friendly check-in + a sword and soul experiment

 

Abdoulaye Konaté - Vert Pour Sidy

How are y'all? At least OK, I hope - OK is about where I'm at myself. Kinda a weird vibe today; had to spend a couple hours in a disciplinary committee to try and keep a kid from getting suspended for throwing ink on people (makes no more sense in context), then keep myself from strangling a Ph.D student in my modern historiography seminar who seems hellbent on misinterpreting Trouillot in the most braindead of post-2015 Austin liberal ways (UHHH DOES THE RECORD OF SILENCES TAKE INTO ACCOUNT DIGITAL ARCHIVING STRATEGIES s2g gonna leave a record of violences on your face), but yesterday I got to meet Romanian darling of the litfic world Mircea Cărtărescu at a talk he gave on his cool new book Solenoid so the week is balancing out. Ramadan is def nailing me harder than I expected this year when combined with everything else. Slowly moving beyond the need to apologize for inactivity here but I will never get past allowing other people's posts to stack up unread in my RSS feed. Climbing the mountain soon! Until then, everyone pls stop writing high quality posts as a professional courtesy.

Two things: first, I'm interested in people's albums of the year for 2022. I was asked this a couple days ago and it was shockingly hard for me to form a list. After much agonizing, the best I could do is this as far as stuff that I knew would be on there in some order:

• Makaya McCraven, In These Times

• billy woods, Aethiopes 

• Moor Mother, Jazz Codes 

• Tumi Mogorosi, Group Theory: Black Music

• Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen 

• JID, The Forever Story

• Soul Glo, Diaspora Problems

• Cate Le Bon, Pompeii

Now that I've shown my whole ass and made my disgusting "black music for white people" Talented Tenth proclivities clear, what would y'all put down? I have gotten hints from some friends of the blog (saying "friends of the blog" all the time is starting to feel like a way to avoid admitting that I'd call internet people I've known for ~six months my friends) on musical taste before - Marcia and Dan even have posts! - but it's a different game to talk about recent music. 

Second, there was a brief discussion on Discord earlier today about Spears of the Dawn and its place as a RPG built around the Sword and Soul genre rather than a broader Afrofantasy game + why that makes it more tolerable than other attempts at Afrofantastic pastiche in the hobby. Despite my (frequently stated) intense dislike of Black Atlantic concerns serving as the primary driver of art ostensibly focused on the Continent - possibly in an attempt to assuage my own deeply-rooted diasporic guilt, many such cases! - the whole thing was a reminder of how fun Sword and Soul fiction is. Like...it's got most of the problems that OG pulp stuff does, esp. where gender and historicization are concerned, but I am choosing to make a Zedeckian stand. In the rest of this post, I'll CONFRONT my clear love of Changa beating the shit out of slavers by writing a bit of Sword and Soul as an experiment in copying some of the tonal and stylistic elements. I only gave this a skim before posting so y'know but at least it'll exorcise this demon.

don't even remember what part of the book this is representing anymore but it conveys the feeling excellently

Ruzuna the Lance, Pneumocrat of the Ivory Legion and Terror of the Shackle Islands, sat in a moss-walled cave and shivered.

Perched on an ancient stone before her, the Demonmask Witch sawed side-to-side erratically in his trance, furling and unfurling his bone-thin fingers as he crossed the dream-worlds that only the few surviving students of the Torch Tree Sect could ever hope to reach. His eyelids flickered constantly, revealing and then hiding a crescent of glistening white eyeball many times each second. His raffia cloak had been dyed blue and gold when they had set out, but its color was now obscured by mud, blood, and cobwebs.

The source of that blood - the cave’s guardian - was now serving as Ruzuna's headrest. It was some kind of atavistic relative of the dragon, she thought, though it had hardly died a dragon’s dignified death. Still, its fearsome appearance had kept the spirit-stone safe from curious thieves and overambitious witches until today.

“Hurry up, you gristly old twig,” she grunted at her witch, with no expectation of a response.

“Ruzuna,” spake the sorcerer’s mouth, with a voice that was not his own. “Dear one.”

She leapt up and seized her battle-axe. Cold sweat wetted its leather haft. “Your name, now - or I will split the skull you now wear before you have a chance to enspell me!”

A slow and sickly laugh came forth to meet her weapon. “You came searching for your grandfather, and it is your grandfather you have found. Now sit, sweet child, and hear my oracle.”

“PROOF!” She cried. “Proof, or I strike!”

“When you were but a child and your parents left you in my care, you loved me for a time. It was I who first handed you a spear, and I who first showed you how to take a life. Don’t you remember the look on that assassin’s face when you spilt his lifeblood? That was one lesson that you never forgot. If you had stayed with me, dear one, I'd have made an empress out of you. Pneumocrat, indeed! Are you really content to be the Society’s village dog? Do you not wish you had a fire crown of your own burning above your eyes - those eyes you have inherited from me?”

“So it is you, grandfather,” she said, lowering her weapon. “Dead chiefs have been seen wandering the brothels. The sphinx of the City Forsaken has ceased to cast a shadow. Three comets, one blue, one green, and one white, raced each other across the sky. You must give me your oracle.”

“My oracle, yes,” her grandfather said. “I spirited this morsel from the council-feast of the Wise One, where truth is the palm wine and knowledge the millet flour. For this crime, ten thousand years were added to my punishment. Heed me well, my child. Seek the mistress of song and sword. The Society’s fate hangs upon her word; you took her hand in the Broken Lands, I’ve heard.”

“Aminatu!” Ruzuna whispered. “It could only be…but I took more than her hand, grandfather. I slew her and all her clan!”

“Perhaps that day your blade slid short, for now she sits in the Mansa Ilyasu’s court.”

"Then I must kill her. The Society will reward me greatly.”

“Or you could spare her,” said Grandfather, “and give back what you took. She holds the key to rising above your station, dear girl. In the footsteps of her death there would come that ugly, hopeless creature we call Peace; what need will there be for you in a time ruled by Peace, O Sacker of Cities, Slayer of Pharaohs? What need - what future! The elders will race each other to burn your memory on your funeral pyre. You will be remembered as a distasteful tool that was used and then discarded, a relic of an age when the Society was forced to work with savages to fight off its foes. They will sing your praise-songs less and less often every decade until even the withered husk of your legend is dead in the hearts of men. Is that the fate you desire, great pneumocrat?”

“I–” Ruzuna began.

“Think on it. Both roads lead to the poet-swordswoman. It is yours to decide how to use her.”