Growing up in the Bronx in the 1970s, Michele Tracy Berger fell in love with fantasy, horror and sci-fi stories like “Lost in Space” and “Bionic Woman” at an early age.
“I was reading all these fantasy novels, and it was cool that it was like, alternate Italian Renaissance,” said Berger, who in addition to writing teaches humanities at Case Western Reserve University. “But there were no people of color. It took me a long time to kind of put myself back in the narrative.”
Putting people of color back in the narrative is a core principle of Afrofuturism, Berger said.
“It is thinking about how we can both reimagine the past and think about the future in creative ways,” Berger said. “What does the future look like that has Black people thriving?”
With her collection of short stories in “Doll Seed,” Berger, blends horror, speculative fiction and Afrofuturism to find new ways of thinking about race and gender dynamics.
Berger looks to writers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler for inspiration.
Genre fiction communities — like sci-fi, fantasy, horror — often have excluded Black and marginalized characters and creatives, Berger said.
She points to the mainstream success of the films like “Get Out” in 2017 and “Black Panther” in 2018 as redefining norms. Themes of Blackness and social identity were at the forefront of both movies.
Horror is especially important to Berger’s storytelling.
“When people think about horror, they think about slasher films from the 1980s. But horror as a genre is about a feeling,” Berger said. “Horror can be a place to explore identity, otherness, alienation.”
The stories of ‘Doll Seed’
The Afrofuturist short stories in the “Doll Seed” collection draw on Berger’s deep knowledge and love of peculiar historical details. The titular story centers on a Black doll used in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. White and Black children were given white and Black dolls and asked which of them was cleaner, nicer and more desirable. Black children’s strong preference for the white doll became justification for outlawing legal segregation.
“‘What happened to the dolls before, and what happened to the dolls afterwards?’” Berger asked herself. “I got the character, and I knew it was like this kind of contemporary fantasy, alternate history.”
That story fielded rejection letters from editors for almost a decade. But in 2019, Berger found FIYAH, a magazine highlighting Black sci-fi writers founded only three years earlier. FIYAH immediately accepted the story. It won the Carl Brandon Kindred Award for speculative fiction a few months later.
“It's important to really believe in your ideas, because you can be sometimes ahead of the curve. For writers of underrepresented communities, so much about the gatekeeping has changed,” Berger said. “If I have an editor who doesn't know about some kind of cultural forms or ways that I might be using dialogue, then their ability to look at the story is a bit limited, right?”
Berger went back and forth with a major publisher about the larger collection during the pandemic before it eventually found a home with small independent feminist press Aunt Lute Books.
Another story, “Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent,” follows a dancer at the Cotton Club in 1920s Harlem. The dancer works with a fictional version of author Zora Neale Hurston to summon an ancient spirit. Berger said she got the idea from her grandmother’s experience with racial passing as a light-skinned Cotton Club dancer.
The story “Nussia” poses the question: What if a Black family in the Bronx was chosen to host the first alien delegate from another planet?
“I'm interested in exploring tensions around what it means to be gendered and racialized and the enduring nature of those representations around us,” Berger said.
“Grinding Disney,” a story Berger said came to her fully formed in a dream, uses familiar Disney characters and a meat grinder to grapple with culturally embedded standards of femininity. The horror in her writing helps the characters understand themselves.
But the endings aren’t always happy.
“They end with agency, and that was important to me,” she said. “Horror allows us to move through several cathartic moments. We see the evil, we confront the evil and we are changed by it.”
