Akwaeke Emezi on "Pet" and on Making a Better World for Their Protagonist, a Black Trans Girl Named Jam
“How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?”
This is one of the central questions of Pet, the first YA novel by Akwaeke Emezi, who gained major recognition for their debut novel Freshwater. Their first foray into YA takes place in the utopian city of Lucille during a time where there are no monsters — at least, that’s what adults keep on telling the younger people. Jam, the book’s protagonist, starts questioning what she’s been taught after a creature named Pet emerges from a painting and warns of a monster putting her friend Redemption in danger.
“Step one of making a new world is that you have to be able to imagine it. I think sometimes that's where the storytellers come in,” Akwaeke tells Teen Vogue. “Some people might have difficulty imagining a world where black trans kids are safe, where there are no police, where there are no prisons. So books kind of help you. Or Pet, in this case, can help create that window of possibility. If you can imagine it, that's the first step in making it happen.”
Teen Vogue recently chatted with Akwaeke about their inspiration behind Pet, bringing to life a protagonist who is a young black trans girl, and more. Spoilers below.
Teen Vogue: Following the success of Freshwater, what did you want to achieve with Pet?
Akwaeke Emezi: Chris Meyers, who runs the Make Me a World imprint, had given me a couple of guidelines because he's got like 25 years of experience writing for kids, and I do not. He said, “write a book that you would have liked to read when you were a young person, like when you were in your teens.” I found that to be a really useful guideline, and I was kind of thinking of, well, what's it like to be a young person nowadays? I grew up in Nigeria mostly under a military dictatorship, very different from being here. But one of the things that I liked about growing up back home is that everyone's very blatant about what's happening. Like when the government's trying to kill you, the government's trying to kill you.
Pet, so far, is my most American book, it's set in America, it's about America. Here, people aren’t really acknowledging what was happening around us, they’re not really looking directly at things. So I wanted to tell a story where a young person is in the middle of that, being challenged to look directly at a problem without the support of the other people around her and as a young person, how do you deal with the problem if no one else will look at it.
TV: When you were building out the friendship of Jam and Redemption, how did you want to portray that connection?
AE: I wanted them to have a super wholesome friendship. In terms of the world that was built, that was more futuristic, so it's not actually what the world is like today. [People like Jam and Redemption] exist now, but the world that they are living in is different. With Jam, what does it look like for a black trans girl to have this really wholesome, protective friendship with a black cis boy. And I'm only realizing that no one's ever asked me about their friendship before, and I just kind of put them together 'cause they felt right, but just looking around at what's happening in the world today, it's like, the main people who are killing black trans women are black cis men. I wasn't trying to make a statement with their friendship in that way, but just when you asked that question I'm looking back and I'm just like, oh, this is a wholesome future. This is the kind of future where she can be loved by someone who, perhaps, in a worse and different life, would have tried to hurt her. I also wanted to write a book that wasn't about black trans people dying, because I feel like that's so much of when people pay attention to black trans women. I was like, let me give Jam a life where that's not even a risk for her. A better world.
TV: What made you want to play with all these religious themes?
AE: I was raised Catholic as f*ck. My mom's family is so hardcore Catholic that my mom has aunts who are Carmelite nuns, still today. I considered being a nun when I was a kid, and then they told me I couldn't wear nail polish, and I was like whoa, you have gone too far. Like, married to Jesus? Cool. No nail polish? Y'all are wildin’. But my grandmother's brother was the first brown priest in Malaysia and then he became the first brown bishop. I'm not Catholic anymore, but there's just so much of it that I grew up with and I was very interested in mythology in general. I was the kid who was reading the encyclopedia in high school because I wanted to figure out how every single Greek god was connected to everyone else. I was like, y'all have some of the best drama I have ever read about!
TV: How did you create the world of Lucille?
AE: Lucille as a town was based on all these towns that Toni Morrison used to write in her books, where you have a town that is like a little world unto itself. So when I was writing this up, like oh, let me write this black town that is just its own world and put everyone in there. Redemption's family is black American, Jam's family is West African and West Indian, [so you have] all the Africans continental and diasporic living together in one little quasi-utopian town.
TV: Pet is described as a creature with a ram's horns, metallic feathers, and metal claws. What were you inspired by when it came to creating Pet?
AE: Pet is actually an angel. It's not revealed until the end of the book and that's kind of like one of the twists. The religious imagery that's introduced pretty early in the book is really signaling this. There’s this idea that angels are people wearing white with halos and white wings. Then if you read the Bible and the angels are described as having wings full of eyes and multiple heads on fire. They're really terrifying things to look at. They're not at all what humans have kind of made them out to be. So that was one of the themes of the book, so to speak, was what does an angel look like, what does a monster look like. And kind of turning those upside down and inside out.
Related: Raven's Makeover Transformed the Beloved Superhero Into a Fashionable Young Teen
Check this out:
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
