July 15, 2025 • 52 mins
Who is Cebo Campbell? What inspired him to write the novel Sky Full of Elephants? In this conversation, we explore his upbringing and the world that shaped his brilliant mind and unique perspective.
Cebo reflects on his journey and the profound significance of identity, family, and cultural heritage in informing his work. He speaks to the audacity of Black existence, the search for solace, and the responsibility of holding Black culture sacred through storytelling.
Drawing from personal experience and the lasting influence of literary giants like Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Octavia Butler, Cebo underscores the importance of collective identity and expansive imagination. He reminds us that the future of Black literature depends on bold artistic expression and a commitment to honoring our shared cultural legacy.
While sports once defined his early years, writing quickly became his sanctuary—and now, it’s our privilege to receive his words. Sky Full of Elephants is Campbell’s debut novel. It opens with a cataclysmic event: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. The premise grabs you immediately—and so does Cebo, in this first episode, as we journey deeper into his work and the vision that drives it.
Connect: @_ThatsPeace @CeboCampbell
Read: SKY FULL OF ELEPHANTS
Learn More: CeboCampbell.com
Special Thanks To:
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Jacqueesse Thomas, and you're listening to Black Lit,
a podcast about black literature and the stories behind the storytellers.
Where did the name of Seawell come from.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
My real name is Cornelius. And my brothers. I have
a bunch of brothers of five brothers, four sisters, and
all of my brothers we all played sports. And my
oldest brother's name is William, and he was really good.
He was like crazy fast. Just we were literally like
six and he was still like a superstar. And someone
(00:38):
said that he played like Bo Jackson, and so they
called him wing footed wheaty bow. Don't know why, but
that's what they called him, wing footed wedi Bow. And
then I came and I was a little bit faster,
and they were like, well, his name starts with the sea,
so Cibo, and then it was wheedy boau Si Bo.
And then my youngest brother, who was good, his name
(00:59):
is rodrique Is and so they started calling him Rico.
So we walk into a room they go see bo
we Bo Rico. And that was like a thing in
my neighborhood where I grew up, that we all had
that the sort of rhyming name and then it stuck,
and it stuck so much that when I went to college.
I went to school on a football scholarship, and I'm
in school, I'm in, I'm in, you know, in class,
doing my thing. They come and get me out of
(01:19):
class and they're like, you're actually not registered to the
school because all of your PaperWorks at Sibo and not Cornelius.
So I had to reregister everything for college. Wow, because
that's how much the name stuck, I've said, and I
believe that when I I'm entering into the age, Where'm
go and go back to Cornelius right like, I'm going
to be Cornelias. I want to have like overalls that
(01:41):
I want to have a porch at a rock and
chair where I'm a dog named Otis, and I want
people to call I want to eat pecans all day
and people all day and just shuck cons and I
want people to call me Cornelius.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
So I looked it up and it said in Zulu
that it means plan our idea.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Why oh, I don't think I've ever known that.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I was like, huh, that's fitting.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I got plans. Let me tell you I got plans.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
So you got plans for pecans and.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
We're trying to get there. I want I want peace.
I want peace, and none says peace like the cons So,
you know, but that's I want to remember that. I
love that. I love that.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I love it too. I was like, because this is
kind of a plan, the sky full of elopments, well,
an unexpected plan.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Certainly a desirous one, like we we we. You know
that book is so funny. It came out of completely
out of nowhere, and now I can't. I think how
speculative fiction works is you You you enter into a
story with a question, right, and sort of you don't
necessarily answer the question, but you write the question into
the book and then anyone who reads it they have
(02:57):
the question superimposed over there when they stopped me. So
you take your reading the pages, you walk outside, the
question is now in front of you. And so the
question is what would it look like? And now when
you go places, I certainly do it now everywhere I go,
I look around, I'm like, damn, if there are no
white people in here, this would be so different, This
experience that I'm having would be so different, and I
(03:20):
can't get away from it now.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And that's what inspired the whole the book The Journey. Yeah,
that one question it was.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It was actually it predated the question because I was
watching Ferris Bueller. Have you heard me tell the story?
Speaker 1 (03:35):
I have?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
The Ferris Buehler story is the truth, and that is
where the question came from.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
You know, it's interesting. I've heard you tell this story
a few times. So it made me wonder, like, Okay,
if yes, and in this modern day and time, Pharris Bueller,
if we replaced it with Trayvon Martin, that would not work.
That would be a hard story. But then I was like, well,
what if that same kid had that same experience in
(04:03):
the sky fully elephants world? What would his day look like? Well?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
One, I think the center of the central part of
the character of Ferris Bueler is audacity, right, and there's
a there's an audacious he looks at you when he's talking,
he looks he's like breaks the fourth wall straight away.
A you can never go too far be If I'm
going to get busted, it is not going to be
by a guy like that. Everything he's doing is whatever
(04:30):
he feels like doing, is entirely impulsive, and I think
culturally to be impulsive is to put yourself at risk
at times, even even to the degree like you said,
people dancing in the in the subway or someone coming
up to you, they're putting themselves at risk to try
to engage you, to constantly try to do that. And
(04:51):
so I think the thing that makes it dangerous is gone.
The thing that makes it makes your audacity feel adulled
is gone. And so I do think it would translate
into more audacity. However, I don't think the audacity would
necessarily translate into mischief, right, So I don't necessarily think
(05:16):
by being free enough to be over whoever you want,
that that means I'm gonna go steal this Porsche, do
you know what I mean? Or I think it will
translate into quieter things, you know, Like I said, I
just want to sit under a contrary and that that
is my audacity in that it's actualization. And I think, yeah,
(05:38):
I just I find that like as a culture, we
are expressive but not necessarily mischievous, and there is mischief,
but it's more like an expression of who we.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Are, you know, I don't know, I probably was a
little mischievous when I was.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
I gotta I do, gotta get respective fact that he's
like sixteen in this movie, and every sixteen year old
is a little bit mischievss. But I mean, generally speaking,
we I think we would be, you know. I mean
I grew up in the eighties and nineties, right, so
there was no Internet when I was a kid. I'm
the last generation that predates the digital age, and I
(06:21):
remember being like, we're going to sneak out our house.
Nobody has new phones cameras, and we were getting into mischief.
But it wasn't it wasn't like a show. It was
just like, you know, we're trying to fuck around, just
have fun, but we're not like it's not a performative
actors just trying to express ourselves, just trying to react
to night time and react to certain circumstances that make
(06:43):
you feel something. But I don't. I didn't think of
myself as like getting in trouble unless I interacted with
the police. And this is the big difference with Varispueller. Yeah,
he literally impersonates a cop, right, he does whatever he wants,
and that audacity to that degree, I just don't think.
I don't think it's I don't think it serves us.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
You know. That's interesting though, that the audacity for your
time now is to find and to be able to
have a peaceful life like a black man, to have
the audacity to be in a peaceful piece space, and
that be the goal, like what you what you're actually
(07:27):
striving for.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Think about how many black men you see on a
regular basis just meditating right or you know, frankly sitting
and just reading right and trying to have the time
and space to just exist in their own mind. That
to me is unfortunately because of our reality, it's the
(07:49):
space that we don't get to occupy as much as
we want to. And so I think that if given
all the room in the world to do what you want,
I think you'll want two things. I think you'll want
to be in nature and I think you'll want time.
And maybe that might translate into some chaos, but for
the most part, I think it's gonna be pretty true.
Because right now I go places. I travel all over
(08:13):
So I've traveled to forty forty eight I think I've
made done forty at least forty eight fifty states. I've
been to travel all over the world. I used to
live in the Philippines, I live in London. Now I've
been all over and you don't know how often I'll
talk to an American. I'm like, have you, like a
black American? And I'm like, have you ever been to Idaho?
And They're like, what the hell would I be in Idaho?
(08:36):
Or have you been to the Grand Canyon? Have you
been to Yellowstone? And those are the most beautiful parts
of the whole country. And so if you think of
yourself as an American and you lay claim to the country,
why wouldn't you go to those places that are also yours?
And I think it's because we've been wedged into these
urban environments, coastal cities that were want port cities, and
(08:56):
so we're like afraid to just go out there. And
I think that's part of the audacity, is to just
be like, you know, that's that's I'm as comfortable in
nature as I am in the city.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, I'm just as comfortable in every part of my country.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Indeed, right because I've been upstate and are at times
I'm like, bro, the's ain't not it, this is not it.
But when I traveled to Wyoming was the most So
I flew into Bozeman, Montana and spent like a couple
of days in Bozeman and Bozeman's great really good sushi
(09:33):
for where I don't know how they got it was
really good, right, especially called Dan's. And I'm a day
and should be making sushi, but it's good. And then
we took the road trip from bos of Montana into
Wyoming into Yellowstone. Listen, there's nothing like seeing bison, like
you know, migrating across the landscape. You don't see that.
(09:57):
You never see wild horses that are not on someone's leash, right,
you don't get to see these lakes that you can
see all the way through and see the fish huge,
just living. That to me is when they talk about
manifest destiny and they talk about like existing in the
abundance of nature, That's what it looks like. And we
don't go to those places at all.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
So, okay, I'm going to go back a little bit
to understand how this mine came to be, How you
came into this way of being. It was meditation always
a part of your life or was that something that
came later on and traveling as well. Was that a
part of your upbringing?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
No, not at all, not at all. I have a
really big family, and so like my mom had she
had a total it was total of thirteen of them,
but two of them died early. Some died when they
were like teenagers. So I grew up with like nine
or ten of her siblings, and then they all had
multiple children, and my mom had multiple children, so we
(10:57):
had a whole bunch of cousins. They would drop us
all up at my grandmother's house in the summer and
just be like, we gotta go to work, y'all stay
at grandma's house. And my grandma would not let us
in the house. She'd just go, y'all stay outside and
you don't come. I'll give you all some eggs in
the morning, and i'll give you some dinner when this
time you remed to pick you up, but you can't
come in the house. And so we would sit out
(11:18):
in this yard and she had like it was like
the yard adjacent to the house, and then a church
adjacent to that. And the house was a house that
was like a It's like a composite of different parts
that we would constantly add to. So like my dad
built the bathroom and I put the carpet in. So
the house was like a way for us to refine
(11:38):
our skills with our hands, and then my grandma would
leave us outside and she would like, you, if you
want to eat, gotta eat the cans off the tree.
You gotta eat the peaches, you gotta eat the plums,
but you can't come in this house. And so we
would just like play games, make up our own games,
sit in the sun, eat fruit off the trees. And
you know, with so many of us that it was
(11:59):
like you were a commune. But we're all roughly the
same age. I mean, my eldest cousins are maybe like
four years younger than me, and my youngest about three
or four years younger. So we would be able to
sort of play together in a way. And I have
memories of like wishing school would start, because I'm like,
we did not hear like hours, Like it's hours, man,
(12:20):
this is crazy, and time relative to who I was,
it didn't exist in my life in a way it
exists now right now. It feels like there's never enough
time in the day. But I have memories of feeling
like it was too much, and those are the same
twenty four hours. And so meditation wasn't a part of
my life, but like existing in a space that was
(12:41):
sort of my own was and I was always the
creative kid in like my family, Like I was quite internal.
I was just just sit by myself and think about things.
And I have this and I like to make things
as well. And so I had this memory of being
really young and my mom was in the kitchen and
she was cooking and she has some eggs. Drops on
(13:03):
the eggs on the floor cracks and so you know
those cars that you pull back and then they zoom
for I'm playing with one of those cars and I
take it apart, and there's a coil inside of us.
When you pull it back, the coil titans and then
you release it, the coil releases and it goes for it.
So I'm playing with this car. My mom drops this egg.
I look at the egg and I was like, that
crack looks like teeth. So I took the egg and
(13:25):
I drew took a mark, I drew scales on it,
and I and I made the cracks look like teeth.
And I took a rubber band, took the coil from
the cart and rubber band, and I made it to
where I want to pull the coil back. The teeth
chumped like that, and I made like a little like
dragon me. I remember doing this, and I remember my
mom being like, boy, grab it, throw it in the
trash right instantly. But I was how much I enjoyed
(13:49):
like looking at something and trying to find a different
angle for how it can exist, what stories live in it,
like trying to extract something out of it. And I
remember that at like six seven. And then we would
go to church and I would be in church on
Sunday and the preacher be saying stuff and I'd be like,
that doesn't make sense. I want to extract stories out
of that too. And so as a child that was
(14:09):
I don't know if it was meditated, but we had
a lot of space, a lot of time to think
about these things, and so I certainly did. And then
you knows, as a writer, I didn't understand how language works.
I wasn't a big reader, only read what they asked
me to read for school. And then we didn't we
were church going, but it was like just to make
(14:29):
sure we weren't going to hell kind of thing, right,
Like that was that's where the limit is, is like
as long as you repented your good east of Sunday
and Christmas and you're good, right, and so you know,
I was quite separate from like what I think the
identity of me that lives in the book. The only
(14:49):
place where I felt like I as a human connected
to the book even young, was in the culture. Every
person I'm describing in my life all black people, and
it was like our world was black, Everything we did
was black. I didn't know anything else. That was all
I knew growing up, and I think the South is
like that, where it's just there's a density of culture
(15:12):
that I find I have to look for in other places,
but there it was just just pervasive. And so as
I got older, you know, you like, you try to
fit into society, you become really good at code switching
and all that. But I would look backwards and be like,
that's when I felt the richest, That's when I felt
the quietest. That's when I felt more capable of hearing
(15:33):
the voice in my head so I can like talk
and articulate what I want to. That's when I felt
the most artistic. And so I do find a relationship
between that and the book and me as a writer.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
I think, yeah, I mean, well you just have to
sound like your imagination. What really kind of inspired that
creativity of thought, not even necessarily to create, but just
having these these thoughts that you allow to play and
to live and to just be whatever they were. And
that is kind of a form of meditation, I think.
(16:05):
I don't necessarily always think that meditation is like sit,
and don't think it's like sit and allow your thoughts
to become They have to percolate.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
They have to percolate. As a so, I have a
design a creative agency, and I was a designer for
many years. I still design a little bit, but mostly
now just lead the creative teams. But that is the
number one lesson I try to teach them when I'm
training creatives is you have to have the space to
have as much input as you have output, and you
(16:33):
have to have the space to iterate without any without
any risk. And so every single person on my team
they have to start with the pencil and paper before
they can go into any app. It doesn't matter what
the writing, doesn't matter, if they're designing, doesn't matter if
they're going to do photography. Sketch it out for me,
let me see it, because that'll give you the space
(16:54):
to iterate. It takes the thing that's in your head
that's really hard to get. It's hard to extract an
idea out of your mind, bring into three dimensions and
you go, okay, just like mess around, play with it
until it starts to feel like something. Mess it up
as much as you can. And I promise you that
the refining it is a part of that meditation. And
so yes, let it percolate, let it live in your brain,
(17:16):
and then play like, have fun with it. And I
certain that that's as a creative I've always thought of
that as like a superpower.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
You are listening to black Lit. I can see how
all of these things played a part in how you
write right, because it gives every like, every thought, every story,
everything you look at has all of these layers and
dimensions to it. And I noticed one thing that stood
out to me the most was how you describe the
(17:46):
world that you created, and having like these little small
things that made me be like, huh, interesting, But it
brings you into it. It brought me into it in
a way. That was probably the most important part for me,
along with the poetry of it. But before we dive
into that, I'm curious when did you first write though,
(18:09):
When was the first time you were like I'm a writer,
and I'm going to sit down and own this title
and share my work with the world.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
You know, I don't. It's it's tricky because I don't
think I knew I was. When I was in high school.
I was in sort of the advanced courses, the like
duel and role courses for English. But I was only
doing it so I can get my scholarship. Like I was, like,
I'm trying to play football. I'm trying to go to
the NFL. I don't want to. I won't want to
be a school kid. I want to sports. Sports was first,
(18:38):
and I was. I mean, I played football, I was
weight lifting, I was in wrestling, and all I want
to do is play ball, I get scholarship or go
to college. And because I had those duel and role credits,
I was equivalent of like a second year student, but
I was a first year student because I had like
I think eighteen credit total credit hours. So it's like
or past the first semester, so not the second year,
(18:59):
but second semester. And I'm in English one oh two
and I play a game that Saturday. I score a
punt return and the announcer says Linda Wood's a sensational
freshman come back to class, and my teachers like, I
didn't know you. I wasn't thinking of you as a freshman.
You're the best writer in the class. And I'm looking
(19:19):
at her like, what are you talking about, Like, I'm
just doing what you tell me to do. And she goes,
you have to change your major. At the time, my
major was I think psychology or sociology, because when you
come on a scholarship, they're just like they give it
to you and then like get out on the field
and start playing. And so I wasn't. I was just
in classes, wasn't I had no idea. They did it
all for me. And so she goes, you have to
(19:41):
change your major. And she asked me what I wanted
to do, And at first I thought, you know, actually
I think I want to do film, like I really
like I like movies, and so maybe I can be
a filmmaker. And she goes, we don't have that degree,
but what we'll do to give you a contract degree.
And so the contract degree is you have to take
a certain number of classes in different departments and they
(20:01):
will equal that degree. So I had to take English literature.
I to take in Creative Writing, how to take theater
and communications, and I'm taking these classes, no idea what
I'm doing. And she goes, take this notebook, and I
want you to write this notebook every day. If you're
writing thisnbook every day and you write whatever you want,
you write poems, you can write, you know, journal entries,
(20:22):
I'll pass you in my class. And I go, all right,
bet So I wrote every day in this notebook. Like
she said, she took the stuff that I wrote, entered
it into the school contest, and I wanted so. I
was Senior Creative Writing Award winner as a freshman in college.
And that's when I was like, okay, like something, it's
like this is that doesn't make sense to me. And
(20:45):
the strangest thing happened. I still reflect on it with
like thoughts. I was suddenly not accepted in any camp
in school. So the football players, because I want to
talk to them, I'll be like, yo, I just read Shakespeare.
Let me tell you about it. And they're like, bruh,
pack this ball and run, like don't don't talk to
me about Shakespeare. And then I would go to class
(21:07):
and they'd be like, you only here because you're football player.
And you want to get a good grid, you don't
actually care about this stuff. And so I was sort
of just alone, like in my thoughts and writing, and
I would have the first book that transformed everything, everything,
the first book I read that I've read read Withsula,
and I will never forget it because I was given
(21:29):
the book on a Sunday, No, it was a Friday,
and I played on Saturday, and I sat down on
a Sunday to read it. And I'm in my dorm room,
sitting by myself, opened the book and I read the
first page and then I shut the book and I'm like, yo,
what was that?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Like?
Speaker 2 (21:43):
How does how did she do that? The how does
she create all of that reaction in my body with
just these letters? Like I don't understand it, So open it,
open it back up, try to read some more clothes again.
And I can't couldn't reconcile how the images in my
brain existed there with just the words on that page.
(22:03):
And it was more than just images. It was like
a rhythm, you know. And so I was like, I
want to do that. I don't know where that is.
I want to do that. And that's when I started
to shift Gears and and you know, I had this
picture in my head of what a writer should be
because of like Jack harrowag and like you know, Burrows
and stuff. So I was like, I need I didn't
(22:24):
drink and I was young, and I was like, I
need to start drinking. I need candles, right, I need
to have like a moment in my.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Room and making it a type doesn't work, smoking.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Like I'm gonna go crazy. I remember buying a glad
a bottle of remember Arbormist, like so Arbormist in like
a plastic cup in my room. I was a college writer.
That's all. That's all I could afford. So I was like, man,
this is it, this is how you do it. And
(22:59):
I was terrible, terrible at it. But I quite like
the craft. I like the idea that I could that
I could play with words in the same way that
I played with you know, with football, or play with
other things, and I can try to compose them to
give put a story in someone's mind or put an
image in their mind. The other thing was that I
also was keen on like I think we're in a
(23:22):
culture now where everyone wants to immediately put out everything
that they make instantly and get feedback. And I was
like very against that young, and so I would make things.
I wrote whole novels and they never left my shelf
because I would just write them to try to figure
out if I can get the art of the story right,
to figure out if I can, you know, compose something
(23:44):
that made me feel good. First, there's a quote from
Prince that I loved even young. He said everything that
I all, the music that I make is perfect when
I make it. It isn't until I give it to
someone else that it becomes imperfect, already complete and perfect.
In my eyes.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
It's like you know, taking your kid and putting them
in some new clothes and saying you can go back
home now.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Just I don't know, it's it's different. So every book
I've written is perfect until this point. And this was
the first one that I was like, Okay, I think this.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Will work, this one, this is the one I can
actually share.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
So okay, first of all, shout out to that teacher.
That's amazing that she recognized that and was like, Okay,
let me let me help this kid along to see
what his gifts are. And that's what teachers are. So
that's what they're supposed to do, right, That's that's one
of the things that they're supposed to do is to
(24:39):
inspire that a neat, natural thing that's already inside of you.
So that's beautiful. I'm also curious. I'm like, I mean,
I know that there's another book coming, but we're not
going to get into that. But I'm curious about those
books that are on the shelf. Do you still do
you still have that notebook?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, I mean I have, I have I have like
digital files with some of the stuff. I have tons
of notebooks. But I was back then, I was trying
to emulate writers that I loved. So it was like,
which I think is a part of the exercise as
you go. You know, one book sounds like Neo Gayman, right,
and then another book sounds like Tony Morrison. Then another
book was trying to sound a little bit like Octavia Butler,
(25:21):
and I'm like trying to find my voice in.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I mean, are those are good names? Sound like? But
I mean, I know I've heard that you've gotten a
lot of reference in comparison to Octavia Butler is parable.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, that one which is like man crazy, But yeah,
those books and not just in the writing bloss on
the themes is I was like trying to find things
that matter to me as a writer that I wanted
to write about, and like one was like super science fiction,
and then another one was like magical realism, and then
one was actually a love story. And I was just
(25:56):
trying to find do I want to do romance? And
I was sort of all over the place, and I
liked that I had that room to play, you know,
so they all folded in. Though I think in some way.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
You mentioned two people that I think seem to have
had like a really or three actually that had a
really good impact on your life. And who the man is?
Who is in front of me today, Your grandmother, your mother,
mother's yeah, and this teacher. Three women yeah right yes,
and even the women in Sky Full of Elephants are
(26:29):
oh man, I'm be honest. I suffered Sidney. She got
all my whole.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
Nerds everybody, and chapter twenty twenty one, I was like
this girl who we all know, is.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
That half white of her? That's that that that was
that side. But I love I loved all of them, know,
even even even Sydney, because she was like the little
sister I never, like never had never wanted or wanted right.
But it's also it was a good arc for her,
like there was important for her to be on that
(27:06):
journey and to ask all of these questions and to
question everything right while she was also discovering who she is.
And that's a coming of age story within the book
and her trying to figure out who she is and
where does she belong exactly. Something that you also mentioned
(27:27):
is about becoming, and you said something in an interview
that it made me wonder if you are still on
the journey of becoming, if you are still trying to
determine if you are if that evolution is based on
your past or your future.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
I think the two things converge in a way. So
I have this thing that I again is part of
the training that I do with the teams that I
lead in and as I do it with myself, is
I try to get them to imagine their lives five
years from now, but to imagine it fully actualized, like
everything you want, no holds barred, every detail fulfilled in
(28:10):
the next five years. What does that look like, and
really clearly articulate what that looks like. And so I
try to tap it, tap into advice and just answer
me three questions. Answer me, where do you live? And
that's also suggestive of what you live in? Is it
a house, is it an apartment? Is it a condo? Where?
And what do you living? What are you happen for
(28:31):
dinner that night? Which is also suggestive of who you're
having that dinner with, because it could be family now,
it could be a significant other, it could be by yourself.
And then what's your model when you wake up in
the morning, right, and really imagine all of that relative
to having your full life fulfilled? Because right now, when
you wake up, you're trying to get somewhere, and so
your motto is like, I'm going to get there. But
(28:54):
what is your motto once you arrived?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Right?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
What you're eating for dinner? Are you now healthier than
you would be otherwise? You can afford the food that
you want, You can eat whatever you want. Are you
eating at home or eating out? Like? What does that
look like? You know? And so that the idea of
trying to imagine yourself, I think is a sense of
trying to get to at least a cliff in that fulfillment,
a cliff in that point of arrival of becoming and I,
(29:20):
you know, I had this picture in my head really
about I guess now it's right out. Five years ago,
I was in a car with my wife and she
was I was telling her about this thing I was
working on. She was not my wife at the time.
I was trying to win out over successfully my ad
and I was like, so I don't hear about this project.
And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna try to get
(29:41):
a bunch of writers together and they're going to do
this and this. She goes, well, why don't you write?
And I looked at her. I was like, what, Like,
what do you mean? And she goes, you you you write?
I see you do it every day. You're writing every
single day, but you never put anything out. Why don't
you write? And so I sat down and I was like,
what does that look like like? What does that look
like to go from completely unknown? I don't have any
(30:01):
literary friends at the time, not one. What does it
look like to go at my age and try to
become literary? And I drew out a whole plan, whole plan,
and the plan was like, all right, you need to
write a book of poems. In the book of poems
will make you indexible, you'll be someone could google you
and they'll find you and they'll say he's written something great. Now,
(30:24):
I write some short stories and take the short stories
and send those out to magazine. See if someone want
to publish you. And if nothing else, see if you
can get an agent. Once you get an agent, write
a novel. Right.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
That was my plan.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
And then I thought, when I write that novel, the
one thing I want is I want to be interviewed
by Oprah. Right, And I had this very clear image
of like sitting not Oprah, don't even have a show.
But I was like, this is on the Oprah show,
the one from the nineties.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Some sitting is about books, and so she does so.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
That get at me so and so I had this
like this is that's what that's going to look like.
Is I'll be out and about, I'll have literary friends,
I'll be you know, you know, in New York Times.
And I had all this stuff in my mind, and
everything that I described up until a point of that
has happened. I wrote the poems. The poems actually won
(31:18):
a contest, which I didn't see coming. It was published,
and I was planning to self publish it. Then I
wrote the short stories, it instantly got publication in different places,
and I got an agent, and then I wrote the
novel just a sequence. But what I found is like
the person got lost in the things that I was making,
(31:39):
and I was like, well, what does my life actually
look like? And I didn't do the same image I
was trying to get my team to picture. I wasn't picturing.
I was just picturing all the things that I was
trying to make. And then I suddenly was like, oh wow,
if I were answering those three questions for myself, first
of all, I wouldn't be in New York. I'd be
(31:59):
in nature. And I'm not in nature. I'm in New
York right now. I'm in Brooklyn, right And I was like,
I would be cooking at home with fresh food. I
wouldn't be you know, at sauce in the Lower East Side, right,
you know. And when I wake up in the morning,
my motto would be to just be the best dad
I could be, to be the best husband I could be.
And so I moved to London and I'm like, now
(32:21):
I want to live on a forest. And I wanted
to have all of those things because it wasn't about writing.
It was about writing as a vehicle to create the
space to have the life, you know, And so I
think that is still in the arc of becoming. But
I can see what it's trying to be, you know,
with a bit more clarity, which I don't think I
(32:42):
did before.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I mean, again, the name is ze Bo. Yeah, it
means planning, planning, planning. I'm much strong believer that you know,
you have a plan, but God always has a bigger one,
better one. Indeed, so we set out on ideas and
then it all just kind of grows and becomes what
(33:04):
it's meant to be.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Indeed, there's a requisite that there's trust in that, right,
Like you if I were to say to you, we're
going west, but I didn't say if we're going to
get the LA or we're going to San Francisco. You
have to trust me, right And a part of that
is not trying to picture San Francisco, not trying to
picture LA, but just trusting that every step you're taking
is in the right direction, right, And so I feel that.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Another archetype that you've mentioned several times is Tony Morrison.
So is that one of your favorite She's the She's
the North Star. She's the because she's.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I mean, what she was doing was so much bigger
than the words on the page, and yet the words
on the page are enormous. Yeah there, I mean when
people ask me the great She's a great American writer,
no question, as far as I'm concerned. But outside of Shakespeare,
there's no greater writer in my mind in history, because
(33:59):
I just I still can't fathom the things she could
do on the page and how they connected to the
things that were happening in my reality in any time period.
So I there's a lot in this book that is
relative to Tony Morrison. It's all an homage. The opening
line of the book is they killed themselves.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
The opening line of Paradise is they killed the white
girl first, right, so those two were married. There's the
whole Mobile that is partially because I grew up around
Mobile and I know the stories of Mobile. But in
the Bluest Eye, she has this whole motif about Mobile,
and it's beautiful, some of the most beautiful writing I've
ever read in my life. It's so beautiful that when
(34:41):
I met my wife, you know, we're dating early on,
she was like, do you know Tony Morrison. I'm looking
at her like girl so and she she she goes,
I read this this quote and I just can't get
out of my head and it was that quote from
the Bluest Eye, and she was like, it's so beautiful
and it's just it was always astounded by her. The
other portion of it is, is you mentioned how the
(35:05):
women are in my book is certainly women are in
my life. I am a believer in a matriarchal society,
like I think a woman has to be at the center.
And my mother was, my mother's mother was. They are
the gravitational force around which we all turn. And so
for me as a creative and a creative and having
(35:28):
an archetype to make proud, Tony Morrison represented that it
is not lost to me for a second. Every time
I sit down, I am trying to make Tony Morrison proud.
I'm trying to make her if you ever ready acknowledge
acknowledgements that says it. I want her to tap someone
on the shoulder and be like, you heard about this writer.
You heard about this book. Because it means so much
to me to like it would a mother. You want
(35:50):
to make your mother proud. I want to make her
proud as a not just a writer in terms of
the letters, the words, but the stories that we're trying
to tell and why we're trying to tell and who
we're trying to tell them to. Like she understood that
in a way that I just skipped like two or
three generations. Man, it was like she was doing it
and then everyone was like kind of stopped, and now
(36:11):
they're picking it back up again, and you could see
the writing is really starting to get quite expansive and
the stories are getting expansive. But yeah, she was. She
was definitely before a time she's she's top top top.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
I mean, I completely agree, and I kind of lends
to that ancestral energy that's all throughout the book as well,
like having that connection and that conversation with our ancestors
and making them proud and continuing the storylines that they've
set out in front of us. Yeah, I'm definitely a
big fan of Tony Morris. And I will say, though,
I think my north star is probably Octavia Butler. I
(36:47):
remember the very first time I read her, I lost it,
like I was, I was, like it was and it
was in a sense, it's kind of funny. This is
probably my Sydney moment. But in that after I read
Octavia Butler, I was like, we can write like.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
This, like you know what I mean, we could do that.
Speaker 5 (37:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
I was like, I didn't know we were in sci fi,
but I mean that's not where we were back then, right,
We kind of had to open that door. And I
remember watching an interview and she was like that sci
fi allows us to be wherever, Yes, and we can
do whatever.
Speaker 5 (37:23):
Yeah, because there are no closed doors, no walls, can
look at, examine, play with anything, absolutely anything.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
There's a relationship between the two of them. Tony Mortenson
is what's inside and she can go as deep as
the roots will go. Octavia Butler is like the leaves
at the top of the tree and she can show
you point you all the way up to the sky.
Like one is like phototropic, the other one is gravitropic, right,
and you need both of them. And when I read parable,
(37:57):
so everything I've read of Octavia but I just like,
I love Star Trek and frankly all of the futuristic
films that I would watch, the TV shows, we just
weren't in those futures. And she was the first one
that was like, no, you're in the future. In fact
you are. The future doesn't exist without you, kind of factly.
(38:18):
And then she was also expanding my mind into different
ideas that were outside of me, you know, ideas about religion,
ideas about self, about like what the future could look
like if we were to change it the traject you
of it now. And she did this thing I think
it was accidental for me, which was you watched you
ever see like any of the time travel movies, you know,
(38:40):
with Marty McFly or any of them. Everyone that's in
the future trying to come back to the past. There
are great fears. You can't mess up anything in the past.
You can't knock this bottle over because it'll create a
ripple effect. But they don't talk about what's happening now
and how the decisions we make ripple forward to the future,
and so everything we're doing now has an impact on
what's to come. And her work made me think that.
(39:02):
It made me go, wait a minute, Everything I'm doing
right now is it's a march towards the future, and
I can change that trajectory as I And then Tony
Morrison is like the compass whatever the trajectory you're on.
You need her to direct you, you know, so I
think there is a relationship between the two for sure.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Do you consider yourself a speckless of fiction writer? Is
that the space that you live in? Or do you
not want me to put a title?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
No, I mean to be honest. I said this to
Doctor Black. Shout out to doctor Back. He's the best.
I love him. He asked me about being a writer,
and I remember I said, I struggle to say I'm
a writer at all because I still think of myself
as an artist, which is to say I'm still like
I haven't. I think when I'm writing, I don't have
(39:51):
the control that a lot of writers have. Like when
I read Coulson Whitehead, every sentence is perfect. That man
has control. I don't have that kind of control. I'm
still a mess I'm still messy, you know. I'm Basquiat
in there, like I'm just doing whatever I want, whatever
I think. And I don't think it follows all the
(40:13):
same rules of writing in a lot of ways. I
think it it dances in and out of things, and
I think I mess a lot of things up. I
also think I'm trying to create something on the page,
not sort of describe something on the page that makes sense.
I'm trying to like, I'm trying to create like an image,
(40:34):
a moment, a reaction on the page as a canvas,
versus a description of a thing that you can see
in your mind. And so that to me is there's
a whole the whole ending of the book what I
was trying to create. It's a crescendo. And you can
read it. You'll see the you've read it, but you know,
the pace picks up, the punctuation changes, the language changes.
(40:56):
It gets quite euphonious. So a lot of the words
using our o's and u's and the sounds that are
sort of malefluous as it builds and builds and builds
and bills and then it has this crescendo. I was
trying to create that, not necessarily trying to write perfect
sentences or trying to write, you know, with the rules
of like drunk and white like I wasn't. I was
(41:16):
just trying to make something.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
It's interesting. There was a quote that I wrote down
that I was going to read earlier. I was like, oh,
maybe we'll get but it's bite twenty more acon As
she wrote I don't think I could have happily stayed
here in this world if I did not have a
way of thinking about it, which is what writing is
for me. It's control.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Nobody tells me what to do.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
It's mine. It's free, and it's a it's a way
of thinking. It's pure. Not so when I hear you
say control or you don't have all of the control,
this quote makes me feel like, this is your world,
this is the world for you to create. And knowing
(42:01):
your relationships to Tony Morrison, I think I wrote that
down for you, not knowing you were gonna even say that.
She was like, tell this boy, tell this man, tell
this king. He means to hear what you put on
a page.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
I mean, that's that's that's heavy because if you said
that that was you know, Donald Trump said that, I'll
still be like, it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
I'm telling you that right now.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
I mean I was still been like, I appreciate the words,
but but the fact that it is Tony Morrison is like,
because ultimately, I think we are trying to find a
sense of place. I was reading Gosh, what is it?
Black Liturgies, and there was a whole thing in there
that said before God made man. God made a place
(42:54):
for man, and we're trying to find a place. And
the control, I think it's in the context of the stories,
not in the necessarily in the in the perfection of
the language, because I think we you know, there's there
has to be room to play. I just you know,
like I have this image in my mind that it
constantly plays and and I don't know why it does,
(43:17):
but I you ever seen one of those like voodoo
ceremonies where they got the mask on and they're like
dancing and they're like conjuring spirits. They do that different
every single time. Yes, it's never the same. And you go,
you have a ritual, but the ritual is only in
your ability, however you can to pull something through. And
(43:39):
that to me, the control isn't the ritual. The control
is you, right, And I and I like that every
time I sit down and I'm like trying to make
anything that plays out in my mind where I'm like,
I just got to make sure I'm like open to it,
you know, open to the antennas are up and I'm
listening and I'm reacting and I'm playing with it. I'm
allowing it to be a voked, and I think the
(44:01):
control is in that. But you know, all that being said,
like I realized I'm talking, I said Coulson, and it
may have sound a negative. I like Culson. I just
I read his stuff and I'm like, Lord, mercy this man.
I think these sentences are too perfect. Like I don't
know who's making this. I don't know who's making.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
This, but I don't think anyone is perfect. To be honest,
I don't think I've had I don't think I've ever
read a perfect writer. Yeah they might structurally, might be perfect,
grammatically might be perfect, but there's always something there that
where the magic comes in, right, and a great writer
(44:39):
and a great any type of artistic expression, there is magic, right,
and you have to leave room for that to express
itself however it wants to express itself.
Speaker 5 (44:50):
You know.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
It's so funny, man. We have so many like extraordinarily
talented creatives in the world and you can feel it
when they've made something that just was like shot out
of him. And I love it because it reminds me.
It reorients me to our power and our source of
power as black people. Have this funny story where I
(45:12):
was in Coney Island and I had taken my kids.
My kids for some reason wanted to go to Connye Island.
I'm like, y'all, it's hot, Like I don't. It's really
expensive and unnecessarily so to go to Cornye Island. But
we go and they want to ride a roller coaster.
And there is one roller coaster that has like a
horse and you like sit on it's like for the kids.
And I see this black kid is hot and he's
(45:35):
got his hoodie on, mean mugging. He's by himself and
he's like walks up and he sits on this horse
and he's like mean mugging on this little toy horse.
I look at this kid and I'm like, you know,
I'm thinking, are you gonna have this mug the whole
ride like that? Yeah you do. You don't have to
do that, like you can, you can let it go.
But he was just sitting there, you know, just with
(45:56):
this horse. And so the ride starts and you know,
you kind of go and then it does that first
drop and I hear him yell and I see that
hoodie fly back like that. By the time we get around,
he's laughing, screaming, his mouth full of teeth, just smiling
so bright, and I thought it took this whole rollercoaster
(46:16):
to let you feel free, like to let you just
express yourself. Man, you know, and I'm quite keen on,
you know, trying to find mechanisms for our blackness to
move as it should move, as freely as it can.
In this country. It is difficult. It's it's it's it's
difficult everywhere. It doesn't matter where you are. As a
(46:36):
matter of fearing, Cali is a manterfeur in you know, Mississippi,
New York. It's just it's it's it's difficult, but when
you see it, it is it's so so xuberant. We
shine in the dark and we can be lights for
other people, and that to me is everything. And you
feel it, man, you feel it. So in the book,
I wanted that to come through with some of the characters,
(46:58):
but ultimately I wanted to come through the book itself.
So the book is the signal, right, Like you read
the book and you put it down. If your mind
isn't spinning, I haven't done my job as a writer.
Because I want you to have those questions. I want
you to move through the world and go wait a
minute we are, we can we can move how we
want to move. And what's holding us back? Now those
(47:21):
that commentary going on in your mind Like.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
A voice hearing you talk, I feel like there's a
part of you in when you're writing and what you're
putting out into the world that's dedicated to protecting black culture.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Oh god, yeah, we have we have to. And you
said the right word is protect. It is. It is
under siege. It's exploitation. It's under siege. And everyone that
when I say we're light in the dark, remember this
is what's what Sinners is all about. He's saying, you start.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Bring it up. But I was like, if we go
down there, Rabbits.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
I got a lot to say about Sinners, but I
can't say at all because I just wrote a horror
book and it's very similar to Sinners. And I was like, damn.
But anyway, what he's saying that that films he's going
When this kid plays his guitar, he illuminates the night
and he will draw in any force that can see it.
And just imagine, imagine if you walking around in the
(48:13):
dark and someone turns on the light, you can be like, oh,
let me go towards that. That's who we are, that's
who we are in this world, and so so yeah,
I mean I think we we've we as a people,
our nature is we come from a state of abundance,
and so the nature is to give. So when someone
arrives to you and they go, hey, I need help,
you'll give them that help. But what's happening is people
(48:34):
are coming to us masked as I need help, but
they're there to take everything that they could possibly take.
So that that's I think we have to protect it.
I said to doctor Black because he said, you know,
we're not a black people, not a monolith. And I
was like, well, we need to be thinking monolithically right,
like we need to. We need to know the contours
(48:54):
of who we are.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
That collective thought, what is that collective morale?
Speaker 3 (48:58):
And socially in this day now, Absolutely we need some
collective sense of what we stand for, what we're fighting for,
how we can take care of our people in our community,
how we can hold on resources within our own communities,
et cetera. Agree completely, It doesn't have to be identical
(49:19):
and didn't mean we can't ever disagree, but we do
need some sense of what we understand would be collectively
healthy for a black.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Community, and to put put borders around it so we
can at least have the same value system no matter
where we are, the value system represents us, and if
anybody's trying to exploit that or to take it or
to leverage it, we can identify the people who don't
actually align with it from those who do. And I
think that, I think it's an imperative because man, the
(49:50):
stuff I see U says, it's so visible and invisible
at the same time. You know, you see, like you
were talking about TikTok those dances real quick, some like
white doing that dance getting paid right real quick. That's
pervasive throughout our whole culture. You know, the kid right
now in the subway, got his laces tied up a
(50:11):
certain way, He's got his jacket a certain way, he's
moving around. It's just him, just being him. I guarantee you,
if someone captures that on film, someone in Sweden gonna
do the same thing, be like, that's the coolest thing
I've ever seen. I think we have to be protective.
And protective is let me change that word. I'm saying,
we need to hold it sacred, which is different than defense.
(50:34):
Holding something sacred is honoring it by not giving it away,
honoring it by holding it to yourself. And that's the
reason that the church has a building. You walk in
that building, and that building is sacred. When you walk
out of building, you can go do what you want.
But if you walk into this building, you're sacred along
with us. And we have to treat the culture that way.
And I don't think everything I write for the rest
(50:57):
of my life will be centered around that as a premise,
because I think it's so vital. I think it's absolutely
but it doesn't end on this continent. It has to
extend to Haiti. It has to extend to South America.
It has to extend to the continent that we have
to protect it if all the white people we're to
(51:19):
disappear tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Black Lit is a Black Effects original series in partnership
with iHeart Media. Is written and created by myself, Jack
Queis Thomas and executive produced alongside Dolly s Bishop. Chanelle
Collins is the director of production, Head of Talent Nicole Spence,
writer producer Jason Torres, our researcher and producer is Jabari Davis,
(51:45):
and the mix and sound design is by the humble
Duane Crawford. Gratitude is an action, so I have to
give praise to those who took the time out to
write a review. Please keep sharing and we will promise
to bring more writers and greater episodes to you
My name is Jacqueesse Thomas, and you're listening to Black Lit,
a podcast about black literature and the stories behind the storytellers.
Where did the name of Seawell come from.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
My real name is Cornelius. And my brothers. I have
a bunch of brothers of five brothers, four sisters, and
all of my brothers we all played sports. And my
oldest brother's name is William, and he was really good.
He was like crazy fast. Just we were literally like
six and he was still like a superstar. And someone
(00:38):
said that he played like Bo Jackson, and so they
called him wing footed wheaty bow. Don't know why, but
that's what they called him, wing footed wedi Bow. And
then I came and I was a little bit faster,
and they were like, well, his name starts with the sea,
so Cibo, and then it was wheedy boau Si Bo.
And then my youngest brother, who was good, his name
(00:59):
is rodrique Is and so they started calling him Rico.
So we walk into a room they go see bo
we Bo Rico. And that was like a thing in
my neighborhood where I grew up, that we all had
that the sort of rhyming name and then it stuck,
and it stuck so much that when I went to college.
I went to school on a football scholarship, and I'm
in school, I'm in, I'm in, you know, in class,
doing my thing. They come and get me out of
(01:19):
class and they're like, you're actually not registered to the
school because all of your PaperWorks at Sibo and not Cornelius.
So I had to reregister everything for college. Wow, because
that's how much the name stuck, I've said, and I
believe that when I I'm entering into the age, Where'm
go and go back to Cornelius right like, I'm going
to be Cornelias. I want to have like overalls that
(01:41):
I want to have a porch at a rock and
chair where I'm a dog named Otis, and I want
people to call I want to eat pecans all day
and people all day and just shuck cons and I
want people to call me Cornelius.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
So I looked it up and it said in Zulu
that it means plan our idea.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Why oh, I don't think I've ever known that.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I was like, huh, that's fitting.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I got plans. Let me tell you I got plans.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
So you got plans for pecans and.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
We're trying to get there. I want I want peace.
I want peace, and none says peace like the cons So,
you know, but that's I want to remember that. I
love that. I love that.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I love it too. I was like, because this is
kind of a plan, the sky full of elopments, well,
an unexpected plan.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Certainly a desirous one, like we we we. You know
that book is so funny. It came out of completely
out of nowhere, and now I can't. I think how
speculative fiction works is you You you enter into a
story with a question, right, and sort of you don't
necessarily answer the question, but you write the question into
the book and then anyone who reads it they have
(02:57):
the question superimposed over there when they stopped me. So
you take your reading the pages, you walk outside, the
question is now in front of you. And so the
question is what would it look like? And now when
you go places, I certainly do it now everywhere I go,
I look around, I'm like, damn, if there are no
white people in here, this would be so different, This
experience that I'm having would be so different, and I
(03:20):
can't get away from it now.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
And that's what inspired the whole the book The Journey. Yeah,
that one question it was.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
It was actually it predated the question because I was
watching Ferris Bueller. Have you heard me tell the story?
Speaker 1 (03:35):
I have?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
The Ferris Buehler story is the truth, and that is
where the question came from.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
You know, it's interesting. I've heard you tell this story
a few times. So it made me wonder, like, Okay,
if yes, and in this modern day and time, Pharris Bueller,
if we replaced it with Trayvon Martin, that would not work.
That would be a hard story. But then I was like, well,
what if that same kid had that same experience in
(04:03):
the sky fully elephants world? What would his day look like? Well?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
One, I think the center of the central part of
the character of Ferris Bueler is audacity, right, and there's
a there's an audacious he looks at you when he's talking,
he looks he's like breaks the fourth wall straight away.
A you can never go too far be If I'm
going to get busted, it is not going to be
by a guy like that. Everything he's doing is whatever
(04:30):
he feels like doing, is entirely impulsive, and I think
culturally to be impulsive is to put yourself at risk
at times, even even to the degree like you said,
people dancing in the in the subway or someone coming
up to you, they're putting themselves at risk to try
to engage you, to constantly try to do that. And
(04:51):
so I think the thing that makes it dangerous is gone.
The thing that makes it makes your audacity feel adulled
is gone. And so I do think it would translate
into more audacity. However, I don't think the audacity would
necessarily translate into mischief, right, So I don't necessarily think
(05:16):
by being free enough to be over whoever you want,
that that means I'm gonna go steal this Porsche, do
you know what I mean? Or I think it will
translate into quieter things, you know, Like I said, I
just want to sit under a contrary and that that
is my audacity in that it's actualization. And I think, yeah,
(05:38):
I just I find that like as a culture, we
are expressive but not necessarily mischievous, and there is mischief,
but it's more like an expression of who we.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Are, you know, I don't know, I probably was a
little mischievous when I was.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
I gotta I do, gotta get respective fact that he's
like sixteen in this movie, and every sixteen year old
is a little bit mischievss. But I mean, generally speaking,
we I think we would be, you know. I mean
I grew up in the eighties and nineties, right, so
there was no Internet when I was a kid. I'm
the last generation that predates the digital age, and I
(06:21):
remember being like, we're going to sneak out our house.
Nobody has new phones cameras, and we were getting into mischief.
But it wasn't it wasn't like a show. It was
just like, you know, we're trying to fuck around, just
have fun, but we're not like it's not a performative
actors just trying to express ourselves, just trying to react
to night time and react to certain circumstances that make
(06:43):
you feel something. But I don't. I didn't think of
myself as like getting in trouble unless I interacted with
the police. And this is the big difference with Varispueller. Yeah,
he literally impersonates a cop, right, he does whatever he wants,
and that audacity to that degree, I just don't think.
I don't think it's I don't think it serves us.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
You know. That's interesting though, that the audacity for your
time now is to find and to be able to
have a peaceful life like a black man, to have
the audacity to be in a peaceful piece space, and
that be the goal, like what you what you're actually
(07:27):
striving for.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Think about how many black men you see on a
regular basis just meditating right or you know, frankly sitting
and just reading right and trying to have the time
and space to just exist in their own mind. That
to me is unfortunately because of our reality, it's the
(07:49):
space that we don't get to occupy as much as
we want to. And so I think that if given
all the room in the world to do what you want,
I think you'll want two things. I think you'll want
to be in nature and I think you'll want time.
And maybe that might translate into some chaos, but for
the most part, I think it's gonna be pretty true.
Because right now I go places. I travel all over
(08:13):
So I've traveled to forty forty eight I think I've
made done forty at least forty eight fifty states. I've
been to travel all over the world. I used to
live in the Philippines, I live in London. Now I've
been all over and you don't know how often I'll
talk to an American. I'm like, have you, like a
black American? And I'm like, have you ever been to Idaho?
And They're like, what the hell would I be in Idaho?
(08:36):
Or have you been to the Grand Canyon? Have you
been to Yellowstone? And those are the most beautiful parts
of the whole country. And so if you think of
yourself as an American and you lay claim to the country,
why wouldn't you go to those places that are also yours?
And I think it's because we've been wedged into these
urban environments, coastal cities that were want port cities, and
(08:56):
so we're like afraid to just go out there. And
I think that's part of the audacity, is to just
be like, you know, that's that's I'm as comfortable in
nature as I am in the city.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, I'm just as comfortable in every part of my country.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Indeed, right because I've been upstate and are at times
I'm like, bro, the's ain't not it, this is not it.
But when I traveled to Wyoming was the most So
I flew into Bozeman, Montana and spent like a couple
of days in Bozeman and Bozeman's great really good sushi
(09:33):
for where I don't know how they got it was
really good, right, especially called Dan's. And I'm a day
and should be making sushi, but it's good. And then
we took the road trip from bos of Montana into
Wyoming into Yellowstone. Listen, there's nothing like seeing bison, like
you know, migrating across the landscape. You don't see that.
(09:57):
You never see wild horses that are not on someone's leash, right,
you don't get to see these lakes that you can
see all the way through and see the fish huge,
just living. That to me is when they talk about
manifest destiny and they talk about like existing in the
abundance of nature, That's what it looks like. And we
don't go to those places at all.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
So, okay, I'm going to go back a little bit
to understand how this mine came to be, How you
came into this way of being. It was meditation always
a part of your life or was that something that
came later on and traveling as well. Was that a
part of your upbringing?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
No, not at all, not at all. I have a
really big family, and so like my mom had she
had a total it was total of thirteen of them,
but two of them died early. Some died when they
were like teenagers. So I grew up with like nine
or ten of her siblings, and then they all had
multiple children, and my mom had multiple children, so we
(10:57):
had a whole bunch of cousins. They would drop us
all up at my grandmother's house in the summer and
just be like, we gotta go to work, y'all stay
at grandma's house. And my grandma would not let us
in the house. She'd just go, y'all stay outside and
you don't come. I'll give you all some eggs in
the morning, and i'll give you some dinner when this
time you remed to pick you up, but you can't
come in the house. And so we would sit out
(11:18):
in this yard and she had like it was like
the yard adjacent to the house, and then a church
adjacent to that. And the house was a house that
was like a It's like a composite of different parts
that we would constantly add to. So like my dad
built the bathroom and I put the carpet in. So
the house was like a way for us to refine
(11:38):
our skills with our hands, and then my grandma would
leave us outside and she would like, you, if you
want to eat, gotta eat the cans off the tree.
You gotta eat the peaches, you gotta eat the plums,
but you can't come in this house. And so we
would just like play games, make up our own games,
sit in the sun, eat fruit off the trees. And
you know, with so many of us that it was
(11:59):
like you were a commune. But we're all roughly the
same age. I mean, my eldest cousins are maybe like
four years younger than me, and my youngest about three
or four years younger. So we would be able to
sort of play together in a way. And I have
memories of like wishing school would start, because I'm like,
we did not hear like hours, Like it's hours, man,
(12:20):
this is crazy, and time relative to who I was,
it didn't exist in my life in a way it
exists now right now. It feels like there's never enough
time in the day. But I have memories of feeling
like it was too much, and those are the same
twenty four hours. And so meditation wasn't a part of
my life, but like existing in a space that was
(12:41):
sort of my own was and I was always the
creative kid in like my family, Like I was quite internal.
I was just just sit by myself and think about things.
And I have this and I like to make things
as well. And so I had this memory of being
really young and my mom was in the kitchen and
she was cooking and she has some eggs. Drops on
(13:03):
the eggs on the floor cracks and so you know
those cars that you pull back and then they zoom
for I'm playing with one of those cars and I
take it apart, and there's a coil inside of us.
When you pull it back, the coil titans and then
you release it, the coil releases and it goes for it.
So I'm playing with this car. My mom drops this egg.
I look at the egg and I was like, that
crack looks like teeth. So I took the egg and
(13:25):
I drew took a mark, I drew scales on it,
and I and I made the cracks look like teeth.
And I took a rubber band, took the coil from
the cart and rubber band, and I made it to
where I want to pull the coil back. The teeth
chumped like that, and I made like a little like
dragon me. I remember doing this, and I remember my
mom being like, boy, grab it, throw it in the
trash right instantly. But I was how much I enjoyed
(13:49):
like looking at something and trying to find a different
angle for how it can exist, what stories live in it,
like trying to extract something out of it. And I
remember that at like six seven. And then we would
go to church and I would be in church on
Sunday and the preacher be saying stuff and I'd be like,
that doesn't make sense. I want to extract stories out
of that too. And so as a child that was
(14:09):
I don't know if it was meditated, but we had
a lot of space, a lot of time to think
about these things, and so I certainly did. And then
you knows, as a writer, I didn't understand how language works.
I wasn't a big reader, only read what they asked
me to read for school. And then we didn't we
were church going, but it was like just to make
(14:29):
sure we weren't going to hell kind of thing, right,
Like that was that's where the limit is, is like
as long as you repented your good east of Sunday
and Christmas and you're good, right, and so you know,
I was quite separate from like what I think the
identity of me that lives in the book. The only
(14:49):
place where I felt like I as a human connected
to the book even young, was in the culture. Every
person I'm describing in my life all black people, and
it was like our world was black, Everything we did
was black. I didn't know anything else. That was all
I knew growing up, and I think the South is
like that, where it's just there's a density of culture
(15:12):
that I find I have to look for in other places,
but there it was just just pervasive. And so as
I got older, you know, you like, you try to
fit into society, you become really good at code switching
and all that. But I would look backwards and be like,
that's when I felt the richest, That's when I felt
the quietest. That's when I felt more capable of hearing
(15:33):
the voice in my head so I can like talk
and articulate what I want to. That's when I felt
the most artistic. And so I do find a relationship
between that and the book and me as a writer.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
I think, yeah, I mean, well you just have to
sound like your imagination. What really kind of inspired that
creativity of thought, not even necessarily to create, but just
having these these thoughts that you allow to play and
to live and to just be whatever they were. And
that is kind of a form of meditation, I think.
(16:05):
I don't necessarily always think that meditation is like sit,
and don't think it's like sit and allow your thoughts
to become They have to percolate.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
They have to percolate. As a so, I have a
design a creative agency, and I was a designer for
many years. I still design a little bit, but mostly
now just lead the creative teams. But that is the
number one lesson I try to teach them when I'm
training creatives is you have to have the space to
have as much input as you have output, and you
(16:33):
have to have the space to iterate without any without
any risk. And so every single person on my team
they have to start with the pencil and paper before
they can go into any app. It doesn't matter what
the writing, doesn't matter, if they're designing, doesn't matter if
they're going to do photography. Sketch it out for me,
let me see it, because that'll give you the space
(16:54):
to iterate. It takes the thing that's in your head
that's really hard to get. It's hard to extract an
idea out of your mind, bring into three dimensions and
you go, okay, just like mess around, play with it
until it starts to feel like something. Mess it up
as much as you can. And I promise you that
the refining it is a part of that meditation. And
so yes, let it percolate, let it live in your brain,
(17:16):
and then play like, have fun with it. And I
certain that that's as a creative I've always thought of
that as like a superpower.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
You are listening to black Lit. I can see how
all of these things played a part in how you
write right, because it gives every like, every thought, every story,
everything you look at has all of these layers and
dimensions to it. And I noticed one thing that stood
out to me the most was how you describe the
(17:46):
world that you created, and having like these little small
things that made me be like, huh, interesting, But it
brings you into it. It brought me into it in
a way. That was probably the most important part for me,
along with the poetry of it. But before we dive
into that, I'm curious when did you first write though,
(18:09):
When was the first time you were like I'm a writer,
and I'm going to sit down and own this title
and share my work with the world.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
You know, I don't. It's it's tricky because I don't
think I knew I was. When I was in high school.
I was in sort of the advanced courses, the like
duel and role courses for English. But I was only
doing it so I can get my scholarship. Like I was, like,
I'm trying to play football. I'm trying to go to
the NFL. I don't want to. I won't want to
be a school kid. I want to sports. Sports was first,
(18:38):
and I was. I mean, I played football, I was
weight lifting, I was in wrestling, and all I want
to do is play ball, I get scholarship or go
to college. And because I had those duel and role credits,
I was equivalent of like a second year student, but
I was a first year student because I had like
I think eighteen credit total credit hours. So it's like
or past the first semester, so not the second year,
(18:59):
but second semester. And I'm in English one oh two
and I play a game that Saturday. I score a
punt return and the announcer says Linda Wood's a sensational
freshman come back to class, and my teachers like, I
didn't know you. I wasn't thinking of you as a freshman.
You're the best writer in the class. And I'm looking
(19:19):
at her like, what are you talking about, Like, I'm
just doing what you tell me to do. And she goes,
you have to change your major. At the time, my
major was I think psychology or sociology, because when you
come on a scholarship, they're just like they give it
to you and then like get out on the field
and start playing. And so I wasn't. I was just
in classes, wasn't I had no idea. They did it
all for me. And so she goes, you have to
(19:41):
change your major. And she asked me what I wanted
to do, And at first I thought, you know, actually
I think I want to do film, like I really
like I like movies, and so maybe I can be
a filmmaker. And she goes, we don't have that degree,
but what we'll do to give you a contract degree.
And so the contract degree is you have to take
a certain number of classes in different departments and they
(20:01):
will equal that degree. So I had to take English literature.
I to take in Creative Writing, how to take theater
and communications, and I'm taking these classes, no idea what
I'm doing. And she goes, take this notebook, and I
want you to write this notebook every day. If you're
writing thisnbook every day and you write whatever you want,
you write poems, you can write, you know, journal entries,
(20:22):
I'll pass you in my class. And I go, all right,
bet So I wrote every day in this notebook. Like
she said, she took the stuff that I wrote, entered
it into the school contest, and I wanted so. I
was Senior Creative Writing Award winner as a freshman in college.
And that's when I was like, okay, like something, it's
like this is that doesn't make sense to me. And
(20:45):
the strangest thing happened. I still reflect on it with
like thoughts. I was suddenly not accepted in any camp
in school. So the football players, because I want to
talk to them, I'll be like, yo, I just read Shakespeare.
Let me tell you about it. And they're like, bruh,
pack this ball and run, like don't don't talk to
me about Shakespeare. And then I would go to class
(21:07):
and they'd be like, you only here because you're football player.
And you want to get a good grid, you don't
actually care about this stuff. And so I was sort
of just alone, like in my thoughts and writing, and
I would have the first book that transformed everything, everything,
the first book I read that I've read read Withsula,
and I will never forget it because I was given
(21:29):
the book on a Sunday, No, it was a Friday,
and I played on Saturday, and I sat down on
a Sunday to read it. And I'm in my dorm room,
sitting by myself, opened the book and I read the
first page and then I shut the book and I'm like, yo,
what was that?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Like?
Speaker 2 (21:43):
How does how did she do that? The how does
she create all of that reaction in my body with
just these letters? Like I don't understand it, So open it,
open it back up, try to read some more clothes again.
And I can't couldn't reconcile how the images in my
brain existed there with just the words on that page.
(22:03):
And it was more than just images. It was like
a rhythm, you know. And so I was like, I
want to do that. I don't know where that is.
I want to do that. And that's when I started
to shift Gears and and you know, I had this
picture in my head of what a writer should be
because of like Jack harrowag and like you know, Burrows
and stuff. So I was like, I need I didn't
(22:24):
drink and I was young, and I was like, I
need to start drinking. I need candles, right, I need
to have like a moment in my.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Room and making it a type doesn't work, smoking.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Like I'm gonna go crazy. I remember buying a glad
a bottle of remember Arbormist, like so Arbormist in like
a plastic cup in my room. I was a college writer.
That's all. That's all I could afford. So I was like, man,
this is it, this is how you do it. And
(22:59):
I was terrible, terrible at it. But I quite like
the craft. I like the idea that I could that
I could play with words in the same way that
I played with you know, with football, or play with
other things, and I can try to compose them to
give put a story in someone's mind or put an
image in their mind. The other thing was that I
also was keen on like I think we're in a
(23:22):
culture now where everyone wants to immediately put out everything
that they make instantly and get feedback. And I was
like very against that young, and so I would make things.
I wrote whole novels and they never left my shelf
because I would just write them to try to figure
out if I can get the art of the story right,
to figure out if I can, you know, compose something
(23:44):
that made me feel good. First, there's a quote from
Prince that I loved even young. He said everything that
I all, the music that I make is perfect when
I make it. It isn't until I give it to
someone else that it becomes imperfect, already complete and perfect.
In my eyes.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
It's like you know, taking your kid and putting them
in some new clothes and saying you can go back
home now.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Just I don't know, it's it's different. So every book
I've written is perfect until this point. And this was
the first one that I was like, Okay, I think this.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Will work, this one, this is the one I can
actually share.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
So okay, first of all, shout out to that teacher.
That's amazing that she recognized that and was like, Okay,
let me let me help this kid along to see
what his gifts are. And that's what teachers are. So
that's what they're supposed to do, right, That's that's one
of the things that they're supposed to do is to
(24:39):
inspire that a neat, natural thing that's already inside of you.
So that's beautiful. I'm also curious. I'm like, I mean,
I know that there's another book coming, but we're not
going to get into that. But I'm curious about those
books that are on the shelf. Do you still do
you still have that notebook?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, I mean I have, I have I have like
digital files with some of the stuff. I have tons
of notebooks. But I was back then, I was trying
to emulate writers that I loved. So it was like,
which I think is a part of the exercise as
you go. You know, one book sounds like Neo Gayman, right,
and then another book sounds like Tony Morrison. Then another
book was trying to sound a little bit like Octavia Butler,
(25:21):
and I'm like trying to find my voice in.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I mean, are those are good names? Sound like? But
I mean, I know I've heard that you've gotten a
lot of reference in comparison to Octavia Butler is parable.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, that one which is like man crazy, But yeah,
those books and not just in the writing bloss on
the themes is I was like trying to find things
that matter to me as a writer that I wanted
to write about, and like one was like super science fiction,
and then another one was like magical realism, and then
one was actually a love story. And I was just
(25:56):
trying to find do I want to do romance? And
I was sort of all over the place, and I
liked that I had that room to play, you know,
so they all folded in. Though I think in some way.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
You mentioned two people that I think seem to have
had like a really or three actually that had a
really good impact on your life. And who the man is?
Who is in front of me today, Your grandmother, your mother,
mother's yeah, and this teacher. Three women yeah right yes,
and even the women in Sky Full of Elephants are
(26:29):
oh man, I'm be honest. I suffered Sidney. She got
all my whole.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
Nerds everybody, and chapter twenty twenty one, I was like
this girl who we all know, is.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
That half white of her? That's that that that was
that side. But I love I loved all of them, know,
even even even Sydney, because she was like the little
sister I never, like never had never wanted or wanted right.
But it's also it was a good arc for her,
like there was important for her to be on that
(27:06):
journey and to ask all of these questions and to
question everything right while she was also discovering who she is.
And that's a coming of age story within the book
and her trying to figure out who she is and
where does she belong exactly. Something that you also mentioned
(27:27):
is about becoming, and you said something in an interview
that it made me wonder if you are still on
the journey of becoming, if you are still trying to
determine if you are if that evolution is based on
your past or your future.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
I think the two things converge in a way. So
I have this thing that I again is part of
the training that I do with the teams that I
lead in and as I do it with myself, is
I try to get them to imagine their lives five
years from now, but to imagine it fully actualized, like
everything you want, no holds barred, every detail fulfilled in
(28:10):
the next five years. What does that look like, and
really clearly articulate what that looks like. And so I
try to tap it, tap into advice and just answer
me three questions. Answer me, where do you live? And
that's also suggestive of what you live in? Is it
a house, is it an apartment? Is it a condo? Where?
And what do you living? What are you happen for
(28:31):
dinner that night? Which is also suggestive of who you're
having that dinner with, because it could be family now,
it could be a significant other, it could be by yourself.
And then what's your model when you wake up in
the morning, right, and really imagine all of that relative
to having your full life fulfilled? Because right now, when
you wake up, you're trying to get somewhere, and so
your motto is like, I'm going to get there. But
(28:54):
what is your motto once you arrived?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Right?
Speaker 2 (28:57):
What you're eating for dinner? Are you now healthier than
you would be otherwise? You can afford the food that
you want, You can eat whatever you want. Are you
eating at home or eating out? Like? What does that
look like? You know? And so that the idea of
trying to imagine yourself, I think is a sense of
trying to get to at least a cliff in that fulfillment,
a cliff in that point of arrival of becoming and I,
(29:20):
you know, I had this picture in my head really
about I guess now it's right out. Five years ago,
I was in a car with my wife and she
was I was telling her about this thing I was
working on. She was not my wife at the time.
I was trying to win out over successfully my ad
and I was like, so I don't hear about this project.
And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna try to get
(29:41):
a bunch of writers together and they're going to do
this and this. She goes, well, why don't you write?
And I looked at her. I was like, what, Like,
what do you mean? And she goes, you you you write?
I see you do it every day. You're writing every
single day, but you never put anything out. Why don't
you write? And so I sat down and I was like,
what does that look like like? What does that look
like to go from completely unknown? I don't have any
(30:01):
literary friends at the time, not one. What does it
look like to go at my age and try to
become literary? And I drew out a whole plan, whole plan,
and the plan was like, all right, you need to
write a book of poems. In the book of poems
will make you indexible, you'll be someone could google you
and they'll find you and they'll say he's written something great. Now,
(30:24):
I write some short stories and take the short stories
and send those out to magazine. See if someone want
to publish you. And if nothing else, see if you
can get an agent. Once you get an agent, write
a novel. Right.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
That was my plan.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
And then I thought, when I write that novel, the
one thing I want is I want to be interviewed
by Oprah. Right, And I had this very clear image
of like sitting not Oprah, don't even have a show.
But I was like, this is on the Oprah show,
the one from the nineties.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Some sitting is about books, and so she does so.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
That get at me so and so I had this
like this is that's what that's going to look like.
Is I'll be out and about, I'll have literary friends,
I'll be you know, you know, in New York Times.
And I had all this stuff in my mind, and
everything that I described up until a point of that
has happened. I wrote the poems. The poems actually won
(31:18):
a contest, which I didn't see coming. It was published,
and I was planning to self publish it. Then I
wrote the short stories, it instantly got publication in different places,
and I got an agent, and then I wrote the
novel just a sequence. But what I found is like
the person got lost in the things that I was making,
(31:39):
and I was like, well, what does my life actually
look like? And I didn't do the same image I
was trying to get my team to picture. I wasn't picturing.
I was just picturing all the things that I was
trying to make. And then I suddenly was like, oh wow,
if I were answering those three questions for myself, first
of all, I wouldn't be in New York. I'd be
(31:59):
in nature. And I'm not in nature. I'm in New
York right now. I'm in Brooklyn, right And I was like,
I would be cooking at home with fresh food. I
wouldn't be you know, at sauce in the Lower East Side, right,
you know. And when I wake up in the morning,
my motto would be to just be the best dad
I could be, to be the best husband I could be.
And so I moved to London and I'm like, now
(32:21):
I want to live on a forest. And I wanted
to have all of those things because it wasn't about writing.
It was about writing as a vehicle to create the
space to have the life, you know, And so I
think that is still in the arc of becoming. But
I can see what it's trying to be, you know,
with a bit more clarity, which I don't think I
(32:42):
did before.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I mean, again, the name is ze Bo. Yeah, it
means planning, planning, planning. I'm much strong believer that you know,
you have a plan, but God always has a bigger one,
better one. Indeed, so we set out on ideas and
then it all just kind of grows and becomes what
(33:04):
it's meant to be.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Indeed, there's a requisite that there's trust in that, right,
Like you if I were to say to you, we're
going west, but I didn't say if we're going to
get the LA or we're going to San Francisco. You
have to trust me, right And a part of that
is not trying to picture San Francisco, not trying to
picture LA, but just trusting that every step you're taking
is in the right direction, right, And so I feel that.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Another archetype that you've mentioned several times is Tony Morrison.
So is that one of your favorite She's the She's
the North Star. She's the because she's.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I mean, what she was doing was so much bigger
than the words on the page, and yet the words
on the page are enormous. Yeah there, I mean when
people ask me the great She's a great American writer,
no question, as far as I'm concerned. But outside of Shakespeare,
there's no greater writer in my mind in history, because
(33:59):
I just I still can't fathom the things she could
do on the page and how they connected to the
things that were happening in my reality in any time period.
So I there's a lot in this book that is
relative to Tony Morrison. It's all an homage. The opening
line of the book is they killed themselves.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
The opening line of Paradise is they killed the white
girl first, right, so those two were married. There's the
whole Mobile that is partially because I grew up around
Mobile and I know the stories of Mobile. But in
the Bluest Eye, she has this whole motif about Mobile,
and it's beautiful, some of the most beautiful writing I've
ever read in my life. It's so beautiful that when
(34:41):
I met my wife, you know, we're dating early on,
she was like, do you know Tony Morrison. I'm looking
at her like girl so and she she she goes,
I read this this quote and I just can't get
out of my head and it was that quote from
the Bluest Eye, and she was like, it's so beautiful
and it's just it was always astounded by her. The
other portion of it is, is you mentioned how the
(35:05):
women are in my book is certainly women are in
my life. I am a believer in a matriarchal society,
like I think a woman has to be at the center.
And my mother was, my mother's mother was. They are
the gravitational force around which we all turn. And so
for me as a creative and a creative and having
(35:28):
an archetype to make proud, Tony Morrison represented that it
is not lost to me for a second. Every time
I sit down, I am trying to make Tony Morrison proud.
I'm trying to make her if you ever ready acknowledge
acknowledgements that says it. I want her to tap someone
on the shoulder and be like, you heard about this writer.
You heard about this book. Because it means so much
to me to like it would a mother. You want
(35:50):
to make your mother proud. I want to make her
proud as a not just a writer in terms of
the letters, the words, but the stories that we're trying
to tell and why we're trying to tell and who
we're trying to tell them to. Like she understood that
in a way that I just skipped like two or
three generations. Man, it was like she was doing it
and then everyone was like kind of stopped, and now
(36:11):
they're picking it back up again, and you could see
the writing is really starting to get quite expansive and
the stories are getting expansive. But yeah, she was. She
was definitely before a time she's she's top top top.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
I mean, I completely agree, and I kind of lends
to that ancestral energy that's all throughout the book as well,
like having that connection and that conversation with our ancestors
and making them proud and continuing the storylines that they've
set out in front of us. Yeah, I'm definitely a
big fan of Tony Morris. And I will say, though,
I think my north star is probably Octavia Butler. I
(36:47):
remember the very first time I read her, I lost it,
like I was, I was, like it was and it
was in a sense, it's kind of funny. This is
probably my Sydney moment. But in that after I read
Octavia Butler, I was like, we can write like.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
This, like you know what I mean, we could do that.
Speaker 5 (37:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
I was like, I didn't know we were in sci fi,
but I mean that's not where we were back then, right,
We kind of had to open that door. And I
remember watching an interview and she was like that sci
fi allows us to be wherever, Yes, and we can
do whatever.
Speaker 5 (37:23):
Yeah, because there are no closed doors, no walls, can
look at, examine, play with anything, absolutely anything.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
There's a relationship between the two of them. Tony Mortenson
is what's inside and she can go as deep as
the roots will go. Octavia Butler is like the leaves
at the top of the tree and she can show
you point you all the way up to the sky.
Like one is like phototropic, the other one is gravitropic, right,
and you need both of them. And when I read parable,
(37:57):
so everything I've read of Octavia but I just like,
I love Star Trek and frankly all of the futuristic
films that I would watch, the TV shows, we just
weren't in those futures. And she was the first one
that was like, no, you're in the future. In fact
you are. The future doesn't exist without you, kind of factly.
(38:18):
And then she was also expanding my mind into different
ideas that were outside of me, you know, ideas about religion,
ideas about self, about like what the future could look
like if we were to change it the traject you
of it now. And she did this thing I think
it was accidental for me, which was you watched you
ever see like any of the time travel movies, you know,
(38:40):
with Marty McFly or any of them. Everyone that's in
the future trying to come back to the past. There
are great fears. You can't mess up anything in the past.
You can't knock this bottle over because it'll create a
ripple effect. But they don't talk about what's happening now
and how the decisions we make ripple forward to the future,
and so everything we're doing now has an impact on
what's to come. And her work made me think that.
(39:02):
It made me go, wait a minute, Everything I'm doing
right now is it's a march towards the future, and
I can change that trajectory as I And then Tony
Morrison is like the compass whatever the trajectory you're on.
You need her to direct you, you know, so I
think there is a relationship between the two for sure.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Do you consider yourself a speckless of fiction writer? Is
that the space that you live in? Or do you
not want me to put a title?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
No, I mean to be honest. I said this to
Doctor Black. Shout out to doctor Back. He's the best.
I love him. He asked me about being a writer,
and I remember I said, I struggle to say I'm
a writer at all because I still think of myself
as an artist, which is to say I'm still like
I haven't. I think when I'm writing, I don't have
(39:51):
the control that a lot of writers have. Like when
I read Coulson Whitehead, every sentence is perfect. That man
has control. I don't have that kind of control. I'm
still a mess I'm still messy, you know. I'm Basquiat
in there, like I'm just doing whatever I want, whatever
I think. And I don't think it follows all the
(40:13):
same rules of writing in a lot of ways. I
think it it dances in and out of things, and
I think I mess a lot of things up. I
also think I'm trying to create something on the page,
not sort of describe something on the page that makes sense.
I'm trying to like, I'm trying to create like an image,
(40:34):
a moment, a reaction on the page as a canvas,
versus a description of a thing that you can see
in your mind. And so that to me is there's
a whole the whole ending of the book what I
was trying to create. It's a crescendo. And you can
read it. You'll see the you've read it, but you know,
the pace picks up, the punctuation changes, the language changes.
(40:56):
It gets quite euphonious. So a lot of the words
using our o's and u's and the sounds that are
sort of malefluous as it builds and builds and builds
and bills and then it has this crescendo. I was
trying to create that, not necessarily trying to write perfect
sentences or trying to write, you know, with the rules
of like drunk and white like I wasn't. I was
(41:16):
just trying to make something.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
It's interesting. There was a quote that I wrote down
that I was going to read earlier. I was like, oh,
maybe we'll get but it's bite twenty more acon As
she wrote I don't think I could have happily stayed
here in this world if I did not have a
way of thinking about it, which is what writing is
for me. It's control.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Nobody tells me what to do.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
It's mine. It's free, and it's a it's a way
of thinking. It's pure. Not so when I hear you
say control or you don't have all of the control,
this quote makes me feel like, this is your world,
this is the world for you to create. And knowing
(42:01):
your relationships to Tony Morrison, I think I wrote that
down for you, not knowing you were gonna even say that.
She was like, tell this boy, tell this man, tell
this king. He means to hear what you put on
a page.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
I mean, that's that's that's heavy because if you said
that that was you know, Donald Trump said that, I'll
still be like, it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
I'm telling you that right now.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
I mean I was still been like, I appreciate the words,
but but the fact that it is Tony Morrison is like,
because ultimately, I think we are trying to find a
sense of place. I was reading Gosh, what is it?
Black Liturgies, and there was a whole thing in there
that said before God made man. God made a place
(42:54):
for man, and we're trying to find a place. And
the control, I think it's in the context of the stories,
not in the necessarily in the in the perfection of
the language, because I think we you know, there's there
has to be room to play. I just you know,
like I have this image in my mind that it
constantly plays and and I don't know why it does,
(43:17):
but I you ever seen one of those like voodoo
ceremonies where they got the mask on and they're like
dancing and they're like conjuring spirits. They do that different
every single time. Yes, it's never the same. And you go,
you have a ritual, but the ritual is only in
your ability, however you can to pull something through. And
(43:39):
that to me, the control isn't the ritual. The control
is you, right, And I and I like that every
time I sit down and I'm like trying to make
anything that plays out in my mind where I'm like,
I just got to make sure I'm like open to it,
you know, open to the antennas are up and I'm
listening and I'm reacting and I'm playing with it. I'm
allowing it to be a voked, and I think the
(44:01):
control is in that. But you know, all that being said,
like I realized I'm talking, I said Coulson, and it
may have sound a negative. I like Culson. I just
I read his stuff and I'm like, Lord, mercy this man.
I think these sentences are too perfect. Like I don't
know who's making this. I don't know who's making.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
This, but I don't think anyone is perfect. To be honest,
I don't think I've had I don't think I've ever
read a perfect writer. Yeah they might structurally, might be perfect,
grammatically might be perfect, but there's always something there that
where the magic comes in, right, and a great writer
(44:39):
and a great any type of artistic expression, there is magic, right,
and you have to leave room for that to express
itself however it wants to express itself.
Speaker 5 (44:50):
You know.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
It's so funny, man. We have so many like extraordinarily
talented creatives in the world and you can feel it
when they've made something that just was like shot out
of him. And I love it because it reminds me.
It reorients me to our power and our source of
power as black people. Have this funny story where I
(45:12):
was in Coney Island and I had taken my kids.
My kids for some reason wanted to go to Connye Island.
I'm like, y'all, it's hot, Like I don't. It's really
expensive and unnecessarily so to go to Cornye Island. But
we go and they want to ride a roller coaster.
And there is one roller coaster that has like a
horse and you like sit on it's like for the kids.
And I see this black kid is hot and he's
(45:35):
got his hoodie on, mean mugging. He's by himself and
he's like walks up and he sits on this horse
and he's like mean mugging on this little toy horse.
I look at this kid and I'm like, you know,
I'm thinking, are you gonna have this mug the whole
ride like that? Yeah you do. You don't have to
do that, like you can, you can let it go.
But he was just sitting there, you know, just with
(45:56):
this horse. And so the ride starts and you know,
you kind of go and then it does that first
drop and I hear him yell and I see that
hoodie fly back like that. By the time we get around,
he's laughing, screaming, his mouth full of teeth, just smiling
so bright, and I thought it took this whole rollercoaster
(46:16):
to let you feel free, like to let you just
express yourself. Man, you know, and I'm quite keen on,
you know, trying to find mechanisms for our blackness to
move as it should move, as freely as it can.
In this country. It is difficult. It's it's it's it's
difficult everywhere. It doesn't matter where you are. As a
(46:36):
matter of fearing, Cali is a manterfeur in you know, Mississippi,
New York. It's just it's it's it's difficult, but when
you see it, it is it's so so xuberant. We
shine in the dark and we can be lights for
other people, and that to me is everything. And you
feel it, man, you feel it. So in the book,
I wanted that to come through with some of the characters,
(46:58):
but ultimately I wanted to come through the book itself.
So the book is the signal, right, Like you read
the book and you put it down. If your mind
isn't spinning, I haven't done my job as a writer.
Because I want you to have those questions. I want
you to move through the world and go wait a
minute we are, we can we can move how we
want to move. And what's holding us back? Now those
(47:21):
that commentary going on in your mind Like.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
A voice hearing you talk, I feel like there's a
part of you in when you're writing and what you're
putting out into the world that's dedicated to protecting black culture.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Oh god, yeah, we have we have to. And you
said the right word is protect. It is. It is
under siege. It's exploitation. It's under siege. And everyone that
when I say we're light in the dark, remember this
is what's what Sinners is all about. He's saying, you start.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Bring it up. But I was like, if we go
down there, Rabbits.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
I got a lot to say about Sinners, but I
can't say at all because I just wrote a horror
book and it's very similar to Sinners. And I was like, damn.
But anyway, what he's saying that that films he's going
When this kid plays his guitar, he illuminates the night
and he will draw in any force that can see it.
And just imagine, imagine if you walking around in the
(48:13):
dark and someone turns on the light, you can be like, oh,
let me go towards that. That's who we are, that's
who we are in this world, and so so yeah,
I mean I think we we've we as a people,
our nature is we come from a state of abundance,
and so the nature is to give. So when someone
arrives to you and they go, hey, I need help,
you'll give them that help. But what's happening is people
(48:34):
are coming to us masked as I need help, but
they're there to take everything that they could possibly take.
So that that's I think we have to protect it.
I said to doctor Black because he said, you know,
we're not a black people, not a monolith. And I
was like, well, we need to be thinking monolithically right,
like we need to. We need to know the contours
(48:54):
of who we are.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
That collective thought, what is that collective morale?
Speaker 3 (48:58):
And socially in this day now, Absolutely we need some
collective sense of what we stand for, what we're fighting for,
how we can take care of our people in our community,
how we can hold on resources within our own communities,
et cetera. Agree completely, It doesn't have to be identical
(49:19):
and didn't mean we can't ever disagree, but we do
need some sense of what we understand would be collectively
healthy for a black.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
Community, and to put put borders around it so we
can at least have the same value system no matter
where we are, the value system represents us, and if
anybody's trying to exploit that or to take it or
to leverage it, we can identify the people who don't
actually align with it from those who do. And I
think that, I think it's an imperative because man, the
(49:50):
stuff I see U says, it's so visible and invisible
at the same time. You know, you see, like you
were talking about TikTok those dances real quick, some like
white doing that dance getting paid right real quick. That's
pervasive throughout our whole culture. You know, the kid right
now in the subway, got his laces tied up a
(50:11):
certain way, He's got his jacket a certain way, he's
moving around. It's just him, just being him. I guarantee you,
if someone captures that on film, someone in Sweden gonna
do the same thing, be like, that's the coolest thing
I've ever seen. I think we have to be protective.
And protective is let me change that word. I'm saying,
we need to hold it sacred, which is different than defense.
(50:34):
Holding something sacred is honoring it by not giving it away,
honoring it by holding it to yourself. And that's the
reason that the church has a building. You walk in
that building, and that building is sacred. When you walk
out of building, you can go do what you want.
But if you walk into this building, you're sacred along
with us. And we have to treat the culture that way.
And I don't think everything I write for the rest
(50:57):
of my life will be centered around that as a premise,
because I think it's so vital. I think it's absolutely
but it doesn't end on this continent. It has to
extend to Haiti. It has to extend to South America.
It has to extend to the continent that we have
to protect it if all the white people we're to
(51:19):
disappear tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Black Lit is a Black Effects original series in partnership
with iHeart Media. Is written and created by myself, Jack
Queis Thomas and executive produced alongside Dolly s Bishop. Chanelle
Collins is the director of production, Head of Talent Nicole Spence,
writer producer Jason Torres, our researcher and producer is Jabari Davis,
(51:45):
and the mix and sound design is by the humble
Duane Crawford. Gratitude is an action, so I have to
give praise to those who took the time out to
write a review. Please keep sharing and we will promise
to bring more writers and greater episodes to you
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