware that this is the 50th anniversary of a lot of
landmark civil rights agitation in the 1960's. I wanted to bring in that question of activism and how art can help inspire
activism in different ways. Octavia, herself, was not an activist in the traditional sense. She was not out there marching,
holding signs, and going to meetings. She was in her room writing and giving us her great works of fiction, but there are
people who have been inspired by her fiction. One of my panelists, Adrienne Maree Brown, has co-edited an upcom
ing anthology of science fiction stories with a social justice spin. Bree Newsome, a young filmmaker I am bringing was
arrested at a sit-in. That is a different kind of activism. One thing I learned from my mother in writing our civil rights book
together is that in the 1960's, not everybody was active in the same way. Sometimes you were that person knocking
on the door in the middle of the night to hand an envelope of money over to a white businessman in the dark of night
to help get black and white students out of jail. Maybe you were that person making copies in the university office,
but you weren’t on the picket line. Peal activists understand that not everybody can go to jail, can carry sign; it is not
always appropriate to go to jail, I am excited to tell you a little bit, about who will be here. Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigeri-
an-American novelist who is really at the forefront of black speculative fiction right now. Her work, talks about every
thing from female gender mutilation to rape. She is just very issue oriented science fiction and fantasy. Junot Diaz is a
Pulitzer Prize winner, best known in literary circles, but he happens to be a geek like the rest of us and he loves science
fiction. He has agreed to come, dream hampton, a writer and activist will also be coming. I don’t know if you remem
ber the case about Renisha McBride who was shot while trying to look for help, dream took it upon herself to produce
a video about the incident to get the word out. That is what we can call artivism that really makes a difference when
you are dealing with a crisis in the moment. John Jennings, he is a visual artist, a graphic artist, and a cartoonist. His
message is through his artwork. It is an eclectic panel, I am excited about if, and I hope the AUC community will be
excited about it too.