Putting the Main Character’s Sexual and Gender Identity in the Reader’s Hands

By Kazim Ali

Making Krishi, the main character of my new Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, The Citadel of Whispers, a gender-neutral character was never supposed to be a big deal. In the classic line of books, the protagonist characters—the character the reader assumed the persona of—was always written as gender neutral. It was the marketing and art departments of the original publisher that had to make decisions about what the cover would look like and what the internal art would look like. It was felt at the time that though girls might read a book with a boy protagonist the reverse might not be true. While most of those early books depicted a boy in the cover art and internal art, the text itself never really gendered the character by either behavior, appearance, or in the action of the text.

It was a short leap from that concept to the notion that characters themselves in the book might have various relationships to gender. Not only did I carefully construct the main character, Krishi, as someone who could either be identified as a boy, a girl, or gender neutral, but other characters in the book also have different relationships to classic gender stereotypes and to fantasy stereotypes as well. For example, Krishi’s two main friends have abilities different that one might expect. Zara, a girl, is the best fighter in the school but is also upset at having to cut her long hair to conform to the gender-neutral appearance that all Whisperers are expected to have in order to be better spies. Saeed, a small boy, is often thought of as physically weak but at several points in the story he manages to defeat fighters bigger and stronger than him by his cunning. 

Tough independent girls appeared many times before in children’s literature of course, but it was probably Sally Kimball, created by Donald J. Sobol as part of his Encyclopedia Brown series, who was the first real bruiser. She was 10 years but often bested larger boys, often giving 14-year-old Bugs Meany an actual black eye to match the metaphorical black eye he got when Encyclopedia exposed his role in various petty crimes. Sally wasn’t a well-rounded hero. She was the muscle to Encyclopedia’s fey, retiring brains. It’s interesting to note that the not-quite-feminist icon Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also not overly noted for their intelligence. The first round of girl action heroes could be as buff and butch as the boys but she couldn’t have it all.  

The Whisperers in The Citadel of Whispers, know that in their work they have to be able to pass as anything. The book actually opens with a martial arts class in which the students—boys and girls and everyone else—have to engage in combat while corseted into restrictive dresses. Their normal clothes are gender neutral tunics and pants, and their hair must be uniformly shoulder length, neither longer nor shorter. Other characters in the book also defy gender expectations. The combat teacher is an athletic woman, while the dance instructor is a slim man; the rogue-like pirate ship captain (think the Han Solo-type) is a sixty-something year old woman with a penchant for taking swigs out of a flask and smoking tobacco from a long pipe.

 Since fantasy is a genre with such historic tropes (around both race and gender), I knew I couldn’t write a story with the same figures. Princess Leia of Star Wars is a warrior woman for sure (I once heard that if you calculate the ratio of shots fired to successful hits, Leia is the best shot of all the characters in the series), but her primary attribute in the original trilogy still leaned into the traditional role of damsel in distress in need of rescue. It wasn’t until the sequel trilogy that the world around her had evolved enough for her to be fully depicted at what was only winked at in a few scenes of the original: she was the political and military leader of the resistance.

I also wanted to work against the norm of most fantasy milieux: a pseudo medieval European context in terms of the castles, the costumes, the social roles. Rather than Tolkien or Lewis (or Brooks or Eddings, who drew from those two), I drew instead upon the wonderful Amar Chitra Katha comics of my childhood, describing Indian architecture and giving most—but not all—the characters Indian names. Innovation is also a firm tradition in speculative fiction. When Anne McCaffrey created her world of the dragonriders of Pern with the first novel in 1968, she created a matriarchal political structure in which homosexuality was an ordinary part of life. The characters who disapproved of it were seen is reactionary and out of touch and were almost always villainous in the context of the story.

Like Krishi, most characters in The Citadel of Whispers, have their own relationship to gender, some more traditional—like Sandhya, the martial arts instructor, or Etheldreda, a gardener with big plans—and others, like the master Whisperer Shivani or the sullen new student Arjun, each disrupt expectations a reader might have. There are trans characters, revealed as such in the text, and others might be read that way. There is at least one character who is written as a drag performer, but is not revealed that way in the text. Hey, I have to save something for Book 2!

In the end, the point was not to be “political” about gender but to be inclusive. The point was to write a book that any boy or girl could read and not feel excluded from, more importantly any young person who had a complicated relationship to their own gender, or wasn’t sure what it meant to them, could read this book as well and feel that they had a home in it. An imagined world ought to include everyone with an imagination.

KAZIM ALI is an award-winning LGBTQ+ author and the Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His new book The Citadel of Whispers,, is available now. Learn more on his website kazimali.com

Breaking the Pattern: Breaking the Silence

by Nancy King

I’ve always been a storyteller yet there were stories I could not tell, others I tried to tell, but no one wanted to hear them. Editors rejected the memoir I wrote as part of my PhD thesis as “too bleak and troublingly personal.” Agents rejected Morning Light, a novel that was a fictional account of my life, as being too dark. I felt ashamed of who I was and what I’d experienced. To keep going, I created a cheerful, strong persona that helped to disconnect me from the darkness I lived with. I felt emotionally isolated, filled with shame that my life was too grim to talk about.  

After returning from a vision quest in 2016, I started writing what I thought would be my sixth novel, only what came out was nonfiction—stories of my life. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t create a character whose life was not mine. It was a struggle similar to the one years ago when every popping out story I wrote was about sexual abuse and violence despite concerted effort to write differently.  

So, I gave up and gave in, grudgingly allowing what wanted to come out to emerge. To distance myself from the emotional content I tried writing third person, past tense, naming no names, but this became impossible. There are only so many words for she, woman, her... Even worse, the writing was impassive, with no emotional content, more like journalism, which was how one of my therapists described the way I talked about my life.

I felt desperate—wanting to write—but not wanting to write what I was writing. I know the feeling when something inside me wants to come out yet I didn’t want to write about my life. I wanted to write fiction, about someone who was not me, leading a life that was not mine, with problems I had never experienced. Yet something inside was pushing me to tell the truth just as strongly as something inside was pulling me back into inner darkness. To stop the struggle, which was uncomfortably intense, I gave in. There was nothing left to do but write first person, present tense. This opened a floodgate of memories, painful, dark, emotionally upsetting. I wrote associatively, not caring about chronology, not caring about age or place. It was hard going because writing first person, present tense brought me back to the time and place of the actual experience. I could smell and taste and feel my four-year-old terror when I wrote about what happened with my uncle—experiences I could never talk about, never even let myself acknowledge, until the vision quest when I was 80 years old.  

I kept writing, but I worried. Was it too much me me me? Would what I’d written interest anyone else? I sent a few chapters to a former student, asking her if any of it mattered. She wrote back that she was going through a difficult time emotionally, that my writing was helping her feel she wasn’t alone, would I please keep writing and sending her what I’d written. That was enough to keep me going. 

When I’d written about 300 pages, I sent the material to my editor. “Nancy,” she said, “the writing is fine, but it has to be chronological. I need to read how your voice changes as you grow, how you develop as a woman. Right now, I can’t tell how old you are, where you are, with whom you’re living. It’s all a jumble and vitiates the power of your writing.”

Oy! I’m not good with computer stuff. The prospect of rearranging so many chapters was daunting. I printed out the book, manually re-organized the chapters so they were chronological, then, with the real pages in hand, I slowly rearranged what I’d written to make the chapters chronological. This allowed me to see what was missing, what needed to be tossed. I also realized the arc of the book was about healing from childhood trauma and subsequent abuse as an adult. The bad choices I’d made as an adult, that I knew at the time were bad choices, but was unable to not make them, which had always puzzled me, now made sense. At the time, I didn’t know that what I couldn’t acknowledge was shaping the choices I made. After writing the memoir I was able to fit together pieces of the puzzle of my life that had never fit before. 

Perhaps I was now able to consciously write stories about my life because of what happened toward the end of the vision quest. As part of the process, each of the participants talked about their experience in the woods. Most people focused on the difficulty of being without family, phone, books, social media, or being in a wilderness without a tent. Not wanting to talk, I waited until everyone else had spoken. When everyone’s eyes were focused on me there was no way to remain silent. The compassionate attention of the group allowed me to speak about a traumatic relationship and abortion, sparing no details, the shame I felt at not being able to say no to my parents or the man. I expected blame. What I got was lovingkindness, acceptance, caring, deep listening—something I’d never experienced before, except perhaps in a therapist’s office, but even there I was never able to speak without censoring myself.  

Looking back, I now understand that telling the story I told at the vision quest shifted my sense of myself. The change enabled me to be truthful when talking about my life. I found people who wanted to hear, were able to listen and respond with caring. They didn’t turn away or judge or condemn me. This broke the grip of the relentless shame and blame with which I’d lived, allowing me to break my lifelong pattern of silence. 

Writing Breaking the Silence, finding the wherewithal to tell the stories of my life without censoring, enabled me to break through my families’ silence, lies, denial, blame, and shame.  

A friend, who read and liked the manuscript sent it to a local press, Terra Nova Books. They offered to publish it, which surprised and pleased me. They suggested titles. I didn’t like them. I suggested titles. None of us liked them. Nothing anyone came up with seemed right. Then, the friend who sent the manuscript to Terra Nova Books suggested the title, Breaking the Silence, which immediately felt right and descriptive.

The publication of Breaking the Silence has made it possible for me to begin healing from the trauma and abuse, shame and blame with which I’ve lived all my life. Telling the story of our lives is the first step toward becoming authentically who we are.

What is your story?

Nancy King, Ph.D., is a writer and playwright whose nonfiction, plays, and novels have won numerous awards. Her novel, The Stones Speak, has been optioned for a movie. She facilitates workshops in creative expression, playmaking, and world literature in the U.S. and abroad. Living in Santa Fe, N.M., she finds inspiration in storytelling, weaving, writing, and hiking in the mountains.

The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

At age nine Farah Jasmine Griffin opened a gift from her father, a classic volume of Black history, to find this note: “Jazzie read this book. . . . Baby read it until you understand." Shortly afterward he died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving her to seek guidance and solace from the African American novelists, essayists, poets, and musicians he introduced to her as a child. In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, published September 14 by W.W. Norton, Griffin pays homage to family and community through generations of Black geniuses.

Read Until You Understand is "a talking book, a teaching book, and a treasure," writes poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander. Griffin applies decades of experience as a professor and scholar in the fields of race, gender, and cultural politics. Her work provides a generous seminar in Black culture, unlocking years of future discoveries for the reader from Toni Morrison to Marvin Gaye. “Our writers and our organizers make poetry of the rage," Griffin writes. "They have been working, building, creating, envisioning, showing us how to live like the future we are hoping to build is already here.”

Read Until You Understand is about your experience of growing up with the canon of Black literature as something of a stand-in for your father after his untimely passing. How did having these strong voices as a presence in your life help you to come to your sense of identity?

Within these pages, I seek to share a series of valuable lessons learned from those who have sought to better a nation that depends upon, and yet too often despises, them. In the process, they have changed the world. Literature by Black writers gave me an expansive sense of self, a sense that I was part of something larger, something that existed beyond my immediate family and community, and it gave me a sense of history. It also imbued me with a sense of possibility.

Upon the election of Barack Obama, some mused that we were living in a post-racial world, while in her book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson instead compares the cultural revival of racism to the Anthrax plague in Siberia in 2016, which occurred during a thaw that re-awoke the long dormant bacteria. How long had you been working on Read Until You Understand, and did any revisions need to occur for the final product to reflect the current situation?

In some ways I'd been working on Read Until You Understand for much of my life, but I started working on it in earnest during the 2016 presidential campaign and finished during the pandemic, the emergence of the global Black Lives Matter movement, and to a lesser degree, the final though contested outcome of the 2020 election. Throughout this time, the stories that I tell, the literature that I share, and the values I explore remain urgent and necessary. The glorious uprising that seeks to advance Black freedom and the outcome of the 2020 election helped to keep the book from ending on a note of absolute despair. 

Memoir, history, literature, and art all come into play in Read Until You Understand. Was there ever a point as a scholar that you felt overwhelmed by the sheer scope of your own work?

No. I never felt overwhelmed; I felt gratified to have landed on a project that called for all of these forms and genres. My goal in writing this book is to draw upon a lifetime of reading and almost thirty years of teaching African American literature to explore how, in addition to addressing concerns about democracy, perhaps even more than these, the works also speak to ideas and values that have concerned humanity since the beginning of time. Each chapter addresses a specific body of work and the issues it raises. Although you do not have to have read the books I discuss in order to grasp the lessons I share, I hope my words will entice you to pick up these works and read them. To do so will only enrich your experience, understanding, and life.

Read Until You Understand is a compelling title, as well as a profound statement. Do you believe there is a static point where understanding can occur, or is it a constantly evolving process?

By all means, it is a constantly evolving process. I am guided by the following questions: What might an engagement with literature written by Black Americans teach us about the United States and its quest for democracy? What might it teach us about the fullest blossoming of our own humanity?

This interview contains quotes from Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton, 2021) by Farah Jasmine Griffin.