There’s a story that Tomi Adeyemi ’15 often tells about the “big bang” moment that sparked Children of Blood and Bone—the Afrofuturist fantasy epic that made her famous at 24 years old and launched a young-adult trilogy that concluded this summer with Children of Anguish and Anarchy.
That big bang came on a rainy day in Rio de Janeiro, where Adeyemi, newly graduated with a degree in English, was spending the summer on a Harvard travel grant to study West African culture and mythology. She knew that Brazil had imported even more slaves through the Middle Passage than the United States had: “I thought, ‘There’s a story there.’” But the museum she needed to visit was closed for renovations, and when the rain started to pour, she ducked into a nearby gift shop. For sale inside were several ceramic plates depicting what looked like African gods and goddesses: dark-skinned and beautiful, dressed in vibrant reds and yellows, wielding torches and jeweled staffs.
“I had no idea what I was looking at,” Adeyemi says, but she was transfixed. She called her Nigerian-immigrant parents back home in suburban Chicago, who told her about the Orishas, divine spirits in Yoruba religious culture (often deified ancestors or personified natural forces) that act as emissaries from God and help direct human events. “And in that moment,” she says, “the world of Orïsha”—the mythical West African country in her novels—“spread out in my mind like a 3D terrain map. I saw the battles and the magic, and riding through the jungle on a giant lion.” It would be another year and a half before her characters took shape, but the setting was there the whole time, humming with details, “like a theme park waiting for people to run through it.”
In truth, though, the trilogy’s earliest seeds were planted long before Adeyemi went to Rio, by a childhood as one of three siblings raised by African immigrants (“In our house, I was Nigerian; outside of it, I was African American”) and by the Black Lives Matter movement. Adeyemi’s undergraduate experience had been punctuated by news stories about police brutality and the high-profile killings of unarmed black boys and men: Michael Brown, Philando Castille, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. “I don’t know if people recall how much footage there was,” she says. “It wasn’t just that it was happening; it’s that we were constantly seeing it. The emotional PTSD was real.”
Simultaneously, Adeyemi had her first deep encounter with W.E.B. DuBois (Ph.D. 1895), studying The Souls of Black Folk in a Harvard English class. “For me, reading those essays was a profound experience,” she recalls. “Because he’s writing after Emancipation and talking about what it feels like to be black in America, but it felt like he was talking about 2012, with the shooting of Trayvon Martin or the backlash against black actors in The Hunger Games movie. It was horrifying, but also: I was in awe of the power of literature to capture human experience.”
Combining all those threads, Adeyemi’s trilogy centers on the power struggle between two groups of characters. One, called the maji, are the darker-skinned inhabitants of a country entirely populated by people of color; once upon a time, they wielded magic given to them by the gods. The other group is a brutal monarchy of lighter-skinned rulers who robbed the maji—“maggots,” according to an ugly slur—of their magic and forced them into persecution and enslavement, outlawing their sacred Yoruba language.
The main protagonist is Zélie Adebola, a fisherman’s daughter and a member of the maji, who fights to bring magic back to her people and restore their sense of identity, and later fights to hold her country together, as events keep spiraling further and further out of control. Around her are a handful of companions (sometimes allies, sometimes rivals), including her brother Tzain, the runaway Princess Amari (who turned against her father’s monarchy) and Amari’s brother, Inan. Adeyemi’s wheeling narrative arcs and propulsive prose offer an exploration of the multifaceted complexities of domination—not only racial, but also gender—and a study of how grief, memory, and violence can echo and repeat across history. The trilogy’s final installment, Children of Anguish and Anarchy, opens with Zélie and her friends in cages aboard a ship, having been abducted from Orïsha by pale-skinned invaders.
The books have won Adeyemi a slew of awards—including a Hugo and a Nebula, among the highest literary honors for science fiction and fantasy—and, now based in California, she’s overseeing the trilogy’s screenplay adaptation. Last year, Paramount Pictures acquired the rights for a three-movie deal with an offer reportedly worth millions of dollars. But the way Adeyemi tells it, her writing career was never a sure thing before it suddenly happened. She entered Harvard planning to attend medical school eventually (even though she’d been writing stories since she was five), and her application to write a creative senior thesis was rejected. Her early internships were in finance and consulting. She only began working on the Oshïra books after a previous novel, a generational epic about the descendants of two African sisters separated by the slave trade—one sent to Brazil, the other to the American South—was rejected by 63 literary agents. “That was devastating,” she says. “I’m a type-A overachiever, a Nigerian American perfectionist, and at that point, I had never spent a quarter of my life on something and failed.”
But then, unexpectedly, the devastation transformed into something else. “Sitting there in the ashes of that failure, after all the tears and all the emotions, I realized, ‘I still want this.’” She established a deliberate writing process, which today involves Excel sheets and a wall filled with color-coded Post-it notes, plus hours and hours of archival and online research. And she sketched out plans for five books; the first in the queue turned out to be Children of Blood and Bone.
Recently, she finished writing a new novel, to be published next year. It’s about a young black girl who goes to an Ivy League university and wants to be a writer. Unlike her previous books, which were aimed at young adults, she thinks this one might be more for adults. “Because it takes place in this world,” she says. “And in a way, that makes it even darker than the fantasy of Orïsha. Because it’s here, and it’s now, and it’s us.”
