In a lovely moment of reading serendipity, I happened to pick up Akwaeke Emezi’s memoir, Dear Senthuran, in the same week that I was working my way through Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Emezi is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and young adult literature, with three books under their belt and more to come. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an astrophysicist who’s come to public prominence in part through her accessible science writing for popular outlets like Slate and Bitch magazine. I started these two books thinking that they would be worlds apart — one Very Much Science, one extremely literature — and then it was a veritable Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia of (re-)discovering just how much the sciences and the humanities have in common, for better and worse.
Before anything else, both of these authors have tremendous passion for the work. Though Emezi’s memoir ranges widely through years of their life and numerous places they’ve lived, the constant in good years and bad is their (sometimes single-minded) commitment to their art:
People can say a lot about me, but everyone knows the work is my beginning. I work myself like it’s a madness and maybe it is. It’s how I world-bend: it is my hammer, my heated metal, my anvil, my forge, my weapon.
(And yes, as you can see, Emezi’s writing continues to be truly gorgeous.)
In an early chapter of Dear Senthuran, Emezi says that they are going to describe the spell they have cast to achieve the success they’ve achieved. The spell is to believe in themself and keep doing the work, and when they achieve one of their dreams, they set a new dream and work like hell to achieve it. They make full use of the flexibility of the word “work”: “work” as an action verb for the effort and drive they put into creation; “work” as a noun that describes the product of their creativity; “the work” to encompass both.
Prescod-Weinstein similarly radiates her love for the work that she does. I have to admit that I…. had a harder time understanding some of what she was talking about (extremely science) versus what Emezi is talking about (litrature and mental illness and relationships). Surprise! I do not 1000% understand theoretical cosmology and astrophysics. Who knew! The first half of The Disordered Cosmos covers Prescod-Weinstein’s work and the questions she’s trying to answer, and they are about ten miles above my head. I read this portion of the book feeling more like I was weaving a brand new net than capturing knowledge in a pre-existing net.
But! What’s very clear, both in the early parts of the book where Prescod-Weinstein is talking about science, and in the second half where she’s talking about the profession, is how much Prescod-Weinstein loves her field. Even when I didn’t understand the science, her devotion to and enthusiasm about it shone through every word.
I still like math and the potential it holds to help us craft a compelling cosmological tale. I still think the times table is a miraculous thing, thirty years after I first learned it. I still love that we can use math to understand and describe the history of the universe itself. And I want little children of every shade, gender identity, sex identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, (dis)ability, and religion to have access to that cosmos, to have fun with it, to find joy in it…. Access to a dark night sky — to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is — should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.
Perhaps in part by virtue of being marginalized in their chosen fields, Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein are both keenly aware of the importance of different modes of knowing. For Emezi, this centers very much on their physical body and spiritual essence. They identify as á»gbanje, a kind of Igbo trickster spirit that is born into the body of a human child. They feel particularly close to the world of spirits and gods; at times closer, it seems, to that world than to our physical world, where they are read through lenses that do not pertain to them. At times this way of knowing themself can lead to an instrumentalizing view of other people that I found hard to read, in part because I often struggle with the genre of memoir and the way it (perhaps necessarily; certainly often) transforms the people in the writer’s life into side characters in the writer’s story, rather than full protagonists of their own. For instance, in a story they tell about traveling home and being taken to the shrine of the deity Ala:
Back at my human father’s clinic, the pastor exulted over how the day had gone. “God opened the way for us,” he said. “We encountered no problems! I am sure that our purpose was to speak about Jesus to that woman.” I remember marveling at his vision of the story. These four men — my father, the red neighbor, the pastor, the contact — they had all been moved by my deitymother, pawns in a mission they were completely unaware of, thinking they were serving their God when really they were carrying out Ala’s will. The contact had kicked up a fuss when it was time to pay him, emphasizing over and over again that he wouldn’t usually do anything like this, he was a Christian, he didn’t like these fetish things.
I thought, What else could my mother do for me if I asked? Who else could she move, so smoothly that they would have no idea they were even being used?
A theme throughout The Disordered Cosmos is the validity of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge, which Prescod-Weinstein asserts ferociously from within a field that resists any kind of knowing that doesn’t come through white Western male intellectual history. She uses the example of the Native Hawaiians who have, for years, resisted observatories that have been placed on Mauna Kea, without regard for the indigenous traditions that hold that land sacred. When she was offered an opportunity at a year-long job at Mauna Kea that would have positioned her to get into a good PhD program, counterbalancing her mediocre grades that came as a result of the structural challenges faced by many marginalized folks at universities, Prescod-Weinstein turned it down in solidarity with the Native Hawaiian protestors. Her recognition that other modes of knowing than her own are valid–indeed vital!–and her pursuit of that truth at the expense of her career prospects are examples I hope to always carry with me and aspire to.
Regrettably, trauma has played all too large a role in the lives of both these authors. Prescod-Weinstein speaks with eloquent rage about her own rape by a more senior person in her field, and the lasting damage that experience has wrought on her career and her psyche.
I want to have the power to eject this memory: to force it far, far away from me. By that I mean I would like to have the power to eject this memory into the nuclear inferno that is our sun. The sun is, effectively, a series of nuclear explosions, mostly converting hydrogen into helium. Better this memory blow up inside the sun than inside of me. But this memory is written on my body so instead I have to trace the lines of force that are available to me. I look to see what work is possible. For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present.
Emezi is often oblique about their trauma, but they are explicit about its impacts: dysphoria, chronic pain, recurring suicidal ideation. Dear Senthuran is grandiose at times, and at other times it speaks of so much pain that it is very nearly self-annihilating. But it’s clear that Emezi is claiming the space to be grandiose in ways that have rarely been tolerated by people like them–Black, trans, immigrant–though white straight men are given all the latitude in the world to self-mythologize.
In the dark of night, my demons don’t tell me I’m worthless. They tell me I am too powerful, that no one will ever want me for it, that I don’t deserve love or happy endings because I chose too much, I ate too much of the world, I refused to starve and as punishment, I will be starved.
Dear Senthuran (I keep writing Death Senthuran, which feels apt) and The Disordered Cosmos remind the reading public (I hope) of the fact that society’s exclusionary structures come at a cost: the cost of people who did not, like Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein, have the luck and the wherewithal to keep working and writing in their fields. The cost is disproportionately borne by those for whom the system was not made, but in the end, everyone within the system is the poorer for it.