SHAY:

Happy new episode today of How to Humanist. I'm your host, Shay Leonia, on behalf of the American Humanist Association. We're getting ready for our conference, everyone, so be sure to tune in to conference.americanhumanist.org to grab your tickets.

In the meantime, I would love to introduce you to today's guest because today, as I'm recording this, is her birthday. So happy birthday, Jordan Ifueko. Jordan, in case you aren't familiar with her work, is the New York Times bestselling author of The Raybearer series and the Disney Marvel comics Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. She's been featured in People magazine and NPR Best Books. She writes about magic Black girls who aren't magic all the time because honestly, they deserve a vacation.

Follow Jordan on Instagram @jordifueko. I will put that information for you in the show notes, and tune into the episode, and I hope you enjoy.

SHAY:

So you just met Jake, our organizing director.

JORDAN:

That was so fun.

SHAY:

Sunday Assembly, it was so cool.

JORDAN:

Do you frequently attend Sunday Assembly? Because that was my first Sunday Assembly thing ever. I haven't even been to the normal Sunday Assembly sessions, but I'd been meaning to 'cause I heard of the concept. You deconvert from religion, and you're looking for some place that still provides some of those communal experiences. So I joined the mailing list years ago and didn't get around to going to anything until they announced that the global Sunday Assembly conference this year would be in Atlanta. So I was like, "That sounds like a sign. I'll go to the conference." And then it was great.

SHAY:

Oh, so it was a conference.

JORDAN:

It was, yes.

SHAY:

Got it. That is so cool. I'm still learning how to reckon with the humanist approach to things that are such a strong coincidence. I just think it was so cool, 'cause when Jake was like, "Look who I'm with," I'm like, "Shut up, I am supposed to be interviewing her on Monday. This is too cool."

So yeah. I wanna talk about everything with you because I'm struggling to know where to start. So let me just start where you were just talking about deconstructing.

JORDAN:

Yes.

SHAY:

Okay, so you grew up not just Christian, but first generation Nigerian immigrant parents Christian, right?

JORDAN:

Yes. And it was kind of almost a fundamentalist thing from both sides. So I have two Nigerian, like, born and raised Nigeria grandparents on my dad's side, he was raised there, immigrated here. On my mom's side, her dad is the same way, Nigerian, but her mom is Black American, and also extremely Pentecostal Black American religious. So it's like my dad's Nigerian, my mom's like half Nigerian, half Black American, and on both sides it's this intense loyalty to Abrahamic religion.

I'm not just saying Christian on purpose. So Nigeria is about just 50/50 split, half Muslim, half Christianity. We were not raised Muslim, but that's still very much there in the culture. And then American evangelicalism, the more you get into the right-wing weeds, the more you're gonna run into Zionism and also something called Messianic Judaism, which is basically like, we identify as practicing Jewish people, but we believe that Jesus is the Messiah.

And there's a lot of that, and that movement gained so much traction in the '90s and 2000s. There was a trend of evangelical Christians, and it's still there, adopting all of these Jewish customs and Christianizing them. Which is a long way of saying that all three of the children in my family, including me, my brother, and my sister, were all given bar and bat mitzvahs and required to literally learn Hebrew and stuff from the Torah. Even though we were Christians and stuff, we did Seders, but it was a Christianized version of it.

So when I say I've dipped in experience in Abrahamic religion, I mean I've collected the Infinity Stones is basically...

But I've always been kind of a rabble-rouser even when I was devoted in these religions, because I've always been kind of a hard sell on the patriarchy. But what that meant is for years I was one of what you'd call a Jesus feminist. Like, oh, it's not that Christianity and the Bible isn't true, it's that if anybody somehow reads this Bronze Age text full of really weird stuff about women and children, they're reading it wrong. 'Cause actually it's not misogynist. With enough cultural massaging they aren't really saying that women are worth less, they aren't really saying that women are more sinful, they aren't really saying fill in the blank.

So I was there for a long time until finally the pillars crumbled, slowly at first and then very quickly, and I deconverted from Abrahamic religion of any kind.

SHAY:

What led to the crumbling?

JORDAN:

Oh, it's so hard to even know where to begin.

I will say a big one, a really, really big one is my relationship to authoritarianism. As my sense of what a healthy family dynamic is matured into one that was very pro children's rights, pro with more power comes more responsibility and accountability, that kind of thing, the less compatible I was with Abrahamic religion.

Because of course at its core, Abrahamic religion, even the progressive strains, largely imply that God cannot possibly be responsible for suffering despite being the one who caused everything to start, right? It's like the inverse of with great power comes great responsibility. It's like with the greatest power comes no responsibility. It's like the biggest anti-accountability for power religion system there is.

Because no matter how progressive you are, generally if you're gonna be cool with worshiping someone who doesn't intervene when a child is being horrifically attacked, and you're going to absolve them of any responsibility to intervene in a way that you would never absolve yourself, that comes down to an authoritarian way of thinking. It's like because he is God, he is not responsible, which is a sweeter way of saying because he's the most powerful being, he isn't responsible. And that's just really incompatible with any truly anti-authoritarian worldview that you can come up with.

When I realized that children are owed things by their parents rather than children should be grateful that their parents forced them into existence, once your mind flips on that, it's hard to think, if we'd all agree that children are owed food and shelter by their parents because their parents forced them into existence, why wouldn't we think humans are owed food and shelter from the being who on an even more significant level forced us into existence?

[SHAY interjects: Okay, one of the best examples that I can think of as Jordan was talking about this is one of my favorite movies, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's a classic movie with Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and I implore you to watch it because I'm not gonna do this monologue justice, but I just want you to hear the words that Sidney Poitier says to his father in one of the scenes where he's very impassioned about his father acting like he owes him something.

Okay so, son to father, this is what Sidney Poitier says: "You listen to me. You listen to me. You say you don't wanna tell me how to live my life. So what do you think you've been doing? You tell me what rights I've got or haven't got and what I owe you for what you've done for me. Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing. If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you were supposed to do because you brought me into this world. And from that day, you owed me everything you could ever do for me, like I will owe my son if I ever have another. But you don't own me. You can't tell me when or where I'm out of line or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don't even know what I am, Dad. You don't know who I am. You don't know how I feel, what I think, and if I tried to explain it the rest of your life, you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way that it was for you is the way it's got to be, and not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs. You understand? You've got to get off my back."

That movie is so good.]

JORDAN:

Once you start really putting your allegiance with the least powerful and the marginalized, it is very hard to stand in a building and worship something with ultimate power who is doing not enough, or at least who is not helping to the extent of its abilities. So that was probably the biggest one.

But there were lots of other very major ones that led to that just finally crumbling after years of very, very devoted faith. Like I was literally on the board of my last church. I was in it, I was in it. That's kind of the CliffsNotes, but there are all sorts of side quests and addendums I could add for sure.

SHAY:

Okay, so did I hear you correctly in the beginning saying that your last standing Abrahamic association was pretty much Messianic Judaism?

JORDAN:

No. That ended pretty much when I was an older teenager. Like, the moment I could get out of my parents' house... I always thought that was cringe, if I'm honest with you. But when you're a kid and you really, really try and submit to the authority you are raised under, you really try and make it work in your mind. But pretty much literally the second I wasn't living there anymore, so I went to college when I was 15, 16-ish, I didn't pursue that in any way. That was something my parents were really into. But I was still very much an evangelical Christian when I moved out at 16 to go to college.

SHAY:

Can I ask you what was so cringe about the Messianic Judaism part? Just because you might heal something in me, and I'll tell you in a moment why.

JORDAN:

Well, I mean, at the end of the day, it was just like, "Hey, so we're obviously not Jewish. Why do we have a menorah?" The way it was explained, it was like, the Jewish people are God's chosen people, but Christianity is what's actually true, and so it's almost like we've been grafted onto the branches of God's chosen people, so we're really them too now somehow. But also, they are still the most important, which is why politically we must put all our allegiance with the Zionist state.

There was just a lot going on there. And a lot of people will think that the whole Zionist discourse is somewhat new, but it's not. It's been there for like decades and decades. So as a child and a teenager, I was very much not really abreast of the actual political motivation behind all of this, the political put a US post in the Middle East kind of motivation. I thought this was all just some kind of theological discussion because of the Bible and God's chosen people and all this stuff.

But yeah, in terms of it being cringe, I wasn't like a dumb 13 and 14-year-old. I was just like, I really am having a hard time seeing how these traditions have anything to do with me. But you have told me that I get to have a cool party if I'm 13. And yes, it's going to be chock-full of really creepy imagery having to do with my purity and stuff, and you're gonna talk about that in front of all my friends, but I guess it's cool I get to wear this dress and I get to pick out a cake.

But yeah, how... I hope that was healing for you.

SHAY:

You truly have no idea. Okay. So you are the first person who has ever said to me what I experienced, in a much different fashion obviously, but when I was in, I wanna say fifth grade, you know, I had grown up in a Reform Jewish family. And my mom was always wanting to be a quote-unquote "better Jew." And then she got sick. My father ends up coming home one day and poof, he's a Messianic Jew.

JORDAN:

Wow.

SHAY:

He was like, telling all of us, including me, I was probably less than 10 years old at the time, like, "You're gonna burn in hell unless you allow yourself to be saved by Jesus." And I was just like, "What? What are you talking about? Are you a Jew for Jesus? What is this?" So yeah, I didn't understand at that point. I was clever enough despite not being an academic to recognize when something just doesn't add up. It's kinda like gays for Trump. It just doesn't make sense. So yeah, this has actually been quite healing for me. I mean, I hate that you had to go through that, but just for the first time in all of my life to hear somebody say back that they know what that was.

JORDAN:

I just wish you didn't have to go through it.

SHAY:

Yeah. It's interesting because it would've been such a common phrase in the circles that I was in growing up. My parents were and are not only conservative, but I was homeschooled, and the only reason I got to go to school at all at 13 is because I begged and did all the research myself and tried to find the most super Christian-y private school that my parents might approve of. That's why I got to darken the doors of regular classroom attendance as a child, is because I did that. I realized I was slipping through the cracks. I would be behind if I didn't get to actually go to a school.

But what I'm getting at there is I didn't know how both fringe and common these movements were. On one hand, they are fringe, right? You know, most people who would say, "Yeah, sure, I grew up Christian," it wouldn't have been that. We had the Messianic Jewish stuff. We had the spiritual gifts and demon obsession stuff in my church, and the praying in tongues stuff in my church. Like, Jesus Camp could have been filmed at my church, that famous documentary. We, in fact, had the woman who ran Jesus Camp come and be a honored guest speaker at our church when I was a kid.

But it's interesting because when I tell people that, they're like, "Oh, basically you grew up in a cult." And I'm like, yes and no. Cultish in that yes, it was insane, and yes, it was fringe. But knowing that this is way more common in American Christian culture than anyone who didn't grow up in it would be comfortable finding out. That's why I push back at the idea of it being fringe, just because I think it's really important to acknowledge how these people exist in the US in the hundreds of thousands. And they are directly influencing politics and media. And so the crazier and weirder it sounds to you, the more you should be upset, because these churches didn't look obviously culty from the outside. They looked like the kind of nondenominational church, which a lot of the time is just Baptist with a better graphic designer. It didn't look like it was some fringe thing pushing really strange, radical ideas on children in the thousands.

SHAY:

This is all news to me because I had read that you had grown up Christian, and when I knew that you were Nigerian I was just like, oh. 'Cause I've been to a Nigerian wedding and it was all about how is this couple coming together to further serve God's plan. It's all about that. Nothing to do with one another.

JORDAN:

It all about that. Yeah. I've been to a number of weddings after I deconverted, and it's one of those things you don't see until you're out of it. It was just like, oh, so basically now every single milestone event you have been encouraged to make not about you and your life and even your accomplishments. Even your birthday. You gotta pray and thank God for having the compassion to let you survive at all.

Like, once you're out of that, it's just like, that's such a weird thing to thank your dad about. Like, "Hey, Dad, thanks that I'm not dead. You could've struck me down at any moment. You could have let the forces of darkness take me, and you didn't and I don't deserve it. Thank you. Anyway, I'm gonna blow out my candles." Like, once you're out of it, you're like, "This is an insane way to think about love and authority." Like truly insane.

But yeah, that's what these traditions do. Every ritual you are encouraged to make it about the ultimate power that is having the mercy to not let you die terribly and suffer and stuff.

SHAY:

That's so... Because I have, where is it, yeah, I have Chidera's book with all of the, I believe it's Yoruba, the phrases like... And I was reading all of the interesting phrases that she has, and I mean, there are some sayings that I absolutely adored. "When you warn the ear it doesn't listen, but when you cut the head the ear follows." Like, stuff like that, that's like Nigerians have bars.

JORDAN:

Oh, they really do. They really do. Absolutely.

SHAY:

But yeah, the thanking the dad after the candles thing. Okay, so now that I'm hearing all you went through as a kid, is that what led you to want to be such a child advocate?

JORDAN:

Well, I wanted to be a child advocate because one of my caregivers was very abusive, physically and emotionally, and the other one was an enabler of that abuse. Growing up with that deep sense of injustice, I think it was very natural for me to end up going to be a children's and teens writer, of fiction for children and teens, because when you really look at the core of what makes a child or a teenager love a story, it's agency.

All of the most popular children's and teen stories are agency fantasies, whether that agency is, I get to live in a boarding school so I'm away from parents and I get to be more my own person, or I have magical powers. Most of these stories don't work unless the kid in some way has a severing from the caregivers that would otherwise be able to override all of their decisions.

And because I experienced that lack of agency with an additional experience of abuse, 'cause you know, children can not have agency and not be being abused. It's just like, "Yeah, sorry, you can't make decisions for yourself. You're a kid." But when there is abuse there, and when you have been forced to be so hypervigilant that you are tracking the moods of your caregiver to make sure that you get your needs met and you don't get abused, you will quickly surpass that caregiver in emotional intelligence and maturity because you have to keep track of them all the time.

And so for a little while, that abuse made me more prone to trying to lean into these authoritarian structures, because the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving parent who will make sure justice is served in the end, who knows what really happened, who knows that you weren't in the wrong and that the other person was, that's a very comforting thought.

So the idea that no, justice will never be done, it's just something that happened to you, and there's no overarching narrative of justice that will make it right in the end, that of course is extremely terrifying to think about as an abused teen and child. So you're gonna hold onto this idea that the world has an ordered narrative for as long as you possibly can.

And when you add on the added world injustices of me being a girl and dark-skinned and Black, the added horror of there never truly being a reckoning for everything that has happened will also make you lean more into those religions. Because again, the idea of there not being a proportionate justice reaction to everything that has happened ever, it's just something that happened and it sucked, and we have to figure out what to do now. It's horrifying. It's terrifying. It's enraging. It makes me want to scream forever and ever and ever.

So in one way, the things that eventually catapulted me out of Abrahamic religion are the things that kept me in it for longer. It's one of those weird contradictory things. But they're powerful.

And I think that's one of the reasons why it's actually pretty hard to find a Black American atheist. The idea that all of this stuff happened and nobody who was bigger and stronger and more loving was watching or caring is a horrifying thought. And so what do you do if that might be the case?

And yeah, that's why I'm pretty gentle on Black religious people, even as much as their behavior and how it can perpetuate these systems of authoritarianism and oppression, as much as that really frustrates me and saddens me, I know the narrative that would be extremely painful for them to give up. So I'm gentler there. You feel me?

SHAY:

It's, oh God, it's heartbreaking to hear you say that, first of all.

I think one of the things that I grapple with is the not the hierarchy, but like the capital letters and the lowercase letters of what I am going to selectively choose to advocate for myself around being a non-believer. And so some of those things are, somebody being like, "Oh, that's so Virgo of them." Like I let that shit go. I could care less.

But when somebody tells me, "Oh, well, everything happens for a reason," I instantly think of all the shit that's happened to me, happened to the ones that I love and care about, are happening to those that I don't even know around the world. And I'm just like, "But does it though? But does it?" And they're like, "Well, it made you who you are today." Yeah, but I could have done without it.

JORDAN:

Yeah. I could have... Maybe there's a version of events that could have been me without the crippling anxiety and depression. Like, that'd be nice. That kind of thing.

SHAY:

Yeah.

JORDAN:

It is hard to figure out where to push back because a lot of people, even if they didn't grow up in these Abrahamic religions or if they left these Abrahamic religions, they haven't really unraveled a lot of the toxic coping mindsets that allow these religions to kind of run rampant. Because what's behind all of these religions is a psychological need for reassurance about things that you cannot be certain about, like death and resource insecurity and meaning. And in-group, out-group reassurances that we are kind of hardwired to have as human beings. We get a lot of sense of security from belonging to an in-group and being safe from a perceived out-group. That's just the way our minds work.

There's no level of, oh, I was just born with the blessing of not having any of these Abrahamic religious influences. It's like you can't escape from in-group, out-group thinking. That's the way mammals work, unfortunately. We can overcome it and we can resist it and we can try and get a much healthier relationship with it, but as long as that's there, if you didn't deconstruct the reasons why these religions became so powerful, you are going to fall into those ways of thinking even if you have nothing to do with Christianity or Islam or Judaism.

Yeah. And I see that actually very commonly in a lot of what you'd call New Age thinking. And it's hard because a lot of those people would probably think that we have similar mindsets because they're very anti-Abrahamic religion, anti-organized religion and all this stuff. But the reason you're against those things matters.

If you're against them because they've perpetuated lots of bigotry, that's a really great reason, but it doesn't really get down to the reason they got there. The reason a lot of these religions ended up having so much bigotry against women and queer people and out-group people is because of the needs these religions were meeting in terms of reassurance of in-group, we'll be together, we'll be safe, our god is bigger, our god will defeat everybody else, our god will give us justice.

And once you look at that, you're like, okay, so a lot of these New Age movements in a way are doing something similar. And it's one of the most controversial things that I have said on the internet before.

I'm really anti a lot of manifestation talk, for example.

SHAY:

Oh, I can't stand manifestation talk.

JORDAN:

Now, there's one kind of manifestation talk that is somewhat reasonable, and because it's reasonable it gets used to mask the extremely harmful unreasonable stuff. There's manifestation in that if you tend to focus a lot on what you want to accomplish, it's easy for you to determine whether your actions are serving those goals or going against them. It's easier to stay positive. But all of this has to do with your own agency to actually do stuff.

But that quickly falls away when you realize a lot of manifestation talk is literally, if I have a positive enough mindset, I will attract to me the things that I want in the universe.

SHAY:

Oh, God. The Secret.

JORDAN:

Ugh. It's very much The Secret. A lot of sayings like that don't stand up to even a little bit of scrutiny. Like, when you push back you're like, "Okay, so when you say it's supposed to come to you, wouldn't that imply that everything that happens to someone was supposed to happen?" That's a really horrible thing to tell a child in Gaza. Or any child in an abused situation right now. And then there's immediate backpedaling. Like, "Oh, no, I didn't mean that." But they did. They just hadn't actually thought about it that far.

They hadn't thought about the wider implications besides I need immediate reassurance that what I'm going through is supposed to be happening, because the idea that I'm going through hard things that I don't deserve to go through and there's nothing I could have done to stop it is so terrifying, and I need to not feel that terror.

But the reason why it bugs me so much is that I think it actually is a big tool of authoritarian societies to make people think that their success and their security largely has to do with their attitude. And that's what it comes down to. Manifestation thinking, New Age thinking, all of this stuff actually is a really conservative way of thinking. It's bootstraps politics, but applied to your mind instead of the hours you're putting in at a job.

And I'm just like, no. I'm pretty sure if a lot of bad things are happening to you, it's not because you didn't stay in a positive enough mindset or acquire the right meditation tools. It's because you live in this country and this country has a vested interest in exploiting you. So the only way you're gonna get out of that is by organizing with other people, not by changing the way you positively respond to a situation with a certain kind of words and vocabulary.

And so yeah, I think a lot of it is connected. And I think that if you made all Abrahamic religion disappear from the US tomorrow, but you didn't get rid of what is behind US culture, which is a culture that was literally based on genocide and exploitation, you would come up with something almost exactly like it within 10 years. Because what's actually behind it is American culture and what it's based on, not necessarily anything super specific to these religions themselves. Although the religions themselves have things in them that make it really easy for it to get extreme, so I'm not absolving the religions at all.

SHAY:

Yeah. That's such a great parallel to draw. I hadn't even thought about that. 'Cause I remember when The Secret came out, I had read the book, I had watched the little film thing that they did, and I remember I was gonna practice manifesting a parking spot everywhere I go. That was one of the specific examples that was given, and I remember at the time I was so bought in. I was like, "Oh, if I didn't get the parking spot today, it's because I did it wrong."

JORDAN:

It's your fault immediately.

SHAY:

Yeah, or like I let some type of negative doubt seep into my brain at just the right moment to make it not come true. And yeah, I was buying into that for a hot second.

JORDAN:

Yeah. I mean, and it's really tempting, right? Because again, it is the ultimate agency fantasy. And you know, when I'm having a really spicy day I'll call it that immediately when someone says that. Just like, "Oh, you know, you just gotta keep a positive mindset and what the universe means for you will come to you," and I'll just literally be like, "Oh, yeah, I'm not super into agency fantasies."

Agency fantasies don't help me, and in fact sometimes I think they distract me from seeing what's actually in the way. Because I know for me the trigger is so close to the kind of things that Christianity does, where if you prayed for something you really needed, like healing or something, and you didn't get a response, it needed to be your fault somehow. It's either you didn't have enough faith, or God did answer, you're just too dim and myopically viewed to understand how He answered you. And how He wanted to get you healing in another area that was more important, and that's why He didn't help you with this debilitating health issue. Like, maybe something was more important, maybe there was a ministry opportunity that would come out of what you were going through, and you just had to be open to that. And so thank God actually that he did answer your prayer even though it looked like he didn't do anything.

It's too similar to the manifestation talk. And like you said, it causes a lot of self-blame, which is so sinister because the language used to promote it is such self-empowering language, when it's actually just encouraging you to essentially blame yourself for everything.

SHAY:

Which is so manipulative and abusive.

JORDAN:

Yeah. Exactly.

SHAY:

Oh my gosh. So how do you deal with upholding your boundaries now? 'Cause I saw the video where you were talking to your auntie about the book and about your distinguished acknowledgements around the book and the misunderstanding there. And it was so perfect because she ends it by saying praise the Lord anyway.

JORDAN:

Oh, yeah, no. All of my accomplishments are something God did. They're not me.

SHAY:

Yeah. Right.

JORDAN:

Yeah, I mean, a lot of my aunts and uncles and parents and even older evangelical friends, they're of a certain age where I'm like, I am so conscious of what they would have to give up to stop believing this stuff. Because I came out of this in my late 20s, and it almost destroyed me. Like it was literally like waking up from The Matrix and realizing that the entire way you have perceived the world, not only the world as it is, but the narrative of the world, that there isn't a narrative. Like that's the most ego death horrifying, just awful thing to happen. And if I could barely handle it in my late 20s, I don't think they could handle it in their old age. I think that it's something they need.

So the way I deal with it is just by kind of processing my own grief at it. I don't think it's helpful to try and talk them out of it. I think even if I could, it would result in something so devastating that I'm just like, "You're like 70. I don't know that I wanna do that to someone who is much closer to staring down the barrel of death than I am and who has watched their friends go."

'Cause you'd literally have to basically re-grieve every person you have ever known that died, because you had a narrative of knowing exactly where they went and what happened to them. And I'm just like, "Yeah, at your age you have watched so many of your loved ones pass, but if you decide to leave this, that will be something you do, 'cause I am not going to do that to you. That would be devastating for you."

I think the only time I put in some really firm boundary setting is when they try to really insist that something is a certain way in my life because of some religious force. Or even when I'm talking to New Age people who try and do the same thing with my life, I'll push back there too. They can talk all about their own lives and how this was the universe this, and this was supposed to happen this way. But if they say that about my life, that's when I'll push back. I'll be like, "Oh, no. I absolutely don't believe that, and I actually find that really harmful to think about that way, so I'm not going to."

You know, I've had some people try and police my language the way that Pentecostals used to. Like Pentecostals would say like, "Oh, don't say good luck. There's no such thing as luck. There's only the favor of God. Don't say 'I'm gonna do this,' because only if God wills it." It's all just a kind of speech obsession compulsive disorder, and I don't use that term lightly. I think that's literally what it is, where they feel this sense of dread if they don't use exactly the right words in the right order.

But that has also sometimes applied with manifestation people. I have literally said things like, "Oh my gosh, this next season's gonna kill me," and I've had someone freak out. Like, "No, no, it won't. It won't, actually." And I just said, "I'm comfortable with the words I used."

I'm just an author. Quite frankly, if the universe doesn't have the same grasp of emotional hyperbole that I do, if it thinks I meant that literally, then we're cooked. 'Cause that would mean I have a higher grasp of how language and hyperbole works than the universe does. And that sucks for everybody. The universe is worse at context in speech than I am. Then I don't trust the universe to take care of us.

SHAY:

Oh my gosh. So by the time that you deconstructed, I'm unfamiliar with the timeline because I'm only just now starting to collect.

[SHAY interjects: For what it's worth, the books that I was holding up of Jordan's are the famous Raybearer and The Maid and the Crocodile.]

SHAY:

I wanna talk about the dedication because you blew my mind with the dedication. But yeah, so post deconstruction, is that when you started writing?

JORDAN:

No. So I started writing Raybearer when I was 13, when I was in the sauce.

SHAY:

Stop it.

JORDAN:

And it got published when I was 26, and when I was 26, I was still a church-attending Christian, but I was going to very progressive churches at that point, and I no longer believed in the infallibility of the Bible. So I was definitely what you'd call a textbook progressive Christian. Didn't think anything wrong with being gay, very feminist and stuff.

So I would say the published iteration of Raybearer, the first book that came out in 2020, came out when I was very much what you'd call a Jesus feminist Christian. Like, I was literally doing COVID church, meeting up with my little progressive free Methodist church. We'd meet up online. And honestly, they're still wonderful. They're the kind of church where they're like, "You know, we're not gonna have service this Sunday 'cause we're gonna go canvas for rent control for the poor." Like those kind of people. Friends with them to this day.

But having said that, you can definitely see the difference in Jordan's still a Christian from Raybearer, to Jordan is a humanist by The Maid and the Crocodile. Like, it's there. It is undeniably there.

God is still in the acknowledgements at the end of Raybearer and Redemptor, even though my relationship with that God was rapidly changing. But yeah, by the time Maid and the Crocodile rolled around, that is when I was less interested in writing about an empress who had a pretty much divine gift of leadership inside her, and I was more interested in who is currently cleaning that empress's throne room. Why is her job less full of purpose, who is coming to save her? Who is coming to give her this big magical destiny?

Maid and the Crocodile is in the same world as Raybearer, but it is about a disabled teen domestic worker. And she has magical powers, but it's like, to change people's fates by cleaning their houses. And because she is disabled, and she was disabled in basically a mill accident because she was a child laborer, she has been told her whole life by authorities like priests that if she had just submitted a little bit more to the role she was supposed to have, she might have been spared these bad things happening.

And so that's the idea that I'm much more interested in exploring by the time we get to The Maid and the Crocodile.

I'm very proud of Raybearer and Redemptor. Reading them back, I can see the struggles I was going through even more clearly than I could at the time. It's funny how your own work can do that to you. And I'm really proud of my determination to focus on these issues of systemic injustice even while my brain was still trying to convince me as a person that it was okay that God wasn't intervening. Because those books are about how you must intervene. That's what those books are about.

And even then, the deity of the Raybearer world, there's a lot of them, but the kind of overarching one is called Am the Storyteller, and Am is a very direct reference to the way that the God of the Bible and of Abrahamic religion is referred to as Am that I Am, Am that I Was, Am that I Will Be. So even though it isn't an Abrahamic God, I was still very much attracted to this idea of an ever presence, which is why I named it Am.

But when your heroine, Tarisai's growth in Raybearer and Redemptor, is about how you must intervene, and the more power you are given, the more responsibility you have, even then, when she has these brief spiritual encounters with Am the Storyteller, it was glaring to me even as a writer, like, "Hey, Am, so why wouldn't Am just intervene instead of depending on the 17-year-olds?" Yeah, that's kinda shitty, Am, honestly.

And I don't answer that question in those books because I didn't have an answer for the question I had in real life.

So that's why by the time we get to The Maid and the Crocodile, our new protagonist, Small Sade, she's just like, "So gods are just there, and you can't depend on them for anything, and sometimes they're actually a nuisance, and you kinda just gotta keep them placated." So she treats them just kind of like really powerful neighbors that you have to try and not piss off and that you kinda hope will do you favors sometimes.

Which is interestingly a very Indigenous West African and Indigenous Native American way of thinking about deities and spirits. This idea of deities being like this exalted, perfect thing that is always right is very much not the way most people thought about gods or a god at the time. That was something Abrahamic religion brought to civilizations.

In some ways it was very helpful because that's a way of uniting a lot of trade routes. It's easier to unite a lot of different people groups under this banner rather than having to learn about the individual gods and priorities of different regions and stuff. I'm now talking about this just from a sociological and fantasy world building perspective. Like, "Oh, I can see why that religion would be useful to accomplish these ends."

But it's no coincidence that Small Sade, who has led a much less sheltered life than the protagonist of the first two books, would have an extremely pragmatic approach to the divine.

And then finally with my latest release, which is for my youngest audience ever, The Genie Game, it's just wholly like, "Hey, yeah, there's magic, but also this is like a capitalist hellscape dystopia. What are we gonna do about it? Maybe we'll have some hijinks on the way."

SHAY:

Not the hijinks.

JORDAN:

Yeah. I'm proud of The Genie Game, but I'm also very aware of the whiplash experience it would be for an adult. Kids have no problem putting together derpy hijinks with really high concept true things. But for an adult's experience of reading The Genie Game, it's literally like, "Wow, this is such an accurate depiction of corporate monopolies enslaving children and the populace. And now we're fighting fires with a boba truck and we're using milk tea and giant tapioca balls? Okay." Like yeah.

SHAY:

There was somebody that was commenting on Reddit, you had this brilliant response talking about the pressures that are put on somebody who is a Black sci-fi fantasy writer versus somebody like, you know, them, coming away from being asked like, "Oh, well why wasn't this educational?" Or in some way, shape, or form. And then you being held to that standard and other Black sci-fi writers being held to that standard.

JORDAN:

Absolutely. I think that's true on two fronts. Generally, if you are a Black or African-coded writer that is pitching to the majority white Western publishing industry, and that's the industry that has a monopoly on the world publishing industry, you are going to be expected to produce work that teaches white readers a lesson. Because the insidious, unspoken thing is basically, why would I want to read about an adventure regarding someone who doesn't look like me unless it was supposed to make me a better person?

Like, either I'm reading for indulgent reasons, in which case the heroine needs to be like a white girl that I can impose onto, or I need to be reading because I'm trying to better myself, in which case I don't wanna read about a Black girl falling in love and having fun. I wanna read about a Black girl experiencing systemic racism and oppression and stuff that I can learn from.

And the thing is, on one hand, I do think the majority races of these countries need to read about those issues because they are the ones perpetuating them. And they need to see what it's like to live under that. So that's very important. But on the other hand, so many of my own coming-of-age experiences and those of Black teens and Black women don't, are not primarily concerned with race. A lot of them are, but also a lot of them aren't.

Like, my mommy issues and how those come out in my books are not primarily because I'm Nigerian American, and in fact, because I wrote those mommy issues in such a visceral way, that's actually one of the things that has made Raybearer so relatable across cultural lines.

When Raybearer came out in Italian and they flew me out to Italy, I was astounded at how big the Raybearer books were getting in Italy. And my oldest reader, these are YA books, was a 90-year-old woman. She signed my jacket. She said her name was Nona Bruna. She didn't speak English. She sent her 19-year-old granddaughter to speak for her, and I thought the granddaughter was there for the books 'cause she's YA age, and she's like, "Oh, no, I haven't read your books. I'm just here 'cause my grandma wanted to come." And even this 90-year-old grandma was talking about how she related to Tarisai, the teen girl, in her relationship with her mother.

SHAY:

Oh, we're all still just little girls.

JORDAN:

Right, exactly. But the way that those books are marketed, you will see a lot of leaning into, "Oh, this will teach you so much about Nigerian and African traditions and stuff," when in fact the central Kingdoms of this empire of Raybearer are very West African coded, but it incorporates so many different cultures across this big Pangea continent. It incorporates Han Chinese culture and Joseon period Korean culture and South Asian culture and all of these different areas because at its core, I wasn't trying to write a primer for West African culture. I was trying to write a fantasy book. And when your fantasy book isn't coded vaguely European, you have a lot more freedom to do more stuff.

So it can feel stifling to understand that if you are invited to a panel to talk about your book, you will not be asked about plot structure and character development. You will be asked about misogyny and racism. That can get exhausting. 'Cause I got a whole degree in the craft of writing. I can talk to you about plot development and narrative structure until I'm blue in the face, but that's not the kind of stuff I'd be asked about in book circles. At least it wasn't for a long time. It's gotten a little better, but the pendulum's always swinging.

SHAY:

Yeah. Well, I guess so that gives me an opportunity to talk about this dedication that you have in Raybearer that just, just reading this alone I was like, "Fuck." You said, "For the kids scanning fairy tales for a hero with a face like theirs, and for the girls whose stories we compressed into pities and wonders, triumphs and cautions, without asking even once for their names." Holy shit.

JORDAN:

Thank you. So for all of my speechifying on like, oh my goodness, don't just ask me about capital I issues, obviously Raybearer does care very much about representation and about especially women and girls' issues.

One of the things that I love about the Raybearer books is that because they are set in a global empire ruled by dark-skinned people, the nature of race-based racism doesn't come up because this is not a world based on race exploitation. But I am extremely intentional in describing dark skin as not only beautiful, but as a default. It's not an othering thing. The way that the main character sees herself and her hair is never in the context of like, "Oh my goodness, I'm so different from white people," because she sees herself as somewhat of a default, and if anything kind of the privileged.

There's one line when you come to the capital of this empire where it's immediately explained that a blue blood is someone whose skin is so dark it's almost blue. The privileged people are people who are from these ancient West African-coded families, and they've always been so equatorial that now privilege is associated with having this dark skin. And I put it that way on purpose because I wanted at least one line to immediately tell the reader, which is going to be a lot of white readers, hey, whatever hierarchy of privilege that you are expecting when you come to a fantasy world, it's not that. It is something very different.

Also encoded in the language of Raybearer, you will never see anything negative associated with the words dark and black, because even that is passively white supremacist language. Black magic versus white magic, his heart was black, his face darkened, all of these things to show sinister and evil stuff. The what would usually be called black magic in the Raybearer books is called the pale arts because it drains things of life. Paleness is what happens when you drain the blood from something. When you literally drain something of its life force, it becomes pale.

SHAY:

I am totally adopting that and calling it pale arts from now on anytime I have the opportunity. That's perfect.

JORDAN:

Right? And I do that on purpose. It's cheeky, for sure, but I'm just like, hey, so if this makes you double take, like, why are you calling it the pale arts, how do you think I have felt for hundreds of years of literature?

SHAY:

Yeah. And if they think for two seconds... I mean, think about when you know your kid is sick. You're like, "Oh, honey, you look pale."

JORDAN:

Right. Like exactly. And I understand that darkness is the color of night and the unknown, but paleness is the color of bones and ash. There are negative and positive associations with all sorts of color scopes. And the consistent choice to make paleness and whiteness associated with everything good is, if not an intentional cultural choice, one with very specific origins that are not a coincidence.

So it's stuff like that I fight back with in the language of the Raybearer books, for sure.

But you know, the definite beating heart of the Raybearer books is that anti-patriarchal... you cannot condense women and girls into pities and wonders, which is, oh my goodness, she's a cautionary tale, and she's an example. It's just like, how about she's a person? And she is worthy of the same exaltation and nuance and criticism of a human because she's a human and not a role.

SHAY:

Yeah.

JORDAN:

So yeah. It's interesting because so many men who are trying to be feminist in their portrayals of female characters still have not advanced out of seeing women as roles in how they can support the character development of a man. It's one of my biggest criticisms of Christopher Nolan, actually. Like, I went and saw The Odyssey. I was like, "Oh, he's still doing this thing." I can tell he thinks these are strong portrayals of women, but every single one is a role.

SHAY:

Yeah, we have to get a little bit more specific with the Bechdel test.

JORDAN:

Oh, yeah. I don't think that movie passes the Bechdel test. I'm pretty sure every brief conversation between two women is about a dude. When they happen, which is rare.

And even Athena, he basically reduced Athena to a therapist for Odysseus. I'm just like, yeah, I'm pretty sure Athena didn't keep appearing to Odysseus to encourage him to really think about why he was running away. I think Athena appeared to Odysseus because she had goddess shit she was trying to get done, and Odysseus is the tool she was using. Like, I'm pretty sure that's actually how that worked. But it's okay.

SHAY:

Maybe next time, Nolan.

JORDAN:

Maybe.

SHAY:

I know that we're about to run out of time, but I have got to ask you because you're so fucking obnoxiously beautifully brilliant. I just have to ask you, what is the dumbest shit that you do?

JORDAN:

Oh. Oh my goodness. It's hard to pick an option 'cause when I'm not writing, my brain wants to do absolutely nothing.

SHAY:

Love it. Love it.

JORDAN:

Yeah. Is it really dumb? I'll sometimes play computer games that are just the most absolutely brainless. The one that I just finished is one about raising a princess, and she's your daughter, and you have to raise her charisma and stuff so she can be a knight. Because you can be a knight that fights things, or you can be a knight that is really pretty, and that's her power somehow. Just absolutely brainless.

SHAY:

I love that.

JORDAN:

But honestly, I haven't had a lot of time to do dumb stuff until recently. This is the first time in seven years that I haven't been actively on a book deadline. I just turned in either my sixth or seventh book, I'm trying to remember, a few months ago. I'll have to count and see.

But yeah, I do the doom scrolling like the best of us. Lots of that.

SHAY:

What's your favorite type of content to doom scroll?

JORDAN:

Oh. For a while I was really into the organization stuff until I realized that was giving me unrealistic expectations for how to conduct my life as someone who's severely afflicted with ADHD. But I liked those. Nice aspirational content.

I have found that I like watching people play games. I know that sounds a little pathetic because there are some streamers where the streamer themselves is the personality, so it's almost like listening to a funny podcast while you're watching someone play a game. That's not what I'm into. I'm into, they're gonna say almost nothing, and they're going to take their Sim around to do chores, or their little farmer to water the plants. And I'm like, ooh, yeah, that's the good stuff. This is more soothing to me than playing the game myself.

SHAY:

I'm trying to picture you watching it and being like, "Ooh, yeah, flush that toilet. Yeah."

JORDAN:

No, no, literally. Like, I'll be in bed, turned on my side so my partner can't see the brightness of the phone, watching. And if he ever looked over it would literally be like, "Yeah. She just completed those chores, which means she gets aspiration points, and that means she might unlock a new furniture set." Like, that's rad.

SHAY:

Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Jordan, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to meet with me and to discuss your books. I can't encourage everyone enough. Jordan is a New York Times bestseller. You are the fucking real deal. These books are so much bigger than I thought they would be. I was like, "Yeah, maybe I can cram before the interview." No, no. They are novels.

JORDAN:

They're a good solid read.

SHAY:

I am so excited to dive into these and see the difference between your transformation between Raybearer and The Maid and the Crocodile. I'm just so excited to read all your stuff, and I really would love to have you back for your next book release if you're around.

JORDAN:

I would love that. Thank you. Well, my next book release is still in the Genie Game universe, so it's for younger kids. I am planning to write for adult-adults finally. That's what I'm working on now, is my first adult release.

SHAY:

Oh, shit.

JORDAN:

So fingers crossed that happens. But yeah. Thank you. I'd love to come back.

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