Bridging Worlds edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

I would like to thank the editor of this collection for a copy in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Jembefola Press

Published – Out Now

Price – FREE via Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature In A Pandemic by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – Jembefola

2020 was a landmark year in the lives of speculative fiction writers trying to both survive and create in the pandemic-lockdown breakout year. It was especially difficult for Black people, and Africans on the continent and in the diaspora.

The Bridging Worlds anthology examines those difficulties and how Black people and African writers navigated them. Even though we had myriad experiences in the different worlds we inhabit, we were nonetheless plagued by well, the same plague, no pun intended.

Bridging Worlds seeks to explore the threads and lines that connect us as we navigated this singular yet multifaceted experience, and show that connection in the various non-fiction pieces written in the diverse styles and forms the authors chose.

Bridging Worlds contains 18 pieces of speculative non-fiction, by 19 creatives aimed at documenting the experiences we had as speculative creators during that very challenging year.

It contains essays, interviews, narrative non-fiction pieces, whatever styles the creatives chose to tell their stories in. Stories that touch on their hopes, difficulties, losses, successes and further plans. It is meant to be an integral contribution to the speculative fiction canon and shed much needed light on the marginalized and scarcely represented Black and African experience.

2020 just seeing those numbers brings back lots of memories and feelings, doesn’t it? Suddenly virtually everyone on the planet had to adjust to a plot that comes out of various books, movies and clickbaity magazine articles. Everyone will have their story to tell, and I suspect like many of us we have not yet started really telling them. The anxiety, the pressure, the fear and the impact is still ongoing even as vaccines start to become more widely available (albeit in richer countries). We still have a lot to process – I recall my rather strange job getting strangely busy in the most horrible ways and my friend working in a hospital feeling for her life. Yet I also got to realise there is more than commuting to an office although he TBR pile never came down.  But this was also the year that as we were all watching the news we saw the wider inequalities and this time we couldn’t look away or get distracted  by the next trivial issue of the day when the Black Lives Matter movement also pointed out the many issues no one had even started sorting out and the deaths as a result of constant inaction continued to rise.

Perhaps we all need to work out how to talk through our stories. As part of this its very useful that writers can help put these words down and help us think about our experiences and more importantly those who lived all over the planet. As such I strongly recommend Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature In A Pandemic edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki a host of Black and African Speculative Fiction authors and editors talk through their experience of the pandemic and create a thoughtful and powerful work that does what all good writing does make you think and realise that our experiences never made us alone nor were all our experiences the same.

In this collection we get a sweep of different short articles giving us perspectives Zelda Knight discusses the process of creating the excellent Dominion anthology but this casts a stark light on traditional publishing’s conservative nature and Knight’s story really makes you appreciate the history and future of the Black speculative fiction community and how much people have to work hard just to get heard.

The writer Yvette Lisa Ndlovu discusses the links between various African traditional folklore and beliefs and the creation of afrofuturism that led to their creating an online writers workshop on the pandemic and why this space is so important for creatives. The editor B Sharise Moore then talks about coming out of deep depression and refinding their love of stories leading to a key poetry editor role in Fiyah magazine. The writer Chimedum Ohaegbu talks about lockdown hitting and with the combination of pandemic, grief, and the wave of anti-Black violence in North America having an exhausting impact alongside being the editor for Uncanny Magazine and we get more insights into the wider community and an awful lot of recommendations! The writer Eugen Bacon provides a thoughtful and eloquent mix of poetry, their thoughts on the world that 2020 turned into and why a writer needs to write that is my favourite piece in the collection.

But we all know that for many others 2020 led to us having to work out how to take one day at a time. There is a fantastic interview with Sheree Renee Thomas that very much explains both how draining and dispiriting seeing the news articles and callousness and injustice of society on display towards its Black citizens which also goes to look at the issues of prejudice within publishing itself. It provides a mixture of anger, despair hope and powerful criticism that all fans of this genre should read and digest very carefully. The editor of Omenana magazine also talks about their experience es through a Nigerian lens.

Sometimes the articles are more diary like. The writer Milton Davis talks us through their experiences of life through the year while Dilman Dila in an interview tells us how very different the experience was in Uganda (which reminds us particularly in the US and UK that there are very many different countries struggling to deal with a pandemic). The horror writer Linda D Addison looks at 2020 through a more diary like structure of key events and what personal impacts they had through the period as well as having something that very much sounded like Covid itself.

In a very different experience Tobi Ogundiran talks about being in a Russian school’s lockdown and the impact it had on their fellow pupils/inmates. Edwin Okolo and Joshua Uchenna Omenga both have sobering pieces discussing Nigerian reactions to the pandemic and the government lack of action especially as we hear about the violence and deaths that followed in various protests that I suspect many of us in the West were oblivious to. Then Mame Bougouma Diene has a wry piece on why 2021 was for them the year that sucked instead! While for Shingai Njeri Kagunda watching how the Pandemic and the various crimes against young Black people not just in America but also Kenya very much had an impact in the creation of their story & This Is How We Stay Alive.

Finishing the collection, we get a wider expansive look on African Speculative Fiction as Wole Talabi and Geoff Ryman discuss where the community has moved to and the hopes and fears for its future as the next generation now start their own storytelling. Finally, Nicole Givens Kurtz has a beautiful piece about how 2020 felt like drowning and what this made them do to keep their head above water.

This is a piece of non fiction work that I strongly recommend. I think it will be both helpful for those of us still trying to process our own years in the pandemic and remind us firstly no one is alone on these feelings but reminding us of the wider changes we need to make not just at a global and societal level but within our own genre to ensure that all voices get heard. Its strongly needed and long overdue.