Ibi Zoboi: Always Magic
IBI AANU ZOBOI was born was born Pascale Philantrope in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 22, 1977. She grew up in New York City, and now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children; she legally changed her name after marriage.
Zoboi attended Clarion West in 2001. She also attended a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation workshop in 2011, and earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2014. She has extensive experience as an educator, running community-based programs for teen girls in Brooklyn NY and Haiti, and working as a writer-in-residence and teaching artist in New York City public schools.
She has written in a variety of genres, mostly for children and young adults. Some of her short stories, including “ Old Flesh Song” (2004), “The Fire in Your Sky” (2011), “The Muralist” (2012), “The Farming of Gods” (2013), and “Kiss the Sun” (2020), appeared in genre anthologies.
Her debut YA novel American Street appeared in 2017 and was a National Book Award finalist. Other YA titles include Pride (2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice; and Coretta Scott King Author Award winner Nigeria Jones (2023).
Her middle-grade books include novel My Life as an Ice-Cream Sandwich (2019) and non-fiction volume Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler (2022).
Picture book The People Remember is illustrated by Loveis Wise (2021). She co-wrote Yoto Carnegie Medal finalist Punching the Air (2020) with Yusef Salaam, and edited Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (2019). She also wrote Black Panther tie-in novel Okoye to the People (2022) for Marvel.
Zoboi’s newest book, (S)Kin, is a contemporary fantasy novel in verse.
Excerpt from the interview:
“I have a novel in verse coming out, (S)Kin. Nalo Hopkinson first started writing about soucouyant in Skin Folk, her collection of short stories, but that wasn’t the first time I heard about the soucouyant, who looks like an old woman in the day but turns into a fireball at night. In Haiti, we have the lougawou, which is like a French werewolf, le loup garou, but in Haiti, it’s a catchall term for any sort of shapeshifter, and it’s usually a woman. Edwidge Danticat has written about the lougawou, but not in a speculative way, more in terms of a person who’s accused of being one. In wanting to write speculative fiction based on Haitian folklore and mythology, I had so much to choose from. I have actual Vodou, and I have the folklore of Haiti. Lougawou, shapeshifters, turning somebody into a cat. There’s so much there. But I first wrote about Old Hag in Sheree Thomas’s anthology Dark Matter: Reading the Bones in 2004. Before that came Dark Matter, the first volume, and that was groundbreaking. It’s one of those books that I think people should still be talking about because it was the first of its kind. It has short stories by W.E.B. Du Bois and an original story by Octavia Butler. Thomas brought all these people together to say, ‘We write science fiction and fantasy.’ I was in the sequel with a story called ‘Old Flesh Song’, about a sort of vampire nanny figure. I have revisited that figure over and over again in different short stories, until I started writing about it in novel form when I did my MFA program.
“The book was first called Skin Sisters and then turned into (S)Kin. The novel was my graduate thesis for my MFA program over ten years ago. I always knew I would come back to the story, and luckily my editor liked it. I knew I’d have to rewrite this whole thing, but I wanted try to pare it down to its bones, so I started doing it in poetry. The poetry worked because I’m able to pull from Caribbean storytelling and vernacular. I decided to try a fantasy novel in verse and see how it works. To play with word placement, to play with rhythm and musicality and metaphors with this story about two girls who have inherited a certain kind of magic. This book is ten years in the making, but I have been exploring this aspect of Haitian folklore and Caribbean folklore for my entire writing career.
“The challenges between writing a novel in prose or in verse are vastly different. You need to have the mind and the soul to be able to pull that off. By the mind, I mean you have to think symbolically. I’m always thinking symbolically and making connections to things that are seemingly disconnected. You’ve got to think musically, too. Haitian Creole is very musical – it can sound harsh, but it’s musical. My husband is half Trinidadian, and it is the most sing-songy language; there’s music to it. You have to hear the music in the language and you have to take the English words and make them musical. You play with the words on the page. You play with white space. You play with the movement of the words. There are so many things going on at once, and also, you’re writing a magical system.
“What worked for me is that I had lived in this world for a very long time. It’s a reality-based story, but I have been imagining how a girl or woman will physically shift out of her skin to become a ball of flame. I described that in a paragraph before, but to do it in poetry is much more powerful. I want to believe that I got the imagery across and I got the emotion across. It’s a painful process, but the metaphors work to my benefit. You have to pull on the metaphor in writing a novel in verse. It’s been done before in different ways – read Edgar Allan Poe poetry, or read horror poetry. Strange Horizons used to publish science fiction poetry. You can see how others have done it, maybe not in novel form, but it’s been done before in short form.
“The character Marisol has newly arrived with her mother from the islands, and I don’t name the island that she comes from, because what people sometimes forget is that migrants can travel from island to island. There are Haitians in Cuba. There are Haitians in Jamaica, Haitians in the Dominican Republic. There are Haitians in the surrounding islands. There are people from other islands in Haiti doing business. Usually the migration happens within the islands, so they’re just from the islands. It’s just Marisol and her mother, and what you know about her is that she’s dark-skinned with short hair. And there is something powerful about her dark skin that allows her to be that much more powerful as a soucouyant.
“The other character, Genevieve, lives with her white father, her white stepmom, and two new twins who are her half siblings. She has a skin condition. She knows her mother is a Black woman because she is mixed race, so I am playing on this idea of skin colorism.
“When you think about the American dream, you’re thinking about a better life. There’s this girl, Marisol, who wants a better life. Her mother wants a better life. She crosses paths with Genevieve, and sees what a better life looks like – at every stage and from every angle, she wants that better life for herself. So the story ensues.
“I don’t think we have enough conversations about the power of pretty privilege, and pretty politics in the immigrant narrative. What does upward mobility look like for different people, and who has access to upward mobility? (S)Kin is a magical story, and a fantasy story, but if we had certain powers, what more could we desire with those powers? How much of our strengths do we use just for survival, and how much of those strengths do we use to do more than survive – to actually thrive in a society that is capitalistic, and where you can have more than what you desire, and more than what you need?
“The other part of the book is sex tourism. I don’t touch on that a lot, but Marisol came from working at resorts with her mother. That is how she was able to make a living. That is me going to the Caribbean, where the Caribbean relies on tourism. Tourism is not just at the resorts – it is having other people come and living their best life in the middle of your life. There’s a quote that says that others build their heaven on your land, and tell you your heaven is in the sky. If I could have put that quote somewhere in the book, I would have.
“Marisol is looking for that piece of heaven, but can she have it with what she’s been given in this life? With the way she looks, and the powers that she has? At home, she is called a monster, and in this new home, she might be called a monster, too, if she doesn’t take certain matters into her own hands. The core is the privilege of upward mobility in the immigrant narrative.
“A social justice-themed story does not have to be reality based. You can still write about social issues in the speculative fiction space, and have it set in the real world. The neighborhood this book is set in is a very real neighborhood. The school that they go to is very real. The issues are very real, but the magic is not.
Interview design by Francesca Myman
Read the full interview in the February 2025 issue of Locus.
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