Ibi Zoboi on creating magic for the marginalized

I’ve waited my entire career to publish a speculative fiction novel. My favorite genres are science fiction and fantasy. However, when I say this, most people think I’m talking about spaceships and dragons, which I don’t love. What I mean is that I love the idea of science fiction and fantasy based on my own culture and traditions. I was born in Haiti, and I know a lot about Haitian and Caribbean mythology and folklore. The Caribbean is not often associated with spaceships and dragons, so speculative fiction set there was always a hard sell. Until now.

I first read Nalo Hopkinson’s novels Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber in college. These books gave me permission to let my imagination soar in my writing. Hopkinson presented future worlds that featured Caribbean folklore and carnival characters. I wanted to do the same with Haitian history and mythology. Rarely is Haiti ever spoken about in future terms. Its magic is always relegated to the Hollywood version of “voodoo.”

Read our review of (S)Kin here.

The Caribbean storytelling tradition, including Haitian vodou, is lush with all sorts of shape-shifting creatures that are a blend of science and magic. The soucouyant has always been my favorite—a flying witch who sheds her skin and stores it in a mortar to fly around at night as a ball of flame feeding on souls. My first published short story, “Old Flesh Song,” was about Old Hag, a variation of the soucouyant. I workshopped this story with the late, great Octavia E. Butler, who called it “a good horror story.” Back then, I didn’t want to write horror. I already knew that when writing about Haitian magic, readers would immediately label it as horror. There’s no doubt that our stories can be dark, but they don’t always have to be horrific.

(S)Kin is my way of finding the magic in the horror and the beauty in the monstrous. Caribbean children are told to be afraid of our magical creatures. But come Carnival time, these frightful characters come alive in an array of costumes—the soucouyant, the ink-skinned jab jab, Midnight Robber, La Diablesse and many others. The costumes are meant to invoke fear, but they also symbolize a dark period in our history when monsters were born out of the horrors of slavery.

What if we take our magic with us wherever we go?

In writing about Caribbean folklore set in the real modern world, I wanted to make a statement about the continued existence and necessity of our magical beings. Inequality, poverty and exploitation persist, and magic can help us make sense of how we survive under these circumstances. What if we take our magic with us wherever we go? What would we need to do to preserve our magic?

This is why I love speculative fiction. I can ask big questions about small things. I want to explore what magic and folklore look like when we migrate to new places and have to make a living. My characters in (S)Kin are empowered by their magic, even when they don’t have power in the real world. I don’t want to erase the real horrors they must face in their human skin. I want to explore social justice issues as big as immigration and as seemingly small as colorism and beauty politics in my fantasy stories. (S)Kin does just that. It’s magic for the marginalized.