Window to ‘wisdom, power and glory’
“What I want people to take away from the book is ... Africa and African people are absolutely beautiful.” Afrofuturistic sci-fi novel aims to encourage curiosity
When a passion stays on your mind, you have two options: ignore it or give it a try. An author’s passion can release a whole new world for readers to open their minds to different cultures, and utopias that didn’t exist before.
It took Denise Crittendon more than eight years to finish her now-published novel, “Where it Rains in Color.” It was released in December 2022. The novel focuses on characters in an Afrofuturistic world who embark on a journey to find a cure after one of them falls ill while also indulging in the beauty of a made-up society with African roots. The book picks up the mythology of the Dogon tribe of Mali in West Africa.
“What I want people to take away from the book is ... Africa and African people are absolutely beautiful,” Crittendon said. “That our African culture, I think, is often overlooked; is filled with wisdom, power and glory; is such a rich and fascinating culture. I want people to develop more appreciation for African society, more of a curiosity.”
Crittendon spent 15 years at the Detroit News after she graduated from Michigan State University. She left the paper in 1993, then moved on to become the first woman to be appointed the editor of the NAACP’s national magazine, t he Crisis, which was founded in 1914 by W.E.B. Dubois.
“I thought to myself, ‘I think this is it,’” Crittendon said. “I don’t think I’m going to go back to journalism. I’m going to pursue a career writing novels. I’ve been having dreams all of my life, of creative dreams, imaginative dreams, and dreams of other worlds, and I was anxious to put them on paper.”
Before she dove into Afrofuturism, she wrote a couple of guidebooks for youth empowerment. The two books, “Life Is a Party That Comes with Exams” and “Girl in the Mirror: A Teen’s Guide to Self-Awareness,” were manuals that focus on character development, self-esteem, and self-empowerment for preteen and teenage girls. She wrote the books in 1996 when she came back to Detroit. After volunteering at Vista Maria in Dearborn, which is a home for young women in need, she discovered that there were no self-help guidebooks for teenage girls.
“Amazon wasn’t as popular back then, so I just went to bookstore after bookstore and couldn’t believe that there were countless motivational books, self-help books, self-improvement books, but they were all for adults,” she said. “So I decided, ‘Well, maybe the world needs this more than it needs another sci-fi novel at the moment.’ I shifted gears and focused on that, and I wrote ‘Girl in the Mirror,’ a teen’s guide to self-awareness, and it was specifically with the girls at Vista Maria in mind, but also other girls who might be looking for a resource.”
She also was the founding editor of African American Family Magazine, now known as
BLAC, which served as a lifestyle magazine for Black families in Detroit.
“When you’re doing a start-up, you’re creating something from the ground up that does not exist,” she said. “It is all-consuming. I literally had to think, drink, sleep that magazine. It took all of my time, all of my energy.”
She left the magazine in 2008 and began teaching English at Wayne County Community College and also taught writing as an adjunct professor in the journalism department at Wayne State University. In addition, she was doing a bit of ghostwriting here and there.
With these new gigs, she also gained some free time. “I pulled out this skeleton novel that I had from way back when,” she said. “I dusted it off. It was in a drawer and said, ‘Now, I have the time.’ It just was just haunting me.
“Starting with this blank slate, I found it exciting . ... One of my favorite quotes is, ‘The past may be stained, but the future is absolutely spotless.’ As artists, we have this blank canvas, and we have the paintbrush, and we can paint anything we want and that’s the way I felt. I was just thrilled.”
Crittendon created “Swazembi,” a color-blazed utopia, and the vacation center of the galaxy. It’s a peace-loving world that’s home to waterless seas and filled with neon vapors where tourists and residents soar from place to place in a swift wind force called the “the Sweep.”
“The residents use an expression called ‘waves of joy,’” she said. “That’s the way they treat one another, and if they’re teasing one another or if someone is jealous of another person, they call it stealing.”
The protagonist of the book, 50-year-old Lileala, receives the title of Rare Indigo because of her radiance, but eventually falls into trouble once she’s infected with a disease that leads her on a journey of trying to get cured. The character then starts to make discoveries about the galaxy and her life, and finds new powers as she attempts to cure herself.
“Afrofuturism projects people of African descent into a future,” she said. “It can be grandiose. In some cases, it’s not grandiose, but the bottom line, it claims a space for people of African descent . ... If we leave it up to others, we could get left behind. When you write Afrofuturism, you borrow a little bit from the past, from our history, and from present-day reality, and you carve out another reality for us and the years to come.”
Crittendon, who travels back and forth between Detroit and Las Vegas, returned to the Motor City last month for multiple signings, including one at the Charles H. Wright Museum.
“It was important to me to have the signing at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History because it reflects our history,” she said.
Crittendon hopes to write a young adult novel and possibly a sequel to “When it Rains in Color,” which is available at many booksellers, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.