My Steps For Decolonizing My Writing

Most of the books I read these days are either ebooks or audiobooks, but here’s a physical copy of one of the books I read during this process. Wasn’t a huge fan of this particular one, but I highly recommend her other works!

Previously, I wrote about how I recently came to realize how anti-blackness & white-centered narratives had infiltrated my storytelling and writing career (if you haven’t read it, you may want to click over to get the full background before diving into the rest).

So as promised, here are the steps I took/am taking to undo this mindset.

1. Change my inputs.

Knowing where I received my influence from, the first thing I did was completely revamp my reading list. From 2019, I made a commitment to make more of my reading list books by black authors--with specific focus on books coming from or written about the African diaspora. I actually spent a lot of time with this one--I felt like I really needed to reconstruct the baseline of quality literature that I naturally referred to when creating my own stories. This is something I still do; just that now, I’ve expanded to reading narratives written by/about POC in general.

(Sidebar: This has honestly been a delightful change to my reading patterns, and one that I’d highly recommend others to do, regardless of your race. As a matter of fact, this is something I’d particularly recommend for my white readers to engage in. One of the luxuries that whiteness in the US affords is usually having little-to-no onus to be knowledgeable about the experiences of other racial identities, because ‘White’ has traditionally been considered the norm. You can do your part to throw a wrench in this narrative by actively reading stories that depict people and livelihoods that are different than your own, and sharing them with others!)

2. Amend my existing body of work.

From there, I actually went back and dug through some of my previous works and tweaked those protagonists to better reflect the person who was writing the stories. I guess you could call this a form of reparations for my writing career: doing what I could to directly rectify the silencing of black voices that I had carried out in my stories all my life. It was also a form of practice for me. Editing my existing stories to portray black protagonists didn’t require a significant amount of work, so it allowed me to get an easy sense of exactly what tweaks I would need to make to my thought process to do the same thing with a new idea. And after editing stories, I made a point to go through and read them. For me, there was something about reading my own stories, edited to reflect myself in them, that fueled my conviction to go forward and do it with new ideas as well.

3. Write about my own personal stories.

And then comes the important part: the writing. I started by writing things that would be easy for me to write myself into--my real personal experiences. When painting stories that conveyed my first-hand encounters like awkward travel experiences or annoying conversations with nosy Nigerian aunties, I practically couldn’t help but to write in voices and main characters that were almost an exact replica of myself. Not only did this help me more naturally write stories from my perspective as a black woman, but it also was just really refreshing to put my personal experiences associated with that identity onto paper. In a way, I feel like I was finally giving that identity space in my writing--something that I had long unconsciously denied. And that was fun and refreshing--something that I enjoyed so much, in fact, that I’m continuing with such narratives in hopes to be able to publish something along those lines in the near future! (fingers crossed!)

4. Normalize black protagonists in all kinds of fiction.

The second aspect of this writing phase actually requires me to do the exact opposite of what I described myself doing previously. Whereas I started by rooting my stories in things associated with my identity and culture as a black Nigerian-American woman, I feel that it’s just as important to write stories that reflect black characters independent of that identity aspect. I don’t mean this as a means of erasing that identity. I just want to reinforce that black people are just people. People who are just as capable of being featured as dragon slayers and awkward quiet students and magicians and so much more, without the story needing to revolve around their skin color or cultural heritage. Today, a young black girl has the right to read fun and imaginative fiction narratives that reflect her in it, which (aside from the routine descriptions of appearance) focus on little more than delivering said protagonist on the same adventures & journeys that I in my youth only knew white children to do. And I hope to one day be able to contribute to that body of work as well~.

So that’s my process thus far! I’m happy about this journey because it’s not only bringing me around to diversifying the characters I include in my writing, but also giving me the opportunity to dive back into fiction writing again. It’s something that had gotten away from me for some time, but I am excited to be coming back to it with fresh eyes and new meaning behind how I tell my stories!

Thanks for reading.