I've wanted to repost on Facebook this illustration (by the awesome
Ross Campbell) of my windseeker character, Arro-yo for some time. However, when I first posted it there, Facebook removed it within minutes and I received a warning about posting "pornographic" photos on my page and a threat that my page would be removed if I did it again.
Arro-yo is cold, rebellious, very tall and kind of mean. She was born in the early 1900s in a forest village in Nigeria's Cross River State. She is dada (born with locked hair) and this leads her to be set aside- unlike her older sisters, she isn't circumcised, sent to the fattening hut or married off. When she grows older, she also comes to understand that she's a windseeker (one of the people who can fly). But this is the tip of the iceberg, because Arro-yo is also born during a dynamic time in Nigeria's history. You'll have to read the stoires iun
Kabu Kabu to find out more.
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| An Efik girl in Old Calabar, Nigeria (1918) |
The above photo is the inspiration for Arro-yo's attire and it should explain Arro-yo's
toplessness. It's unfortunate that Facebook did not understand this fact.
There are four Arro-yo stories in my recently released short story collection
Kabu Kabu- "Biafra", "How Inyang Got Her Wings", "The Winds of Harmatten" and "Windseekers". All were mined from an unpublished adult novel I wrote called
The Legend of Arro-yo (My agent shopped this novel to several publishers. However, though fantasy publishers loved it, they said it was was too literary and though "literary" publishers loved it, they said it was too fantastical. I wrote
Zahrah the Windseeker as
The Legend of Arro-yo was getting batted around).
Though the
Legend of Arro-yo hasn't been published (yet), the short stories I took from it have been better received. "Windseekers" was a finalist for the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002 and published in the anthology. "The Winds of Harmatten" was published in Stanford University's
Black Arts Quarterly in 2003 and reprinted in Nalo Hopkinson's
Mojo Conjure Stories anthology in 2005. "Biafra" won the The Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism Short Story Contest in 2005.
How Inyang Got Her Wings was a finalist for the The Equiano Prize for Short Fiction in 2006. Another Arro-yo story ("It's War!") will appear in the forthcoming anthology
Long Hidden.Arro-yo is a very special character to me. In many way, she is the beginning. I started writing her with seriousness while at the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University in 2000. I'd written the short story "Windseekers" (most of my novels start off as short stories) and then discovered Octavia Butler's work in the bookstore days later.
Wild Seed. Reading that novel verified my suspicion that I was on the right track. After getting to know Anyanwu (one of the main characters of
Wild Seed), Arro-yo's meanness didn't bother me so much.
