Imperative from on High

I began writing in the third grade.  My mother would punish me to no television and I had to do book reports on a certain number of books before I could get off punishment.  My reading list consisted of Nancy Drew books at the time and she quickly realized that they were pretty much the same story so she relegated me to doing book reports on Black History.  (I was also made to memorize Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech which I WISH parents made their children do today).  Reading became my escape and I would read all the time.  Writing was an extension of that.  I loved words.  I loved how they could transport me. 

I started writing erotica in the 10th grade.  The boy I had loved from afar for 5 years sat in front of my in my typing class and I wanted to impress him with my newly budding sexuality so I would write stories like I had read in my mother's extensive porn collection hidden in her closet.  I would sell the stories I had written to boys for $5. 

In college, I had a boyfriend and I loved writing him erotic stories.  I loved writing erotic letters.  I loved writing.  My degree was science and technology based but I took liberal arts classes whenever I could that would allow me to write.  One professor BEGGED me to go to law school after I wrote a paper about defending women's right to choose.  As fate would have it, upon graduation, I got a job based on my artistic and creative merit and not my scientific accomplishments.  I would show people my portfolio and they were more impressed with the aesthetics than the content.  For years, I did very little writing.  I was married and we alternated years of being outrageously happy and unbearably miserable, off and on. 

It wasn't until I got divorced that I started writing again.  I would buy expensive journals and write about my spiritual and emotional evolution and write erotica simultaneously.  I loved writing on crafted papers (still do)  and telling stories.  I would try to seduce men with my writing.  It was the very beginnings of AfroerotiK even though it was a decade before I would come up with the concept.  I would buy lingerie and lotions and cassette tapes and make sexy recordings while I masturbated and recite my stories.  I would create these packages and give them to men as my indication that I wanted to be intimate with them.  (I don't think it worked one time if I recall correctly) 

Fast forward to 2001 and I went to grad school to study African and African American Studies with a concentration in psychology.  I got As on all my papers and I thought it was just because the standards for the school were so low.  It wasn't until I started writing my thesis and working with Dr. Linda James Myers at OSU that I realized that I was really far more exceptional at writing than I had previously acknowledged or comprehended.  I was asked to speak at a conference in England.  I presented my paper and professors from all over were asking me to travel to their countries and teach classes at their various universities.  I hadn't even gotten my Masters.  It was then that I realized that I had a gift that not a lot of people had. 

Meanwhile, in my personal life, I had started writing erotica again.   I had created my perfect life at the time with academic and cultural pursuits but I was single and I wanted an outlet that was different than the emerging erotica market offered me.  I was not at all aroused by rappers, drug dealers or basketball players so I started writing erotica to appeal to my desires for a transcendent, Africentric love with my intellectual, spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, and sexual equal.  I didn't want to write about  ghetto behaviors because I wasn't from the ghetto and the ghetto ain't as fabulous as Black people want to make it out to be.  I wanted to write about the complexities of Black folk, the ones that weren't shown on TV or in music videos.  So, I would write.  I would write and when I was finished, I wouldn't be aroused because I was so invested in the sentence structure, the character development, the grammar that the stories were more like projects and when I was finished, I would post them online and people would say, "Oh my God, that was the best story I've ever read.  Write one about XYZ."  And I would.  And more people would ask me to write stories for them about topics and fetishes that aroused them. 

It was around that time that Zane started showing up on the scene.  I've been pretty vocal about saying that I don't think she's a good writer.  That's not a secret.  I've told her so personally.  I don't have anything against her personally and I'm sure she's a nice person but I think what she's done to millions upon millions of Black people is eroticize incredibly unhealthy and dysfunctional behaviors to the point that Black people, an entire generation of Black people now think that selling pussy, cheating, and casual sex is normal and right.   Our collective need to see ourselves depicted in sexual situations was met by her willingness to use the words dick, pussy, and fuck in poorly-written stories of dysfunction and it sold. 

So, AfroerotiK was born.  I have never written about Black people cheating (I have written about white people cheating but they don't have a lack of positive images of themselves so I couldn't give half a fuck about portraying them in a positive light.  I'm far more concerned with exposing their inherent racism.)  I do not use the N word in any of my stories, I do not refer to women as bitches or other derogatory terms.  I don't write about perfect characters but beautifully flawed characters who are working on themselves, who are committed to their evolution as a people.  I fill my stories with lessons about life and love and communication and intimacy . . . you know . . . all the stuff dangerously lacking in any depictions of us as a people. 

I tried, a decade ago, to get a book deal.  I thought surely that agents would read my work and fall to their knees begging to represent me.  Rather, they said they weren't interested.  I went to publishers who surely would see that my writing was far superior to the newly emerging urban lit with its fifth grade level writing skill.  In academia, I was touted as an exceptional writer.  In publishing, people didn't like what I had to offer.  Meanwhile, I'm writing more stories and posting them online, I'm building a following, people are telling me that they LOVE my work, that it touches them in ways nothing else has. 

Today, I am dedicated to my mission to show Black people that love, intimacy, commitment, and emotional maturity are not bad things and that they can exist inside of a relationship that is sex positive, that explores more than vanilla sex.  I'm dedicated to rid people of African descent of their oppressive, sexist, misogynist, homo and transphobic views.  I'm dedicated to making Black beautiful again. 

And so, I write.