I don’t like writing editorials as openers for issues to literary magazines. I’ve done it only twice, three times at the most, with my own lit mag, Specter. In the four years I’ve edited magazines, I’ve found the exercise of writing an editorial to be tedious, or maybe redundant. The work speaks for itself, generally. And the work in this issue of Literary Orphans does, indeed, speak for itself. But I do have a few words to say before we begin.
Black Thought is the stage name of one of my favorite emcees, the lead vocalist for my all-time favorite hip-hop act The Roots. In the tradition of LO, Black Thought—the rapper—is an orphan: his father was executed, “tied to a chair in an empty lot, shot in the neck, the chest, the groin, all over” when Black Thought, then Tariq Trotter, was one year old. About sixteen years later, his mother’s death “was even more brutal” than his father’s. “My mother was raped, strangled, and stabbed 30 or 40 times. She was identified through her dental records.”
These horrific stories, detailed in an 2008 Rolling Stones profile of The Roots, easily slot themselves in the current narrative in which the proclamation “Black Lives Matter” is necessitated, in part, by continued police brutality and, in whole, by the continued belief that our lives, our bodies, are of lesser worth when compared to others and, therefore, can be dismissed—and discarded—without care, without justice.
When LO Executive Director Mike Joyce contacted me in April 2014 to guest edit an issue, my immediate thought was yes, of course: an issue featuring black writers.
I wrote to Mike, “I want to publish an issue of literature from black people who may identify as queer or transgender, or are stout atheists, or who deal daily with mental illness, who love fantasy and science fiction and comic books, who struggle with their identities within the black community.”
I continued via email, “I simply want to find more writers like myself. Writers who, by the simple fact that they’re black, have to simultaneously find their artistic voice while fighting against labels and preconceived notions of what a black writer should look like, sound like, produce, and stand for.”
And so, we here are, one year later. A small issue in length, Black Thought features the beautiful work of Corinne Gaston and her “Travel Anatomy,” the colorism exposed in “Star Bellies” by Evelyn Alfred, and the voyeuristic “Survival of the High-Riding Bitch” by June Frances Coleman.
Morgan Jerkins takes us to Japan and the fantastic with “Fade,” while Naadeyah Haseeb’s “Passive-Aggressive” shows the reader the reach of racism within an interracial romantic relationship.
“Art|is|Sometimes They Call Me “T”” by Teré Fowler-Chapman dispels the notion of respectability politics as a safe haven for black bodies.
“Black Hand Side” by Ran Walker is a hilarious, if entirely probable, take on cultural appropriation. “A Friendly Game,” originally published in the debut issue of Specter, is a short story by Rion Scott that is so good, I wanted to bring it back to life here in Black Thought. And Troy L. Wiggins rounds out the issue with a how-to-survival guide “Tips For Millennial Black Nerds,” a piece that is the perfect microcosm of what I wanted Black Thought to be.latest Running | Nike Shoes
