The world was supposed to have gotten better, not become even more violent, rank with more death. All of Bitter’s friends were sick of it, and rightfully so. Too many mothers had buried their children under a lethally indifferent administration. Too many people had seen others die, even if it was in frantic livestreams and videos, witnesses risking their lives and freedoms to record the cops and their gleeful atrocities. Everyone knew someone else who had died from something they didn’t have to die from. There had been mass shootings at the public schools, at the movie theaters, at the shopping centers. None of it fucking mattered.īitter sat in her room and ignored the shouts from outside her window, the stomping of feet, the rhythmic chants, thousands of throats swelling to the same song. She was supposed to have had a childhood, a whole world waiting for her when she grew up, but instead kids her age were the ones on the front lines, the ones turned into martyrs and symbols that the adults praised publicly but never listened to because their greed was always louder and it was easier to perform solidarity than to actually do the things needed for change. She was seventeen, and she thought it was ridiculous that adults wanted young people to be the ones saving the world, as if her generation was the one that had broken everything in the first place. And it was brutal.Bitter had no interest in the revolution. These were the real costs of being visible and being shiny and being prolific. And so I try to create a balance with that in the memoir, and show while my career looks lovely and shiny on the surface, that these were the things I was dealing with behind the scenes.

There's a lot more that comes up emotionally and psychologically to be able to finish a book. It's not as simple as saying, you know, oh, you just force time every day and you sit down and do it.

It was things like, this is how you finish a novel. But with Dear Senthuran, you know, I thought, what would I like to teach if I did teach? And it wasn't, oh, this is how you structure a story or this is how you structure a novel. I don't like teaching in general, so I don't teach workshops. 'The parts about the publishing industry are things that I would teach if I taught. 'It's a story of a very specific part of my life, but told through the lens of spirit, like spirit-first, I wanted to give as much as I could in the book - and there's a lot in it,' they say. Akwaeke Emezi, author of Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

Akwaeke emezi bitter