At the beginning of 2020, I decided to keep a special journal. 2020, I thought, was going to be a challenging year. I’d also read Emily Raboteau’s “Climate Diary” in The Cut (not that I had any aim of publishing my musings). Mainly, I was thinking about elections. I live in the swing state of North Carolina, where one US Senate seat is in play (Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican, is up for his first reelection).
I’m also the kind of writer who needs to write to figure out what I think about what’s happening around me.
2020, I thought, was going to be all about electoral politics. In 2008, the state voted narrowly to elect Barack Obama. The margin over the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ) was about 11,000 votes, and my home town, Durham, took credit for getting out that vote.
2012 had been a different story. I’m glad President Obama was reelected, but at the state level we’d faced a dramatic reversal two years earlier. Republicans took the state’s General Assembly with a super-majority, then passed a disastrous “bathroom bill,” to discriminate against transpeople; imposed gerrymandering to block the Black vote “with almost surgical precision” according to federal courts; repealed the Racial Justice Act, which provided a path for inmates on death row to avoid execution if racial bias was a significant factor in their cases; blocked local governments from removing or relocating Confederate monuments; and many other regressive and damaging measures.
Like hundreds of others, I protested as part of Rev. William Barber’s Moral Monday movement (and wore a jazzy print dress to be arrested). This Atlantic piece is a good summary of politics until recently in the Tar Heel state.
I fully expected 2020 to be all and only about politics. What followed my title page were musings about candidates, my plans to help register voters, a housing emergency in Durham, and accounts of my GOTV adventures.
I was happy about these things:
I was teaching two classes that I enjoyed. In Introduction to Human Rights, I have the students play Human Rights Jeopardy, and I allow them to cheat so it’s loud and sometimes heated and I make them dance or sing a song if they answer incorrectly); and in Imagining Human Rights, we were grappling with how brilliant writers like H.G. Wells, Octavia Butler, and Nnedi Okorafor conceived of rights. I finished both classes virtually, which is both a luxury (to be able to continue via computer and Internet) and also weirdly unsatisfying and sterile;
I was preparing The Hive Queen, Book II in The Bond trilogy, for an August release. I asked a very talented mapmaker (and writer), Travis Hasenour, to prepare a map (I LOVE fantasy maps) and I was looking forward to seeing it (the release has been rescheduled for September 2020);
I was planning two summer writing retreats (Two! One was in Ireland and I was looking forward to seeing a dear friend in Belfast.). Both were postponed.
Two family parties were postponed and several family members have battled COVID and other ailments.
Until February 27. My journal revealed nothing about Wuhan. George Floyd was still alive in Minneapolis. White gunmen had just killed Ahmaud Arbery on February 23 in Satilla Springs, Florida, but the chilling video wasn’t made public until May 5. Breonna Taylor, the Louisville emergency technician, was also still alive and planning to start on her nursing degree and start a family.
But that was the day that worries about this virus started to creep into my journal.
Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has merged with the righteous anger over police violence against our Black neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens. I’ve marched and sent money and listened carefully. I’ve reached out to my students, including the Black and brown scholars and the kids whose DACA status puts them at permanent risk. My sister, who is Asian American, worries about being the object of racist attacks in her city of Chicago.
I’ve gone back in my journal to mark new important dates. The date Arbery and Floyd and Taylor were killed. The date COVID deaths passed American deaths in Vietnam. The date the president sent the security forces after peaceful protestors so that he could take a photo in Lafayette Square. The date (today) that workers started removing the John C. Calhoun statue from its pedestal in Charleston, South Carolina.
I think if I, as a novelist, packed so many momentous developments into a story, no editor would accept it and no reader would believe it.
Among other things, I’m grappling with how, as a white person who has been immersed in human rights for so long, I still didn’t fully grasp the extent, depth, persistence, and violence of police against Black and brown people. I’m also looking for ways to make sure that in my professional and my writing life, I’m listening hard and making sure that what I teach and write changes and meets this moment in a positive way.
2020 must end better than it began. It must.
What I’m writing
I had fun writing about Science Fiction and Human Rights for Fantasy Cafe. The piece came out of my Imagining Human Rights class. I’d assigned MR Carey’s masterful The Girls with all the Gifts as my students’ Spring Break read “planning to frame a discussion of rights and climate change once students returned from Spring Break. As it turned out, Carey’s apocalyptic tale and his unforgettable heroine, Melanie, were just as suited to a discussion of pandemic as rebirth and reveal.”
What I’m reading
I delved back into Hilary Mantel’s exceptional Thomas Cromwell trilogy, rereading Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, then held out as the delicious dessert the final book, The Mirror and the Light. It’s SO GOOD and also an endless lesson in how to write well, with humor and empathy, and with a master’s sense of human behavior, both good and horribly bad.
Photo of the Month
Well I did mention maps, didn’t I? Travis did a marvelous job (and Jaime Questell did a wonderful “distressed” version for a poster).
That’s it for June. I’ll be writing again soon with more news about The Hive Queen release, so please share this with anyone you think may be interested!
Robin