Clap Back

  Text copyright © 2021 by Nalo Hopkinson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542032681

  Cover illustration by Natasha Cunningham

  Cover design by Alex Merto

  Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

  “My brother is all the time putting soccer on TV when I want to watch tennis. I forgive him.”

  —Embroidered square, Malawi group quilt project “The Forgiveness”

  BURRI CREATES NEW LINE OF AFRICAN-INSPIRED KNITWEAR

  Last week, designer Agnetta Burri introduced Forgetful, her new line of knitwear for the summer season. The bold colors spill in splashes of geometric shapes that cling unabashedly to the wearer’s body, the design characterized by finger-hiding sleeves and long trains on skirts, dresses, and pants alike. In an interview given poolside at her Lake Geneva chalet, the 27-year-old Swiss designer said, “I’m working with ‘The Forgiveness Project.’ I’m sure you’ve heard of it. A group of teenage girls from a village in Mawi, Mali, something exotic-sounding like that. They’re making this huge knitted quilt and working these, like, Arabic proverbs into the weave. I think it’s Arabic. And maybe it’s prayers, not proverbs. Well, I’ve contracted with them to create quilt squares for display in my boutique. It’s like, ‘Forgive and Forget,’ right? They’re writing some new stuff for me.”

  Burri, who has a degree in molecular biochemistry, was originally the founder of a tech startup working on delivery methods for sending cancer-fighting agents to targeted parts of the body. She moved on from that project into the world of haute couture. She has used her biochemistry background to develop a proprietary technique for impregnating the fibers of each of her pieces with a story that will temporarily soak into the wearer’s skin. “No, you won’t be able to read it. Nothing will show on the skin or in the fabric. You kind of absorb it, like those topical painkillers. And then the story just gets transported into the body, and over the course of a few days, you’ll be able to recite the whole thing. You become a sort of megaphone for a story the world needs to hear. There are so many people whose stories don’t get told, don’t you think? I just want to do my part. And in a week’s time, the nanites dissolve; you, well, pass them out in your urine. Just these little nanobot stories in a compound with low molecular weight and a high water and lipid solubility. Those penetrate the skin the easiest. It’s pretty safe. I’ve had it tested and certified. Everything’s above board.”

  When asked which stories will be woven into the pieces, Burri would not go into detail. “I must protect my sources,” she said coyly. “I’d hate for anyone to take advantage of these innocent young girls.”

  Now that it’s been unveiled at Paris Fashion Week, the Forgetful line will go into mass production. Burri says that the mass-produced pieces will not have stories embedded in them. “I mean, that wouldn’t exactly be consensual, right? No, it’s only the custom-made couture pieces from the collection that have them. Those are going to a handful of customers, and they’ve all signed consent forms. The artisans and models of my couture house, too.”

  2032

  “Interest on foreign aid loan is too high. My country can never pay it off. God says usury is a sin. I forgive you.”

  —Attributed to “The Forgiveness Quilt,” author anonymous

  A hush had fallen in the gallery. It wasn’t like there were a ton of visitors; it was only a student group exhibition, after all. But this was it for Wenda’s class cohort. After this, the class of 2032 would be able to graduate. There would be no more of Wenda having to wrangle with her committee over whether Black protest art was “overinscribed.” No more security guards mistaking her for an intruder when she was cleaning up the studio after TAing late-night classes. Her classmates would go on to do whatever they did. And Wenda would probably go to jail. But she’d have her fucking degree.

  They were all watching her. Her friend Mèdouze caught her eye. He was standing next to his own project, a video installation. Queer trans identity, color theory, found objects; right now, Wenda was so nervy that the details blurred in her mind, even though she’d helped him work on his artist’s statement. Mèdouze made a heart-shaped gesture against his torso and blew her a kiss for encouragement. Wenda smiled shakily back at him.

  She’d already prepared the tabletop by wrapping it in clear garbage bags and taping them down. She got on her knees to reach under the display table for the cardboard boxes containing the first part of her performance piece. Her hands were quivering. Part nerves, part exhaustion. Sleep had been hard to come by recently.

  One by one, she pulled out the big cardboard boxes. She’d meant to use wooden crates, but she’d run out of money. The guerilla effect of old packing boxes was probably better for this performance, anyway.

  Wenda sat back on her heels with the boxes spread out on the floor in front of her. Some of her classmates were frowning, some smiling, some indifferent. Toulema, her committee chair, had her eyes down, taking notes.

  Wenda’s bones were lead. Her eyes had turned to sand. Last night was only the most recent of many all-nighters. She blew out tired air, trying not to fret about what Toulema might be writing about her.

  She pulled on the crisscrossed flaps of the box closest to her. They popped open with a soft puff, filling her nose with dust mites and the smell of old things. She sneezed. She reached into the box for one of her finds and unwrapped the tissue paper protecting it to reveal a ceramic tobacco jar in the shape of a man’s head. He was middle brown. His expression was lascivious. His lips took up most of the bottom half of the jar. He had gold hoops in his ears. The lid was in the shape of a turban. For the umpteenth time, Wenda wondered: Was this really some nineteenth-century white guy’s muddled notion of Blackness, or just his idea of kitsch?

  She put the jar on the table and kept unboxing. The crowd began an uneasy murmur, leaning in closer to see better. Wenda unboxed the various Blackamoors attached to candlesticks, lamp bases, bookends. Serving, always serving. Stick pins in the likeness of little boys with skin literally black, also sporting the ubiquitous turban plus jeweled bell sleeves, puffy pantaloons, and slippers with upcurled toes. Ashtrays, always in pairs, in the shapes of men and women (always one of each), art deco sleek in pantaloons and little vests, sitting with their legs akimbo, wrapped around the bowls meant for collecting cigarette ash. The women always with their nubbin breasts swinging open to the breeze. She’d found any number of brooches, vintage 1940s and 1950s, displaying the same dismissive uncertainty of aim (“Mawi, Mali, something exotic-sounding like that . . .”). The brooches depicted enameled vaguely Afro-Asiatic faces wearing improbable crowns. The Jemima figurines and cookie jars beamed their pleasure at being kitchen slaves. Mèdouze gasped audibly at those.

  There was more: ashtrays in the form of constipated Black toddlers sitting in outhouses, straining as they screamed, openmouthed (the open mouths were where the hot cigarette ash went). As ever, Wenda swallowed down the lump of hurt and betrayal that rose in her throat every time she saw this stuff. She could barely stand to touch it. She wished she could apologize to the pieces, contorted as they were into caricatures happy to serve, happy to entertain. No matter. This ended today. She was going to proclaim her truth, like the young African women knitting “The Forgiveness Quilt.” People loved thinking that the quilt was an act of let
ting go of blame. Fuck that. Wenda knew different. Nah, those girls were naming the injustices they’d suffered for the world to see.

  Worst were the reproductions. The same cornucopia of jocular racism, but newer, shinier, produced within Wenda’s lifetime. They sickened her. But the more modern polymers from which they were molded were the easiest to inspirit. Her iwin would penetrate the resin, carrying a plasticizer that would soften the material into pliability.

  She creaked to her feet, grimacing at the grinding of her knees. Around the edges of the table, she ceremoniously laid out all the joke ephemera: Valentine’s Day cards, which depicted the “couple” as a cartoonishly uglified Black girl and boy in tattered clothing, the boy offering wilted wildflowers and the girl declaring through lips fat as hams a vaguely salacious delight in some white person’s contemptuous rendition of Black speech; old postcards of little Black boys, their faces twisted in pain as geese snapped off the chubby penises they’d stuck through holes in wooden fence posts to take a leak.

  The assortment of horrors was now fully on display. Wenda straightened and arched her back to ease its twinging. She would’ve cringed in shame if anyone but Mèdouze had seen how she’d been spending so much of her free time—and her scant teaching assistant’s salary—trolling antique shops and internet auction sites to buy this crap. It would have looked to the outside eye like internalized racism of the obsessive-compulsive kind. She was calling the performance “Clap Back.” Some aspects of it were as illegal as balls. Sometimes protest art just was; how you gonna change the world if you play within its rule set? She’d fudged the details with her committee; what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Besides, once they witnessed it in action, she hoped the final result would blow them away. If it worked. She only had one chance to get this right. If it flopped, all she’d have was a table piled with ugly shit.

  INFLUENCER JODRI LAFITTE THE FIRST TO UTTER WORDS HIDDEN IN FORGETFUL COUTURE LINE

  Mr. Jodri Lafitte, internet darling and makeup artist, today was the first to utter a “storylet” absorbed through his skin from a sweatshirt custom-made for him by designer Agnetta Burri’s couture house. Mr. Lafitte recorded the whole event and uploaded it immediately to his image channel.

  click to view video

  Speaking eerily in the voice of a young woman, Mr. Lafitte intoned:

  “A police came to our school and said if girls wear tight dresses, boys will molest us. I forgive him.”

  Then he giggled in surprise at the sounds coming from his mouth. Mr. Lafitte said the sensation of nanites being absorbed into the flesh of his forearm “tickled, like bubbles in champagne.”

  According to Burri, Mr. Lafitte will experience the compulsion to repeat the words six or seven times a day for a week before the nanites degrade and are flushed out safely in his urine. The sweatshirt is one of only 17 pieces from Burri’s new Forgetful line of clothing to be custom-made for a handful of select buyers. All 17 pieces have a quotation embedded into a patch of their fabric’s weave.

  Wenda lifted the final items out of the last of the boxes: apron, mask, surgical gloves, paintbrush, and a tightly sealed jar. She donned the protective clothing, then held the jar up to the light. The clear liquid inside sloshed with the viscosity of slightly soapy water. To look at it, you would think it was water. Wenda’d been stashing it in her fridge. A couple of times, she’d absentmindedly been about to drink from it, till the smell—a combination of heavy fleshiness and ammonia—had alerted her. After that, she’d labeled the jar clearly with “Iwin” and sealed it into a sandwich bag for good measure.

  Iwin. That’s what Wenda had dubbed the invisible sprites floating in her custom blend of plasticizers, amino acids, and dissolved glucose. The English word “ghost” didn’t quite do it for her, so she’d gone with her dad’s native Yoruba word. The world had other names for what the iwin were—“micro-this,” “pico that”—but these were hers, obedient to her. So she’d named them, as any doting mama would.

  What had eventually worked as a carrier was a strain of Clostridium sporogenes her poor cat, Sable, had picked up. The vet said he’d probably gotten cut or something while roaming around the fenced backyard. The infection had gotten into the bone. He’d looked as though he were rallying, so the vet had let Wenda take him home. But Sable died a few hours later. Wenda buried him in her landlady’s backyard. She figured it was only justice that she enslave the nasty strain, put it to work as payback for Sable. With any luck, the iwin had infiltrated the bacteria, suppressed the natural eucaryote behaviors, and replaced them with the iwin’s own programmed ones.

  Thank heaven for that double major. Even so, the coding that had gone into the iwin had been a stone bitch. She’d found a code string on the Dark Web and blended it into one of her own, adding “wake” and “cease” prompts, and a trigger. Tricky, but she’d finally gotten it as close to right as she could tell. Stroke of luck, finding the string that the poster said had “fallen off a truck.” It consisted of instructions for penetrating and altering dense substances—just what she’d needed.

  With the paintbrush, Wenda carefully coated each of the horrid memorabilia with the liquid from the jar. People wrinkled their noses at the smell wafting up from the table: life and unlife in combination. As she worked, she quietly whispered over and over, breathing the words into the still-wet coating: “Please make this work. Please make this work.” Maybe speaking her intention would help. It certainly couldn’t hurt. Intention was plenty. It had brought the horrors on the table into existence, after all.

  Done. She set her paintbrush down. Now she had to work quickly. Only a couple of minutes before the plasticizer penetrated the pieces.

  She took down her heavy dreadlocs, silver-threaded after years of grad school. This part of the work was better done with unfettered hair. She pulled the whistle out of her apron pocket. She’d carved it from a thigh bone of Sable’s, cutting around the infected part. It was clumsily made, full of chipped-out places. Wenda hadn’t known how to carve, so she’d followed an online tutorial on making a whistle out of dried bone. She’d given herself a bunch of accidental nicks. She discovered that rubbing the blood into the bone and then polishing the surface gave the whistle a pleasing brown stain, like antiquing.

  Heart thrumming, Wenda blew a breathy tune through the whistle. She’d designed those notes, those particular vibrations played in that order and that timbre, to activate the iwin. This was modern-day hoodoo. Time was, you’d have had to boil a black cat alive, not salvage from an already dead one.

  Wenda clutched the whistle and waited. Seconds passed. Wenda bit the inside of her bottom lip nearly raw with the tension of it. Toulema watched judgingly, the inside corners of her eyebrows squeezed together.

  There came the faintest pulse, as though someone had patted the skin of the air like the surface of a drum. “Whoa,” murmured one of the onlookers. A few people clapped their hands to their ears.

  Wenda’s scalp prickled. Toulema yelped. On the table, the memorabilia were beginning to move. The iwin had molded and jointed them, giving them insectoid, limb-like levers, their edges imperfectly aligned with other elements of the sculptures and drawings. A lamp glided around the tabletop on hairlike appendages scuttling beneath its base.

  Wenda dimly knew she was hyperventilating. Her teeth were chattering out a tympanum of terrified exhilaration. In the fugue state brought on by accumulated years of worry and sleep deprivation, her vision doubled. She knew what she was seeing, but her mind’s eye overlaid it with what she’d dreamed of: Turbans being unwound from sweating heads. Clay and enamel knuckles scrubbing relief into crinkled hair that had been trapped under the masking winding cloths for centuries. Black and brown fingers buttoning vests closed to cover nipple-less breasts, previously exposed. The constipated babies, their bellyful bowels loosened, shitting out flaming tobacco embers with explosions of sulfur, then running giggling away from their burning outhouse prisons to play with their friends. Lips relaxing from coo
ning rictus into genuine, full smiles and raucous laughter. Endless slices of watermelons being drop-kicked into the air to burst apart and rain down sweetness. Water bowls that had strained unreleased arms for hundreds of years being upended over their carriers’ heads, waterfalling cleansing baths. Tattered clothing mending itself into a riot of defiant, contrary stylishness.

  Wenda shouted with glee. It had worked. Her shoulders relaxed, more fully than she’d known possible. “No more,” she told her poppets. She raised her voice so the stunned gallery could hear her: “No more being frozen in attitudes of submission, no more fetching and carrying. No more smoking ash tipped through your lips into your screaming baby bellies. Kill those fucking penis-nipping geese and roast them for a party. A fucking party, y’hear? No more pick-a-nigs. You’re retired.”

  Her poppets slid down the table legs and followed her as she marched to the gallery’s front door and opened it for them. The New Black streamed through, out into the unsuspecting world. Wenda stayed behind to face her audience.

  The attendees glanced uncertainly at each other. Then Mèdouze began clapping. Hesitantly, the rest joined in. Toulema’s brows had ascended into the stratosphere. In the semaphore of Toulema, you never knew whether that was good or bad. But at least she’d put her damning notebook away.

  Wenda was too jittery with reaction to know what she felt. It wasn’t over. No one had asked her yet what the iwin-driven poppets were going to do out in the world. For now, she would have a glass of the cheap red wine at the bar, chat with Mèdouze for a bit, then stagger home and collapse into bed.

  Rap star Songtesta has announced her intention to reveal her Forgetful phrases at a pop-up private party on her yacht in the very near future. She’s carefully timing when she will first don her Forgetful garment, an elaborately deconstructed ball gown with its seams visible, so that her storylet will be in her bloodstream during the event.