Your humble blogger's favorite artist now has the title of author (and a New York Times bestselling one at that) under her belt with the release of The Memory Librarian and other stories of Dirty Computer. Sprouting from the world laid out in the 2018 album and "emotion picture" Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe brings to the page more tales of those deemed "dirty" living and loving in a futuristic totalitarian society set on "cleaning" them. In collaboration with five BIPOC female and non-binary writers, Monáe puts the lives, loves, struggles and triumphs of those considered "other" front and center in a collection of five short sci-fi/Afrofuturistic stories.
The storytelling is superb, with writing used like a painter would use a brush to paint a canvas to bring you into the lives and thoughts of the stories' characters. It's par for the course, however, for Monáe, as she has always called herself a storyteller and is never one to be put in one creative box. In fact, it can be argued that The Memory Librarian is another "emotion picture", as the stories pull out emotions (particularly empathy, hope and joy) from the reader just like her songs and videos do. It would also be easy to see the stories set to stage as a set of one act plays given the dramatic scope of each one.
My favorite of the stories is "Save Changes", the collaboration with Yohanca Delgado. It's a tale of two sisters, children of a resistance fighter against the tyrannical New Dawn, who come across an opportunity to change the past and face the implications of what that means. A beautiful meditation on love, family, and time in light of oppression, it doesn't fail to tug at the heartstrings and make one think about the use of time for making a positive change.
The Memory Librarian is definitely a worthwhile read, whether you're familiar with Janelle Monáe's work or not. It's an engaging roller coaster ride that ends with a deeper sense of the need to see those that society throws away and that in the end, hate won't win. For those considered "dirty computers", it's a celebration and beacon of hope in a world that is trying.
