Book World: Janelle Monáe’s first book expands the world of her music
By Janelle Monáe Harper Voyager. 336 pp. $28.99
- - The desire to take a music project beyond the confines of an album has driven the career direction of so many creatively ambitious musicians. From classic studio films, such as The Who’s “Tommy” (1975) or Prince’s “Purple Rain” (1984), to extended music video projects, such as Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” in 2016, the music-to-film pipeline, when done successfully, can establish an artist’s auteur status.
American singer, rapper and actress Janelle Monáe, who made her film debut in 2016, with the award-winning “Moonlight” and critically acclaimed “Hidden Figures,” is no stranger to this concept. Her Grammynominated third album, the joyously vibrant collection of pop bangers “Dirty Computer,” was accompanied by an “emotion picture.” The Hugo Award-winning short film brought to life the fully formed world around Monáe’s record, introducing audiences to a dystopian near-future surveillance state where queer people, people of color and all who don’t conform, are considered “dirty computers” and hunted down to be corrected. It is this world which Monáe builds on in her first book “The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories from Dirty Computer,” a collection of short stories that explore the power of memory in liberation.
The collection is a collaboration between Monáe and several writers known for their work in speculative fiction and science fiction, including Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore and Sheree Renée Thomas. By nature, anthology collections, with the ink of so many different pens on them, can feel incohesive and messy. It is a credit to the editors and Monáe’s strong vision that the collection does not fall at that first hurdle. If anything, the varied voices play into the book’s concept, dipping in and out of different characters and worldviews to paint a larger picture of the impact of the all-seeing authoritarian state, New Dawn.
In the era of New Dawn, difference is a crime. Technology is weaponized to watch a citizen’s every move, and memory is treated as a threat to the new order and wiped clean with the drug Nevermind. The allegories to our modernday fears of technology’s dominance in our lives and the many ways history is rewritten to benefit those in power are evident throughout the text. As with her album “Dirty Computer,” which Monáe told Rolling Stone was for young, marginalized people, “The Memory Librarian” is fixated on that same audience - a reminder for those who’ve ever been told they don’t fit in that there’s a world beyond this harsh one and a set of tools that can help them get there.
In the first story, “The Memory Librarian” (which Monáe co-wrote with Johnson), we are introduced to Seshet, the Director Librarian of a city called Little Delta and a rare Black face in the upper echelons of New Dawn who presides over its authoritarian regime by day, cracking down on Doc Young and his illegal street remixes of Nevermind. At night, she seeks out the thrill of life beyond the rules and, after meeting her transgender girlfriend Alethia 56934 at a dive bar, Seshet begins to uncover more of her past before she became the “queen of the white city.”
Even those who have escaped the regimented world of New Dawn remain haunted by the horrors they witnessed, as evidenced in the story “Nevermind,” co-written with Lore, which follows the rebellious Jane 57821, who broke free from the regime when she chose to remember. Now hiding out in the Pynk Hotel, an-all female commune in the desert, Jane battles against being taken over by memories of her old life and the threat of being found by New Dawn. The women convene in groups called “chords” and are portrayed as radical, freethinking artists just like many of the other protagonists throughout the anthology. In this world, artists, musicians, painters, designers are the physical embodiments of freedom and conversely are treated with suspicion by the regime.