The impossibility of authenticity

“How can I tell this is actually a Black character?”

It’s 2022. I’m exhibiting my graphic novels at San Diego Comic-Con for the eighth year running, alongside my good friend and fellow writer Yomi Ayeni. And in the melee of people approaching our table, one studious-looking gentleman has picked up a copy of artist Sergio Calvet’s and my urban fantasy series Magic of Myths. He flicks through it, considerately pondering the pages before he drops his question.

And it entirely catches me off guard.

He’s Black. I’m Black. Magic of Myth’s central character, Eve, is bi-racial Black. And yet, in the 11 years of creating this series, no one had ever asked me before if I had coded her as such.

The funny thing is, I had. Yes, Eve is a character unto herself, but also drawing on my feelings as a shy, Black Gen-X teenager who never comfortably fit into one space. I was a comic book, video game, fantasy and sci-fi geek who also loved football and sports. And during the 1990s, at my secondary school, publicly admitting the former sometimes confused people at best and painted an occasionally violent target on your back at worst.

So, much like trying to navigate mediums and genre interests that didn’t feature many people who looked like me at the time (obviously there were, but pre-internet that visibility was extremely limited), my initial creation of Eve a decade later became about navigating the typically white genres of Western mythology and fantasy as a modern black person – pushing forward despite being othered.

Yet, here I was, a legal alien in San Diego, suddenly second-guessing myself. The depths of Eve exploring her feelings of being othered as a fantasy heroine within the bowels of Greek/Roman mythos is something that becomes more overt in the yet-to-be-published second half of the series. But were all the breadcrumbs Sergio and I left in the story so far – especially the subtle black British cultural markers – ‘enough’?

In a world of late-stage capitalism where awareness of diversity is higher than ever, ‘commercial viability’ automatically creates a question over what is authentic.

This is not a new or unique dilemma, especially for writers of colour. We spend a lifetime climbing ever-shifting societal mountains while simultaneously trying to take shelter from self-doubts both natural and manufactured. Our presence, whether as characters or creators, is laboured with a requirement of justification. And as market forces swing the pendulum of whether we’re en vogue or not, writers are often forced into making a choice in terms of how heavy we can go with any message we might convey – more so if that message is tied to our cultural identity. We’re not a fad. But the established structures make it far too easy for us to be treated as one.

In a world of late-stage capitalism where awareness of diversity and inclusion is higher than it’s ever been, ‘commercial viability’ automatically creates a question over what is authentic. And even when being true to yourself and your writing, that question can be terrifying. Part of that fear comes from an inherent challenge: how much of what you write is true to you and how much is what has been projected on to you? How much has being othered and fighting against such crafted your sense of self? Has what you’ve been denied impacted you more than you realise to the point of becoming an unfair or inaccurate pillar of your identity?

The answer is, of course, that there’s no real answer. Especially as writers. Tugging at one strand of the tangled ball of yarn that is our identity only loosens a dozen more complexes and complexities. Our characters’ traumas are often an extension of ours, whether consciously or them fighting for unrepressed air. And when you’ve spent years being looked at with suspicion and treated as ‘something else’ it’s only natural that will seep into your craft. You don’t have to be defined by your experiences, but acknowledging them can be cathartic.

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