eJournals REAL 37/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
10.24053/REAL-2021-0007
2021
371

Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre: Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone

2021
Annika McPherson
10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 a nniKa M c P herson Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre: Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone Introduction In 2018, Tomi Adeyemi’s Young Adult (YA) novel Children of Blood and Bone hit the market as “one of the biggest YA debut novel publishing deals ever”, with movie rights to her “Black Lives Matter-inspired fantasy novel” (Newkirk II n� p�) having been secured prior to the book’s publication (Fleming Jr n� p�)� 1 The novel instantly became a number one New York Times bestseller and the author, risen to fame on the internet and social media following the deal and backed up by a substantial marketing machinery, toured numerous talk shows and gave interviews across a wide range of online and offline media, many of which featured comparisons to other texts and authors� Entertainment Weekly, for example, asked if Adeyemi was the next J� K� Rowling (Canfield n. p.), while her novel was often likened to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones� The author herself, however, pitched it as the “African The Last Airbender” and, distancing herself from controversies surrounding Game of Thrones, as “Black Panther with magic” (Waters n� p�)� 2 One of the writers to have cleared the ground for globally circulating YA fiction set in Africa long before Adeyemi’s breakthrough is Nnedi Okorafor� 3 Hailed, in turn, as the potential “next George R� R� Martin” (who is an executive producer of the forthcoming HBO TV series based on Okorafor’s 2010 novel Who Fears Death, see Morgan), Okorafor’s Akata Witch - much to 1 The film is in development by Disney’s Lucasfilm in partnership with 20 th Century Fox� 2 Indicative of the substantial increase in market interest following the long-standing demands for more diversity in YA fiction, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s forthcoming Ace of Spades (2021) - described by the author as “Gossip Girl meets Get Out” - landed a similarly lucrative book deal for the U� S� market (Flood)� The author’s comparison is also symptomatic of the current narrative alignment of televisual, film, and literary formats. 3 There is of course a substantial corpus of African YA fiction. With the notable exception of the 130 popular ‘Pacesetters’ novels published by Macmillan between the late 1970s and the 1990s, however, few titles have been in large-scale circulation outside of the continent and its diasporas� Osa outlines related developments in African children’s literature and Nigerian youth literature across a series of articles, while Coulon discusses the ‘Pacesetters’ novels in more detail in “Onitsha Goes National”� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 148 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 the author’s chagrin - is frequently referred to as the ‘Nigerian Harry Potter’� In a thread of Tweets commenting on these comparisons (@Nnedi, “I really wish”), Okorafor presents an alternative list of her most important influences: family trips to Nigeria, the Igbo girl Sandra Marume who inspired her protagonist Sunny Nwazue, as well as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), two canonized postcolonial novels from the first and second generation of Nigerian writing in English according to common - yet not uncontroversial - categorizations� 4 Based on these influences, Okorafor classifies her trilogy as “Nigerian-American YA fantasy (#africanjujuism)” and calls upon those who instead see tropes à la Harry Potter or Star Wars at play in her work to check their privilege, as she is “not interested in jumping on bandwagons or riding coat tails” but is “building and flying [her] own space ship” (@Nnedi, “I really wish”). Okorafor has indeed developed distinct styles and modes of writing, which she calls Africanfuturism - a “sub-category of science fiction” to be distinguished from Afrofuturism (a label she rejects for her work) - and Africanjujuism, depending on the overall thematic setup and mode of the respective text (“Africanfuturism Defined”). 5 Aside from the Akata series and Who Fears Death, her works include Zahrah the Windseeker (2005), Lagoon (2014), the Binti trilogy (2015-2018, currently in adaptation as a Hulu TV series), The Book of Phoenix (2015), and Ikenga (2020), as well as further titles spanning across children’s, YA, and adult fiction. Next to her numerous award-winning novels and novellas, she has written Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017-2018), Wakanda 4 Emmanuel and Aboh, for example, criticize this categorization of Nigerian literature as “generationalizations palaver” which “hinders the bond of continuity in terms of understanding the linguistic modality and thematic similarity Nigerian writers have shared over the years” (143)� 5 According to Okorafor, “Africanfuturism is similar to ‘Afrofuturism’ in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future. The difference is that Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West� Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa. It’s less concerned with ‘what could have been’ and more concerned with ‘what is and can/ will be’� It acknowledges, grapples with and carries ‘what has been’� Africanfuturism does not HAVE to extend beyond the continent of Africa, though often it does� Its default is non-western; its default/ center is African” (“Africanfuturism Defined” n. p.). Okorafor pinpoints the difference with the following juxtaposition: “Afrofuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in Oakland, CA , USA ”, whereas in “Africanfuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in a neighboring African country” (ibid.). Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 149 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Forever (2018), and the Shuri (2018-) series for Marvel comics and is a co-writer for the forthcoming film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980)� In 2019, Okorafor and Adeyemi were nominated for the prestigious Hugo and Lodestar Awards respectively, with Children of Blood and Bone winning the 2019 Lodestar for Best Young Adult Book, which Akata Warrior had been awarded the year before� 6 Both authors grew up in Chicago suburbs, with Okorafor using the labels ‘Nigerian-American’ (on her website with, on her blog without the dash) and ‘American-born Igbo’ or ‘Naijamerican’, her Igbo heritage - honed not least during the “epic family trips to Arondizuogu” - listed as a prime influence on her works in the already mentioned Tweet thread� Adeyemi, by contrast, generally states having had less exposure to her Yoruba background while growing up� While the comparisons of both author’s works speak to the popular cultural moments of their publication, Adeyemi’s Black Lives Matter invocation in her author’s note to Children of Blood and Bone and Okorafor’s references to Okri and Tutuola address much more telling dimensions of their works� As the following analysis shows, Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone use different strategies to transgress the worn-out postcolonial ‘writing back’ paradigm towards specific modes of engagement with current issues that are interwoven not only with the authors’ investments in the politics of literary representation but also with the layered processes of production, distribution, and consumption that Hannah Pardey calls the “digital affect” (225-228) in a case study of other types of so-called new Nigerian novels� Before elaborating on this aspect, I will compare the perilous journeys of Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s young female protagonists on their respective quests to save magical realms against the backdrop of the colonial legacies of adventure and fantasy writing that these authors inevitably find themselves writing against. As crucial interventions into the overbearing whiteness of fantasy, they celebrate and reimagine West African cultural contexts while consciously catering to global audiences� This necessitates a tightrope walk between the genre’s legacies and the conventions each novel engages with in a distinct mode of reconfiguration. However, especially in the context of YA fiction, Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s novels serve as important reminders that the relevance of their stories and characters by far exceeds critical attempts to question their emancipatory potential. Criticism highlighting the global commodification of their works or their adherence to genre tropes in turn frequently conveys and 6 In 2019 Okorafor had been nominated for best novella for Binti: The Night Masquerade and for Black Panther: Long Live the King for best graphic story� Her works have previously received the highly prestigious World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula, and Eisner Awards amongst many others� 150 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 performs a sense of critical nostalgia that is symptomatic of the melancholia that has stifled the field of postcolonial studies over the last two decades. Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Challenges in YA Adventure Fiction and Fantasy In European literary cultures from Antiquity and the Middle Ages onwards, the differences and continuities within and across adventurous narratives have been traced through different modes, forms, and genres such as, for example, the Odyssean apologoi or the medieval courtly âventiure of Arthurian tales and quest narratives, the popular adventure novels of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and twentieth and twenty-first-century popular culture (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 2-5)� Particularly in fantasy, Joseph Campbell’s “standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero” (23) with its ‘monomyth’ and nucleus of the rite of passage of separation, initiation, and return continues to loom large (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 16)� According to Campbell’s frequently cited formula, “[a] hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (x): fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (y): the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [sic] (z)” (23)� Differences between adventure tales relate, for example, to the types of transgression and risk-taking, the particular challenge to the order of things, the modes of being tested, whether the adventure is actively sought out or destined by some form of providence, or whether there is a metaphysical quest and transcendental promise (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 1-16)� 7 In the British context, youth magazines and adventure novels were formative to the development of popular narrative modes aligned with imperial ideology, as Patrick Brantlinger and Daphne M� Kutzer, amongst others, have shown� Robinsonades, for example, mostly constituted narratives “of morally justified imperialism” (Green 22). They were not restricted to the commercially highly successful boys’ adventure stories but also included female Robinson figures whose narratives illustrated “the tension between fulfilling conventional feminine roles and developing individual potential” (Fair 142)� 7 For a detailed examination across different modes and genres, see the entire collection Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzipien, Genre edited by von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher, which also includes chapters on the paratextual framing of Victorian adventure fiction (Härtl), and on the structure of adventure in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Söffner)� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 151 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Especially later female Crusoe figures cross and combine ostensibly feminine and masculine spheres in a refutation of stereotypical roles (156-157)� Jochen Petzold, in his examination of the popular Girl’s Own Paper magazine’s “interconnected topics of emigration, armchair travelling and exotic adventure” (35), however, emphasizes that although adventure fiction featured “daring and plucky ‘girls’”, they mostly “remain within the bounds of Victorian propriety” (40)� 8 Even though some Victorian narratives challenged stereotypical role models, in the interwar period “the bulk of empire stories in children’s literature and comics, popular fiction and films of the empire genre focused on active and expansive masculine heroism” (Webster 9)� When narratives of empire became “increasingly feminized” (10) in the course of the 1950s, they tended to foreground white women whose representation was attributed with “intrepidity, courage, moral strength, benevolent concern for the welfare of the colonized - but in the context of colonial wars they also became symbolic of national weakness and vulnerability” (ibid�)� Across these narratives, the white woman was variously represented as a guardian of “the boundaries of her home against invasion”, an image “of a nation under siege by immigrants”, or as guarding “sexual boundaries against ‘miscegenation’”, thus demonstrating the “interplay of ideas of racial and gender difference” (9-10)� Especially with fantasy literature’s frequently blurred boundaries between children’s, young adult, and adult varieties in terms of actual readership or debates on its suitability for specific age groups, the genre’s complicity in imperialist and colonialist mindsets has come to be criticized more vehemently over the last few decades� As with adventure tales more generally, the genealogy of children’s fantasy often focuses on European examples that are tied to the conceptual emergence of childhood, to Enlightenment “instructive works for young readers” (Nikolajeva 50), to the Romanticist “interest for, on the one hand, folklore, and on the other, the child as innocent and untouched by civilization” (ibid�) as well as the “chosen child” trope (57)� 9 Whether placed in secondary worlds or having “magical agents [brought] into the everyday life of ordinary children” (51-52), modern fantasy narratives have increasingly become a tool “for the characters’ self-exploration rather than for educational purposes” (54)� Variants include stories of an “archetypal hero of unknown 8 For a detailed examination, see Smith’s Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture as well as Smith et al� 9 Nikolajeva traces the fantastic from E� T� A� Hoffmann, Carlo Collodi, and Lewis Carrol to Edith Nesbit as “the creator of modern fantasy for children” based on the texts’ narrative voice and perspective, with Edward Eager, Pamela Travis, and James M� Barrie or Frank L� Baum as further notable examples of English-language children’s fantasy authors (51-52)� 152 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 parentage destined to save the world from evil” (57), quest narratives which “contain parallel worlds and times with boundaries barely tangible” (ibid�), as well as “the classic device of sending the protagonist to an alternative world by means of some magic agent, with the purpose of temporary empowerment” (58): At its best, fantasy for children provides moral and spiritual guidance for young people, addressing an audience that has yet not any firm distinction between reality and imagination; that does not dismiss magical worlds and events as implausible; that has stronger potential for secondary belief� The best examples of classical fantasy for children use the fantastic form as a narrative device, as a metaphor for reality� The fantastic mode allows children’s writers to deal with important psychological, ethical and existential questions in a slightly detached manner, which frequently proves more effective with young readers than straightforward realism� […] In particular, fantasy can empower a child protagonist in a way that realistic prose is incapable of doing� In this respect fantasy has a huge subversive potential as it can interrogate the existing power relationships, including those between child and adult, without necessarily shattering the real order of the world� (Nikolajeva 60-61) Although it generally functions as a “socialization vehicle” (61), children’s fantasy is thus frequently marked by an element of empowerment through the subversion of power relations as well as through its metaphorical relation to the target audience’s lifeworld� Based on the common notion of the socialization function of children’s and YA fiction in general, not only cultural representation but also cultural appropriation has become a contested topic� In relation to fantasy, this can be exemplified via the debate on Patricia Wrightson, a white Australian writer who, like several others, has drawn on a, “from a European cultural perspective, radically-estranged [sic] universe of Aboriginal legend” and has “introduced many Australian schoolchildren to a somewhat sanitized version of Aboriginal beliefs, traditions, and history” (Attebery 327) with her popular Wirrun trilogy that was first published in the late 1970s. Today, Wrightson “is no longer cited, as she once was, as an interpreter of Aboriginal culture and spokesperson for Aboriginal experience” and her employment of “fictional collaborators” taken from Indigenous contexts has contributed to her now “uneasy” status in the genre (Attebry 336)� 10 That cultural appropriation is 10 With little concern for cultural appropriation, in Nikolajeva’s survey chapter of children’s fantasy Wrightson’s trilogy is said to present “a fluctuant boundary between the magical and the ordinary, incorporating Aboriginal lore into the story of a young person’s quest, with animated nature and indigenous creatures as helpers and adversaries” (58)� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 153 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 no longer benevolently overlooked becomes clear in the widely discussed controversy surrounding J� K� Rowling’s “appropriating and amalgamating cultural elements from a range of Indigenous traditions” in her “History of Magic in North America” series in 2016 (Cecire 203)� As Maria Sachiko Cecire has argued with a focus on what she calls the Oxford School surrounding J� R� R� Tolkien and C� S� Lewis, children’s fantasy - and, by extension, YA fantasy as well as fantasy in general - has long overlooked the overbearing whiteness of its canonical works� Taking her cue from notions of ‘white magic’ and ‘black magic’, Cecire illustrates how Romantic “[s]paces of childhood and enchantment are not only metaphorically ‘white’ in their supposed purity and goodness [but], in nearly all cases, implicitly raced white as well”, with ‘black magic’ having been negatively connoted by imperial racial power dynamics (173-174)� Tracing this legacy, Cecire shows how “racial and ethnic coding made it possible for the genre to extend an Anglo-American empire of the mind in youth culture even as the actual British empire declined” (174)� From The Hobbit to Game of Thrones, the “imperial model of adventuring, mastery, and success” (175) continues to play out� The common fantasy scenario of “[i]ssuing forth into dangerous, magical wildernesses to perform a task or seek a goal” has to be read against texts in which “English youths set out onto the high seas or into the African or Asian interior to meet physical and mental challenges in lands filled with exotic cultures and people”, displaying “manly qualities that affirmed ‘Anglo-Saxon’ superiority and right to rule” (187) in the process� Textual continuities from the “colonialist bildungsroman” are also transposed into “pseudo-medieval and otherworldly settings” that are nevertheless allegorically tied to a nation connoted as white (190) and, for example, frequently include tests which “require defeating monstrous foes or managing unruly Indigenous peoples” (193)� It is against this backdrop that authors such as Nnedi Okorafor “reimagine the genre as oriented around the myths and experiences of non-European cultures and people of color” (Cecire 186)� Cecire thus positions Okorafor’s novels as referencing Anglo-American medievalist fantasy in a revisionist way with her protagonists, “young Black women who embark on journeys of self-discovery and emerge as heroes” (269)� In this regard, Okorafor and Adeyemi can indeed be said to ‘write back’ to imperialist and colonialist genre legacies� Aligning them instead with the “post-ironic turn of the new millennium”, however, Cecire points out that their narratives “include arcs of inner growth toward love, wholeness, and peace with one’s identity, making special room for considering how mixed and nonwhite identities might understand their relationship to magic” (271), which I discuss in the following analyses of Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone� 154 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Okorafor has detailed this relationship to magic in her essay “Organic Fantasy”, in which she elaborates on her fiction’s connections to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and novels by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, especially Wizard of the Crow (2007)� 11 For these writers and herself, she claims, rather than conceiving of the fantastic as a mode, by “writing about Africa the magic naturally, organically sprouted” (158)� To Okorafor, Okri’s Nigerian setting “went over the deep end when it came to magical elements” and she adds that “on top of all this, [she] could tell that Okri believed in what he was writing” (“Organic Fantasy” 155, italics in original)� Given Okorafor’s explicit engagement with Tutuola, Okri, and Ngũgĩ, it comes as no surprise that the epigraph to Akata Witch is a quote from Wizard of the Crow that aligns with Okorafor’s notion of ‘organic fantasy’: “Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange come out of the ordinary and the familiar”� Yet, it is important to also recall Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s emphasis in Decolonising the Mind (1986) on the “psychological violence of the classroom” in that, whereas the “bullet was the means of physical subjugation”, it was language that “was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (9), not least through colonial literary education: Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world� How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings� (16) To facilitate cultural self-perception, Ngũgĩ famously insisted on the writing of African literature in African languages� Although removed from his specific politics of language, in relation to both the socializing and the lingering educational functions of children’s and YA literature, Okorafor’s notion of ‘organic fantasy’ and her emphatic call for “diversity within the genre of young adult fantasy as a whole” (“Organic Fantasy” 159) are closely tied to the importance of modes of orature and the (re)imagination of cultural contexts that are not only to enable Black readers to “see themselves reflected in these types of books”, but for all readers to “eventually follow the roots that extend deep and firmly into the rich African soil and sand and learn a thing or two about this potent part of the earth” (ibid�)� 11 The essay was first published in African Identities, vol� 7, no� 2, 2009, pp� 275-286� For a more detailed discussion of ‘organic fantasy’, see Pundt� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 155 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Akata Witch and / as ‘Africanjujuism’ In an extension of the notion of ‘organic fantasy’, Okorafor has defined the Africanjujuism of her Akata series on social media as well as on her blog as “a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative” (@ Nnedi, “The Akata series”)� 12 The reason she gives for this distinction from fantasy as commonly understood is that “historically African cosmologies and spiritualities have systematically shown to be less than (less important, less powerful, less impactful etc [sic]) any other, worldwide� This label acknowledges and applies that needed respect BEFORE jumping to the fantasy part” so as to facilitate “a different, more nuanced reading” rather than a perpetual reduction to Western categories (@Nnedi, “The Akata series”, emphasis in original)� Having to manage the backlash by those who reject the idea and necessity of diverse representation in literature or who cannot relate to the ‘seamless blend’ of real and imaginative spiritualities and cosmologies in her Afrojujuist worldbuilding, Okorafor hones what I call an ‘author-izing’ online presence to actively respond to unfounded criticism, to mediate debates on her writing and to address misunderstandings as well as oversights� In response to discussions of the word ‘akata’ - which is commonly used by Nigerians to refer to African Americans and is mostly considered derogatory in its connotation - Okorafor addresses relations between continental and diasporic Africans, especially African Americans, which are also portrayed to affect her protagonist� 13 In the novel, the word is clearly used as a term to demean Sunny with utterances such as “You stupid pale-faced akata witch! ” (Okorafor, Akata Witch 14 11), heightened by the school bully Jibaku’s doubling up on exclusionary language when she yells “Stupid oyibo akata witch” (13) at her, adding the similarly controversial common term ‘oyibo’, a reference to white foreigners� This is further compounded by Chichi referring to her as ‘onyocha’ (15), another expression for white Europeans and other foreigners which Sunny vehemently rejects, and as “ghost girl” (17) upon their first meeting. Sunny’s marginalization relates to both her albinism and her having been born and raised in the United States until the age of nine, 12 See also “Africanfuturism Defined”. 13 However, the term is at times also defended by pointing to its originally referencing “a ‘wild’ cat that does not live at home” in Yoruba and hence being applied metaphorically in the sense of not living in Africa, in opposition to ‘ologbo’ (“a cat that lives at home”, which is also the general term for ‘cat’ in everyday use)� The controversy is addressed in numerous YouTube videos and blog posts� 14 Henceforth shortened to Witch in in-text citations� 156 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 as is topicalized in the novel’s prologue: “My name is Sunny Nwazue and I confuse people” (3)� In a poignant scene of the sequel Akata Warrior that Okorafor also points to in a blog post (“The Word”), 15 Sunny confesses to having used the term ‘akata’ herself as an insult to shame her fellow student Faye, who had ostracized, threatened, and physically violated her at their Manhattan school where, though we were all mixed up there, the other kids didn’t really mix, you know? Kids stayed with their own kinds, especially black and white� The African people kept to themselves in my school. The African Americans acted like they were kings. And queens. I sort of moved from group to group. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I was African, but not really African. I was born in America, but not really African American. (Akata Warrior 16 336-337, italics in original) Hurling the insult at her attacker while making fun of Faye’s menstrual blood showing on her pants is Sunny’s last defensive retort, and although she is aware that the meaning of the “nasty word” is likely unclear to Faye, it “is all in the way it’s said, the sound of it� It’s ugly� It’s an insult� It’s like a dagger that is a word” (Warrior 340)� The skirmish ends with more physical violence and insults and Sunny recalls this as “the most painful day of her childhood” (336)� Although she is aware of remote historical connections, this leads her to question the proneness to mutual insults she witnesses between Africans and people of African descent from both sides of the Atlantic� The scene connects back to the prologue of Akata Witch in that Sunny again points out that she confuses people (Warrior 341), but it also exemplifies the way in which Okorafor weaves current and everyday topics into her novels (and, arguably, answers criticism of the first novel’s use of the word by having her protagonist reflect on it in the second part). Through Sunny, the series addresses the discrimination of persons with albinism, a common issue in Nigeria and many other sub-Saharan African countries, where “myths and misbeliefs surrounding persons with albinism have led to witchcraft-related harmful practices, involving the use of their body parts obtained through brutal attacks and mutilations” (“About”)� 17 This 15 In this context it is also telling that the first part of the trilogy was published as What Sunny Saw in the Flames and the second one as Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi by Nigerian publisher Cassava Republic� 16 Henceforth shortened to Warrior in in-text citations� 17 The situation of persons with albinism in Nigeria, where a National Policy on Albinism was adopted in 2012, is outlined in Action on Albinism (“Nigeria”)� A Regional Action Plan was adopted by the African Union Executive Council as a continent-wide policy in July 2019, see Action on Albinism (“Regional Action Plan”)� See also documentaries such as In the Shadow of the Sun (2012) in relation to Tanzania, Black Man White Skin (2015) by Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 157 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 context is invoked in the novel through the ‘ritual killer’ Black Hat Okotoko, whose atrocities are reported in local newspapers and whose plan to bring back the violent spirit Ekwensu must be averted by Sunny and her Oha coven: they must save the world to prevent the potential “nuclear holocaust” (Okorafor, Witch 307) that Sunny has seen in her premonition described in the novel’s prologue� In attempts at cultural translation Ekwensu - referred to as “Evil Spirit” in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (122) - is often likened to the devil in spite of significant conceptual differences. In Akata Witch, Ekwensu is “not a metaphor or a symbol� She’s one of the most powerful masquerades in the wilderness”, a “super-monster” that, once brought into the world, “no person or thing can stop” (312)� The Oha coven, “a group of mystical combination, set up to defend against something bad” (84) consists of Sunny, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, the latter having been sent to Nigeria from the U� S� to be ‘straightened out’ after having used higher-level juju powers to trick his non-magical ‘Lamb’ classmates, thus breaking the rules of the juju-empowered ‘Leopard Persons’� Whereas colonialist tropes of ‘black magic’ as outlined by Cecire have contributed to juju’s predominantly negative connotation and representation, the novel differentiates between potentially harmful and thus “illegal juju” (Witch 158) and its positive, powerful variations - which, however, are only to be used according to one’s proven skill level� By highlighting the capacity of positive applications of juju while simultaneously acknowledging and demonstrating the effect of potential misuses, the novel writes back not only to reductive colonialist representations of juju, 18 but also reframes the widespread condemnation of ‘traditionalist’ practices in Nigeria that is frequently fuelled by evangelical Christian churches� Furthermore, what the Lambs consider ‘disabilities’, the Leopards know to be the basis for heightened magical abilities� In line with this, Sunny is presented as a girl who merely “happens to have albinism” (Okorafor, “The Word” n� p�) and whose “defect” (Warrior 341) is key to unlocking her abilities as one of the ‘free agents’ who are “a result of mixed-up and confused spiritual genetics” (Witch 96)� Story-world context is provided by the excerpts from the book Fast Facts for Free Agents that precede the first ten chapters of Akata Witch� Presented as written by an author who is biased against both free agents and African Spanish advocacy groups, as well as Born Too White (2017) on people with albinism in Tanzania and Malawi� It is important, however, to point out the respective advocacy contexts of production as well as to not limit engagements with the worldwide discrimination of persons with albinism to African contexts� 18 A prominent example of such representations is Joyce Cary’s The African Witch (1936)� I thank Tobias Döring for pointing out this potential intertext� 158 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Americans (Witch 113), they facilitate further commentary on prejudice and the positionality of knowledge� Mainly, however, by studying Fast Facts, Sunny and the reader learn about the Leopard Persons’ abilities, rules, practices, and culture� These excerpts also provide an occasional tongue-in-cheek commentary on Nigerian issues such as the notorious e-mail scams (“419 Scams and Leopard People”, Witch 120)� Frequent references to popular culture (e� g� to Fela Kuti, highlife and afrobeat music), the use of food, flora, and fauna as cultural signifiers (Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy” 153), place names like Aba or Abuja, literal translations and explanations of Igbo or Efik terms and phrases to the respective non-speakers of each language in the Oha coven, as well as commentary on Nigeria’s history, ethnic and religious diversity provide not only local flair and ample potential for identification but also basic information to readers unacquainted with the cultural context� The novel likewise features occasional intertextual references, for example when Sunny is reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (Witch 39)� The motley coven of “the princess, the American, the dyslexic, and the albino” (Witch 130), as Sasha’s mentor Kehinde calls them, has to come together - in spite of initial animosities based not least on social, economic, and ethnic differences - to use their complementary skillsets to safeguard Leopard Knocks and, ultimately, the entire world� Through her ability to go into the ‘wilderness’ in between the realms, a series of adventures demonstrate how Sunny learns to master invisibility and can “mess with time” (116), while Orlu can “undo bad things” (23), Sasha has a photographic memory and is capable of anticipation, and Chichi is a ‘Nimm’ princess (her mother being a priestess) with a heightened memory, facilitating acts of higher-level juju based on her extensive study of instructive and other books� Having to trust each other and needing to work together to avert the end of their world, the coven in many ways allegorizes contemporary social divisions, and it is spirituality that paves the way to the coven’s capacity to transcend their differences for the common good� In Akata Witch the Nigerian setting is imbued with verisimilitude, while the literal ‘wilderness’ that Leopard Persons can access and the parallel world of Leopard Knocks form part of a global secondary realm that Lambs are unaware of� Sunny’s journey to self-discovery and her battle to “know herself” (93) are connected to her learning to control her powers and her spirit face, a distinguishing feature of Leopard Persons that connects them to the spirit world� Aside from marking her spiritually empowered identity as Anyanwu (‘eye of the sun’ in Igbo, 152), this is also an intertextual reference to Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, where “Anyanwu is a shape-shifter who can become anything she tastes and analyses” (Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy” 152)� The fantasy Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 159 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 trope of unknown parentage as outlined in Nikolajeva’s survey above is here shifted by a generation, as the mystery surrounding Sunny’s grandmother is gradually revealed to be the reason for her destiny to save the world� After initiation, mastering juju demands life-long guided learning and scholarship and, first and foremost, responsible usage according to one’s tested level of skill� Her juju powers also set Sunny apart from her staunchly Catholic mother and enable her to embrace the Leopard heritage derived from her grandmother, which is kept secret by her mother for fear of her daughter’s safety� The Leopard world also comes with its own sign system, Nsibidi, derived from the same symbolic language of southeastern Nigeria that also inspired the Black Panther depiction of Wakanda’s language (Desowitz n� p�)� In addition, the Leopard world features some unique creatures, whereas references to common spirits such as Mami Wata exemplify the seamless blend of references that mark Okorafor’s ‘organic fantasy’, which demands a “skewed lens” so as not to be perceived as “strange” (Okorafor, “Hugo Nominee”)� This lens is refocused, as it were, when Sunny gradually becomes emotionally and spiritually more grounded due to her exposure to and embracing of her cultural heritage, to the point where she no longer requires an umbrella in the sun to protect her skin� This does not necessarily constitute an ableist overcoming of her albinism but can also be seen to symbolize her finally being at ease with herself� After all, it is her very albinism that - unbeknown to the ignorant Lambs who marginalize her - actually empowers her� Another key worldbuilding element that illustrates the blend of African cosmologies with both the Oha coven’s adventure tale and Sunny’s identity formation is the novel’s portrayal of masquerades� Okorafor’s depictions of masquerades as “a staple in several Nigerian cultures” (“Organic Fantasy” 156) draw inspiration from Ben Okri’s 2007 novel Starbook, her mother’s recollections, and her own visits to Nigeria: In Igbo tradition, the spirits of the underworld and the ancestors are believed to come through the anthills to spend time with the living� They are only seen during key events such as weddings, funerals, holiday celebrations and large parties� An individual, typically a man, dons a Masquerade costume and he is believed to become the spirit or ancestor� A Masquerade must never ever be unmasked; to do so would be the ultimate disrespect and require a most severe punishment� And a man or boy must be initiated into and trained within a secret society in order to put on the costume of Masquerade and be possessed by the spirit or ancestor� (ibid�) 19 19 Masquerades also play a key role in Okorafor’s Binti trilogy, especially the third part, Binti: The Night Masquerade (2017)� 160 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 In Akata Witch, it is Ekwensu who is brought forth by ‘Black Hat’ Otokoto Ginny� As Chichi describes her, Ekwensu “is what Satan is to the Christians […]� But more real, more tangible� She’s not a metaphor or symbol� She’s one of the most powerful masquerades in the wilderness” (Witch 311-312) and “of such deep evil that her name was rarely spoken, even in the Lamb world” (324)� Controlling this masquerade is the ultimate task and climax of the coven’s many previous adventures� A greedy former “oil dealer who did big business with the Americans”, Otokoto’s hunger for power “opened him up to terrible powers of the earth” in the form of “forbidden juju” (308) requiring the sacrificial death of the children he kidnapped. The personification of corruption, Otokoto also forms the decisive connection to Sunny’s grandmother Ozoemena, who had been murdered by him� The existential threat posed by Ekwensu is averted by both the Oha coven’s joint, fearless, and transgressive actions in the form of the use of unlicensed juju as well as by the former oil dealer’s own sins of greed and corruption as Chichi uses a “bring back” charm against him that had been revealed to her mother by Sunny’s grandmother (331)� However, in the climactic scene it takes Sunny’s instinctual guidance of Anyanwu, “her spirit, her chi”, and her “other self” (326) to order Ekwensu back and thus save the world� Yet, Sunny has another, more mundane task to fulfil in that she finally stands up against her father’s rejection and threat of physical violence� Only through the revelation of her grandmother’s status as a Nimm warrior can Sunny finally answer the question “Who am I? ” (339), her grandmother’s letter offering her “a glimpse of her own soul” (345)� From this perspective, Akata Witch might well be labelled a ‘postcolonial bildungsroman’ of sorts� Yet, its idiosyncratic blend of real and imaginative spiritual and cosmological contexts with fantastic tropes and the coven’s many adventurous tasks that culminate in sending Ekwensu back to the spirit world facilitates identification and empowerment through cultural representation, which becomes visible not least in the online fandom surrounding the novel, where fan art depictions of Sunny frequently feature next to those of characters from Children of Blood and Bone� Trauma and the Impossibility of Spiritual Healing in Children of Blood and Bone Whereas spiritual healing is achieved through self-knowledge and the fulfilment of the predestined task in Akata Witch, Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, the first part of her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, dwells more explicitly on Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 161 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 structural violence� In her author’s note, Adeyemi contextualizes the writing of the novel “during a time where I kept turning on the news and seeing stories of unarmed black men, women and children being shot by the police� I felt afraid and angry and helpless, but this book was the one thing that made me feel like I could do something about it” (Children of Blood and Bone 20 526)� Listing “black lives taken too soon”, she urges her readers to not only cry and grieve for the characters of the novel, but also “for innocent children like Jordan Edwards, Tamir Rice, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones [who] were fifteen, twelve, and seven when they were shot and killed by police” and “for all the survivors of police brutality who’ve had to witness their loved ones taken firsthand”, invoking the story’s “power to change the evils in the world” (Blood and Bone 526-527) as a call to real-world action� The context of police brutality is also alluded to in Akata Witch when Sasha refers to his experiences with police and comments: “Y’all don’t know what it’s like for a black man in the U� S� and y’all certainly don’t know Chicago cops on the South Side” (Witch 60)� Adeyemi’s references explicitly complicate the relation between the real “pain, fear, sorrow, and loss” (Blood and Bone 526) on the one hand and the fantastic animals and sacred rituals of her novel on the other� Her paratext thus highlights the above-cited notion of a Black Lives Matter-inspired fantasy via the direct link between the real-world trauma caused by hatred and systemic violence and its allegorical representation in the mode of a fantastic adventure tale� Set in Orïsha, Blood and Bone details the ten ‘maji clans’ whose titles - Reapers, Burners, Connectors, Winders, Tiders, Grounders and Welders, Lighters, Healers and Cancers, Seers, and Tamers - refer to their different abilities in relation to their respective Yoruba deity� Reimagining the real-life context of Orisha worship as practised across the Atlantic world in different ways, Adeyemi creates a secondary world that is replete with medievalist fantasy tropes� 21 The topographical outline of Orïsha in the paratextual map roughly resembles a version of the current state of Nigeria that is, however, fractured into islands� Place names such as Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Calabar, or Benin City are retained but shifted geographically to varying degrees� From the beginning, the protagonist Zélie Adebola is depicted as a fighter who is awaiting her graduation match in Mama Agba’s secret training facility that is disguised 20 Henceforth shortened to Blood and Bone in in-text citations� 21 Although her interest in the Orishas was sparked by her much-cited study trip to Brazil as a student, Adeyemi has qualified this somewhat, e. g. in an interview on the Not Another Book Podcast (“‘Children of Blood and Bone’: Live with Tomi Adeyemi”)� For a general introduction, see Baba Ifa Karade’s chapter “The Oriṣa” in The Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts� 162 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 as a sewing workshop� In an event referred to as ‘the Raid’, which happened eleven years prior to the narrative present, magic was literally killed with King Saran’s genocidal massacre of the ‘maji’ in which Zélie lost her mother� To further subdue potential maji - who are divîners until their powers emerge, usually at the age of 13, and who are born with white strands of hair -, their Yoruba language has been outlawed, making it more difficult to practice and pass on their cultural traditions� The alloy ‘majacite’ is the powerful weapon that breaks maji powers and kills them, as young Zélie had to witness when her mother was chained and lynched� The first-person narration alternates between Zélie, the princess Amari, and the crown prince Inan, whereas Zélie’s brother Tzain is not given a narrative voice. The four are positioned on opposite sides of Orïsha’s power differential between the potentially magic-wielding but subdued and disenfranchised ‘divîners’ and the ruling ‘kosidán’, with shifting and at times unclear allegiances, so that trust between them is always precarious� Yet, they have to fatefully join forces across the maji/ kosidán divide in their quest to bring magic back and to empower the divîners against the tyrannical and murderous king� Zélie is to achieve this task with the help of three artifacts needed to perform a sacred ritual at a designated time and place, which provides the countdown for their perilous journey� The king and his henchmen refer to the maji and divîners as ‘maggots’ and keep them in perpetual debt bondage through ever-increasing taxation, with the constant threat of being sent to and permanently enslaved in ‘the stocks’� Especially Inan’s switching and at times unclear loyalties leave ample room for speculation as to who is ‘good’ or ‘evil’� As his father Saran has bestowed upon him a sense of “duty before self” - a phrase he reiterates almost obsessively whenever he needs to justify his actions - Inan initially refers to magic as a “virus” or “curse” and to the maji as “parasites” (e� g� Blood and Bone 73, 84, 173, 134), only to later discover that he is a divîner himself, a revelation he desperately tries to hide� References to real-world imperialism are also only thinly veiled, but when King Saran tells his son a story of endless battles for power, he offers an interesting counter-narrative: “When I rose to the throne, I knew magic was the root of all our pain� It’s crushed empires before ours, and as long as it lives, it shall crush empires again�” I nod, remembering Father’s rants from long before the Raid. The Britāunîs. The Pörltöganés. The Spãní Empire - all civilizations destroyed because those who had magic craved power, and those in charge didn’t do enough to stop them� (82) In another iteration of his ostensible reason for killing the maji (but not the divîners, who cannot activate their magic without maji), Saran tellingly con- Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 163 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 ceptualizes the eradication of magic as a burden in a way that recalls Kipling’s invocation of the ‘white man’s burden’: “We are not the first to bear this burden� To go to these lengths to keep our kingdom safe� The Bratonians, the Pörltöganés - all crushed because they didn’t fight magic hard enough” (432). Saran tries to school his son in how to break the will of the ‘maggots’, continuously dehumanizing them rhetorically as well as in his actions (e� g� when branding ‘maggot’ into Zélie’s flesh), although he at one point acknowledges magic to be “a gift from the gods” and “a spiritual connection between them and mankind” that had been broken “with royals generations ago” (82)� In this sense, the war between the divîners and the kosidán is also a spiritual one, but the lines between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ do not always run seamlessly along those of oppression� Aside from the many allusions, some of which cater to adult rather than younger readers, the novel’s complex worldbuilding facilitates the immersive secondary world experience of epic or ‘high’ fantasy by way of an elaborate cultural reference system based on or inspired by Yoruba terms and concepts� One example for this is the narration of the mythical origin of the world: “On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone� In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses� Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul” (Blood and Bone 159)� Other concepts borrowed from Yoruba spirituality are alâfia, which designates a state of peace, and apâdi, “eternal hell” (98, 202-203)� While Adeyemi can also be said to write ‘organic fantasy’ in the sense of merging actual and imaginative spiritual and cosmological references, the secondary world she creates in her Legacy of Orïsha novels is overall more allegorical than Okorafor’s, which emerges from the everyday� The relationships between Adeyemi’s characters are complicated, fraught, and shift along the way of their quest to bring back magic, revealing a broad spectrum of moral and ethical questions that also resonate with current real-life contexts� Within this medievalist world, topics such as colorism or racialized oppression are also directly addressed, e� g� when Zélie begins “to realize how far others will go to keep us down” (Blood and Bone 163)� Zélie frequently renders the oppression that is experienced by the divîners as the inability to breathe: 22 Afraid� I am always afraid� It’s a truth I locked away years ago, a fact I fought hard to overcome� 22 Throughout the text, breath and breathing allude to the Black Lives Matter movement’s use of the phrase “I can’t breathe” since the chokehold killing Eric Garner in 2014� 164 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Because when it hits, I’m paralyzed� I can’t breathe� I can’t talk� All at once, I crumple to the ground, clasping my palm over my mouth to stifle the sobs� It doesn’t matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields� They will always hate me in this world� I will always be afraid� (312-313) When she meets the temporarily allied Inan in their shared dreamscape and he pleads for Zélie to explain her fear to him so that he can understand, she interrupts him by straightforwardly calling out his privilege: “You can’t� They built this world for you, built it to love you� They never cursed you in the streets, never broke down the doors of your home� They didn’t drag your mother by her neck and hang her for the whole world to see�” Now that the truth is out, there’s nothing I can do to stop� My chest billows as I sob� My fingers tremble at the terror. Afraid� The truth cuts like the sharpest knife I’ve ever known� No matter what I do, I will always be afraid� (312) Although the return of magic had felt “like breathing for the first time” (170), Zélie’s and the maji’s deep-seated trauma cannot be overcome� 23 Symptomatic for this are the festivities at the divîner camp, during which they “dance like there’s no tomorrow, each step praising the gods� Their mouths glorify the rapture of liberation, their hearts sing the Yoruba songs of freedom� My ears dance at the words of my language, words I once thought I’d never hear outside my head” (377) - are interrupted by the violent attack of the king’s troops, demonstrating that even temporary joy is impossible and freedom illusory� As lack of power is equated with oppression (311), and since the return of magic cannot bring peace but only provide “a fighting chance” (389), the violence inherent in the social order needs to be fully exposed to effect any meaningful change� King Saran is the embodiment of this violence: “in this man - this one wretched man - is an entire kingdom� An entire nation of hate and oppression” (414), again alluding to both colonial and contemporary forces of oppression� In light of this, one of Zélie’s most heroic acts is to “not let [her] fear silence the truth” (416) when she finally faces him: “You crushed us to build your monarchy on the backs of our blood and bone� Your mistake wasn’t keeping us alive. It was thinking we’d never fight back! ” (ibid.). Even 23 See also Adeyemi, Blood and Bone 91, 450� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 165 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 though Saran is ultimately brought down and killed by the hands of his own daughter and in spite of the heroic fulfilment of her quest, Zélie is granted but a momentary relief, as the entire system of oppression with its constant power struggles has to be undone for there to be any chance at freedom and peace� In this endeavor, which strongly and clearly resonates with the author’s stated Black Lives Matter inspiration, the “children of blood and bone” are foreshadowed to also be “instruments of vengeance and virtue” (519) in an allusion to the second part of the trilogy as well as a necessarily open ending - much like Sunny’s announced next quest to find out what it means to be a Nimm warrior in Okorafor’s sequel Akata Warrior� Perilous Journeys in and Beyond the “Digital Affect” Demonstrating a sense of empowerment through representation, both Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone have drawn online fandoms in the form of fan art, fan wikis, and discussion boards� While Okorafor frequently comments on her novels on social media, Adeyemi’s novel has an accompanying publisher’s website featuring author videos, a teacher’s guide with reading questions to be discussed in the classroom (Odean n� p�), as well as a quiz to find out one’s maji clan affiliation (“What’s your Maji Clan? ”). 24 Without a doubt, both novels and writers are commercially successful and cater to broad global audiences way beyond the assumed niche markets for diverse YA fiction. Success is often eyed with suspicion, frequently leading to charges of commodification, lack of significant critique, or dismissal due to ostensible adherence to formulaic genre tropes� Such criticism also followed Black Panther’s unanticipated scope of success - of which Nnedi Okorafor is an integral part not only due to her authorship in several of the Marvel comic series, but arguably also more generally due to her very conceptions of and manifold contributions to ‘organic fantasy’, ‘Africanfuturism’, and ‘Africanjujuism’� Although it is certainly significant that both series under discussion are by diasporic authors residing in the United States, who therefore tend to have comparatively easier access to agents and major publishing deals than those residing on the African continent, it is important to keep in mind the relative representational void that their texts fill, especially Okorafor’s earlier works. Just like their protagonists’ temporary relief, the authors’ success, then, can 24 This recalls the popular Hogwarts Sorting Experience for Harry Potter fans (“Discover your Hogwarts house on Pottermore”) and also speaks to the social media and expected merchandising campaigns for the forthcoming movie� 166 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 also be seen as but a small victory in the long quest towards necessary changes in the global publishing industry and book market� Yet, Hannah Pardey’s exploration of the “digital pathways” of “consumption patterns of the new Nigerian novel” (218) alerts us to the fact that, as she argues, “an affective online community of metropolitan and ethnically diverse readers whose interest in self-realization through empathetic but distanced suffering with others functions to adjust the middle-class emotional habitus to the conditions of an increasingly globalized market economy” (ibid�)� Given that the novels she examines are “by Nigerian-born writers residing and publishing in the UK or the US” (220) 25 , can similar conclusions be drawn for the YA fantasy novels under discussion here? Pardey convincingly reveals the “digital affect” to consist of “a tightly-knit pattern of production, distribution and consumption” (224) and argues that its manifestation in the form of “middlebrow 2�0” aligns this “expression of postmodern culture” (225) with an emotional function catering towards capitalism� Are emphatic statements as to the empowering potential of novels such as Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s just another version of such “emotion talk” which provides “relief from capitalist alienation” (226-227)? While in the present examples certainly much can be said to support the thesis that “the digital affect seeks to counter the market with emotions - only to be continually reintegrated into its mechanism” (228), the finding that it represents “a homogenous cultural space that is marked by a capitalist basis” (230) for the present novels would have to be substantiated with the same methodological diligence and data that Pardey bases her examples on� A case study can certainly be constructed that would prove the “contradictory habitus of the digital affect” which “both counteracts and confirms the capitalist mechanisms that produce the online community in the first place” (235), although in the examples outlined here this would hopefully be less prone to “ignore or appropriate racial, national, and age differences” or to transpose “contemporary middle-class ‘problems’ in the affluent West […] onto black girl protagonists” (236)� The dynamics of reception and production can be complicated not only by Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s genre reconfigurations and their author-izing interventions in the form of social media and authorial paratexts, but also by the fan art that young readers produce in their varied and pronounced engagements with and discussions of the novels, which is where one can best encounter the dynamics of empowerment� 25 Pardey exemplifies the “digital affect” through discussions of Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Diana Evans’s 26a (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004), and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005)� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 167 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Pointing out the simultaneity of counteracting and conforming to capitalist mechanisms, however, also speaks to a critical desire to escape the postmodern dilemma of complicity� This problem might indeed be more productively addressed through a post-ironic than through a postmodern lens� The desire to escape rather than to address complicity is also visible in criticism which calls for “rewarding” reading experiences that pose a “challenge […] both in terms of content and form”, and for texts that refrain from “clichéd metaphors” or “predictable plot moves” (Stedman 207)� Okorafor and Adeyemi certainly avoid the popular “unreconstructed genre elements such as happy endings, babies signifying a happy future, a loving gaze at black or brown skin on white, stilted dialogue, exoticism without ironisation, [or] whiteness as the unquestioned norm” (ibid�) that Stedman sees perpetuated in recent British Black and Asian fiction featuring “surface diversity” (ibid.). Yet, YA fantasy’s necessary tightrope walk is one that happens in-between the genre’s problematic legacies and its active reconfiguration, not least by employing fearless female protagonists� It is, however, also the very fantasy that readers desire to be represented in and that authors calling for diversification within this genre can creatively transgress in their own perilous journeys along the boundaries of genres and markets� To not grant them this liberty would be just another expression of critical nostalgia for ostensibly more ‘resistant’ texts� Works Cited @Nnedi (Nnedi Okorafor)� “I really wish people would stop calling my Akata series a ‘Nigerian Harry Potter’� I appreciate people being excited about these books and I know people want some kind of easy shorthand to describe it, BUT you’re doing a disservice to my hard work in the long run�” Twitter, 18 Feb� 2020, 3: 51 p�m�, https: / / twitter�com/ nnedi/ status/ 1229780456993906688� ---� “The Akata series is Africanjujuism, a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative�” Twitter, 25 Sept� 2019, 4: 01 p�m�, https: / / twitter�com/ Nnedi/ status/ 1176859245045866498� Achebe, Chinua� Things Fall Apart� 1959� New York: Anchor Books, 1994� “About�” Action on Albinism, https: / / actiononalbinism�org/ en/ page/ s3e6cfhxqxie7v46ridjnstt9� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Adeyemi, Tomi� Children of Blood and Bone� London: Macmillan, 2018� Attebery, Brian� “Patricia Wrightson and Aboriginal Myth�” Extrapolation, vol� 46, no� 3, 2005, pp� 327-337� Black Man White Skin� Directed by Jose Manuel Colón, performance by Óscar Jaenada, Ochoa Juan, and Zoe Saldana, Alquimistas Producciones and Genial Media, 2015� 168 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Born Too White. 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