“Beyond time and memory---where the computer cannot reach---is dreaming.”
-The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe.
A quick review of Janelle Monáe’s debut story omnibus! This electric and electronic collection is a collaboration between our beloved actor-singer-android-writer themselves, as well as various collaborators. To give them credit before this review (and also because wow, there’s a lot of big names here)
- Yohanca Delgado (who’s part of Stanford’s. Wallace Stegner Fellowship)
- Eve L. Ewing (known for her work with Ironheart, Photon, Black Panther,
- Alaya Dawn Johnson (multi-award winning author: Adding all of the awards she won would take all day. Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, National Book Award...)
- Danny Lore (They did work for the 2020 Star Wars series from IDW Publishing)
- Sheree Renée Thomas (Associate Editor at Obsidian, 2022 Hugo Award finalist)
Click the read more for the full review!
Summary
This Afrofuturist collection is separated into five separate stories with shared themes, characters, and settings. All of them appear in the universe established in the Dirty Computer emotion picture, where a dystopian cybernetic future threatens to destroy all it considers “Dirty.” The book, then, follows various “Dirty Computers,” who seek to find a community and home outside of the insidious and totalitarian “New Dawn...”
The DunMeshi Pitch
“The DunMeshi” pitch will be a recurring theme in my book reviews.
I watched DunMeshi because of all of the memes I saw. In the same way, I will try to convince you using intriguing, attention-grabbing, and interesting facts about the book:
“I have friends,” she said.
“Who?”
-The Memory Librarian (aka my favourite quote)
- There’s a whole story about a Black feminist queer commune. It’s so good.
- Zen, the badass character that Tessa Thompson plays in Dirty Computer, is back!
- Do you want to see an infinite time machine? I want to see an infinite time machine
Favourite Parts
Its conception of what “Dirty” means is incredibly nuanced. I won’t spoil too much of the book here, but it’s explored in the first (and titular) story, The Memory Librarian. Seshet, a Black, queer woman in a leadership position at New Dawn, is constantly under rigorous surveillance: Her privilege is conditional on her being absolutely perfect, a struggle that is scathingly realistic to the experience of being a Black woman in North America in a corporate position.
However, the idea of “Dirty” keeps developing with the story: In some scenes, it’s actively reclaimed.
It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s interview with Adrienne Rich, in which she gives a nice definition to what “Dirty” is conceptualized as.
“[Audre] But what I’m not saying that women don’t think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I’m saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is…”
Adrienne: “Sinister…”
Audre: “Sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting”
(Quote sourced from Sister Outsider)
And indeed, “Dirty” is all of those things. The queer, unsettling, “Dirty,” and sex-positive vision that the various protagonists have of the future is fascinating to explore, and is done with a care and love that is very rare at all to see.
I also really loved the optimism, and the sheer vision of the dreaming happening. In a lot of the dystopian novels I’ve been reading, there doesn’t tend to be a particularly well thought-out ending, but here... I actually came away from the collection feeling satisfied, and hopeful. This is a very rare thing in this genre.
This was a very short book review. Where can I read more about it?
Great news! I’m actually working on a more in-depth analysis post about the book itself, and its themes. This was actually a warm-up for it, so I can synthesize my ideas about the book into a short format.