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The Bandcamp description of Splendor & Misery describes it in part as “a reversal of H.P. Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic insignificance”, wherein the protagonist of the Afrofuturist concept album “finds relief in learning that humanity is of no consequence to the vast, uncaring universe”. Instead of being scandalized by the revelation that he is small in such a neverending space, that feeling is freeing—he is unbound by what the notion denies. There is a radical unlocking in discovering that, on a supreme level, no mortal is superior or inferior to you, the universe doesn’t owe you or anyone else anything, and every piece of you, for good or for ill, will turn to dust in its wake and the breadth of it will never notice. There is nothing maddening about being small, the album argues. In fact, it mostly clearly reveals the hollowness of man’s inhumanity to man, and to the marginalised in particular.
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This is not the only work that has taken the most recognizable parts of the Cthulhu mythos and reshaped them for thoughtful and critical effect. From the most deliberate reimaginings of Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to even the admonishing context written into the rules document of the Fate of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game, we have acknowledged how resilient the mythos is as a subgenre of horror, and from where it emerged in the author’s mind, and have cast that lens back inward to the work with incredible effect.
The end goal of this collection is in the same spirit as those works, but hoping to accomplish the inverse: for Blackness to be seen as radically significant.
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It is. It has no choice but to be. It has spent the better part of the history of the old New World being significant enough to be the driver of entire industries of capital, the metaphorical and literal masons of entire nations, the driven bodies of decades of conflict, torture, struggle, exile, revolution, and resilience, and has survived throughout.
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One may imagine that, if there were an entity so large and unfathomable that it looked past such centuries as if they were mere moments, it would still be impressed at how many moments there have been, and how brutal they have been—but also how filled with hard-fought pride, resistance, declaration, and joy. To hazard a tired analogy, even if we were as ants to such gods, you would imagine they respond the same as we do when we learn that ants can carry so many times their own weight, and withstand forces many times more still—with a kind of childish awe that they would resist, even in the face of such an unbending world.
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The truth of our world is much like the truth of clipping’s album—all over the world, Black people have witnessed vast and indefatigable systems built specifically for us to struggle to grasp them, so deep and cruel that they tell us to our face how small we’re meant to feel, so unmoving that the act of challenging them is meant to drive us wild with rage or sorrow. And yet, not only have we stood our ground in the face of those systems, we have survived them, we have lived in the face of them, we strove to understand them, and finally many of us actually touched those systems with our own hands. And even though those elder beings—the law, the medical practice, the police, housing, employment, the faith, and so much more—are still so cantankerous that they may wrestle violently in our grip, never content to take our understanding for power, at least so many of our siblings did still earn that knowledge. In struggling against those monsters, they have won, at least, the understanding that there is nothing truly special about them—and simultaneously, even in our utter banality, a world of wonder about how we’ve made it this far.
Admittedly, a large portion of that intent is also to make you laugh. Just because someone is significant doesn’t mean there is no room for them to be imperfect, and in that imperfection I try to find spaces where something truer than praise, and yet lighter than shame, can be found. Not everyone who writes an autograph in this collection is good or right all of the time, and not all of the circumstances under which they are asked to sign are good or right at their immediate moments. That’s fine. We spend so much time struggling under the weight of how the media ‘perfectly’ sees Blackness—one moment perfectly broken and untrustworthy, the station of the poor and downtrodden who live to rob or hurt you, and then the next moment perfectly talented and accomplished, always willing to bear unnecessary burdens for free to prove their worth. Sometimes, though, we’re just tired, hungry, selfish, mistaken, distracted. Sometimes we are not in the mood.
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The resilience for which we credit having survived such a cruel universe for so long, I reckon, has nothing to do with being perfect, unbreakable, or just. It is neutral fact. We are here because we have made an effort to remain, and to value what remains, as we must. But I think it’s also worth remembering that we can do so without it being perfect—that we can be given the paradoxical gift of being valued because we have survived being insignificant with such undeniable magnitude.
About the Author
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and the inaugural Ignyte Award for Best Speculative Poetry. His work is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former Poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
Visit his website at www.brandonobrien.space.
About the Cover Artist
Trevor Fraley is an illustrator with a passion for characters and the worlds that they inhabit. Starting at a young age, he was always interested in the ability to tell stories through a visual medium. Throughout years of exposure to countless mediums from storybooks, film, television and many others, the idea of creating impactful work from seemingly thin air drove him to pursue this endeavor.
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In 2016 he earned his BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where he also received the Marcel Vertes Award. Since then his work has been featured in numerous outlets such as Medium, FIYAH Magazine, Action Lab Comics and Silverclutch Games.
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Trevor continues to add to the world of illustration while also finding new and intriguing ways to contribute to the world that we live in.
Visit his website at www.trevorfraley.com.
Interstellar Flight Press
Interstellar Flight Press is an indie speculative publishing house. We feature innovative works from the best new writers in science fiction and fantasy. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.”
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Find us online at www.interstellarflightpress.com.
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he magic shoes.
Can You Sign My Tentacle? Page 5