Last week, I was honored to participate in the SLJ webcast, “Fact-Finding and Black History,” a panel discussion with Amina Luqman-Dawson, Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome, moderated by Marva Hinton. As we discussed how to navigate the challenges of researching Black history, I cited the term, “critical fabulation,” which was coined by MacArthur Fellow Saidiya Hartman, a cultural historian and Columbia University professor. I became acquainted with the term and with Hartman’s scholarship through her award-winning book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Gilrs, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019). Critical fabulation uses storytelling and speculative narration to right history’s omissions, particularly of enslaved people.
Until I read that book, which melds history and literary imagination, I did not realize I had been practicing critical fabulation at least since my 2006 picture book Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom. The poetic biography unfolds in three voices–God’s, Harriet’s and the narrator’s–or four voices if you count that of nature. I continued to invent voices for historical figures in Becoming Billie Holiday; Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement; I, Matthew Henson: Polar Explorer; and BOX: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom. Dabbling with second-person point of view for You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, I created narrative poems that pushed past the limits of the archive, which invariably fails to value or validate Black lives and Black stories.
My deepest dive into critical fabulation, however, was for the verse novel, KIN: Rooted in Hope, a collaboration with my son, illustrator Jeffery Boston Weatherford. In this family history, we conjure the voices, visages and vistas of our enslaved and newly emancipated ancestors and their contemporaries. As I was writing KIN, I stumbled upon Hartman’s Wayward Lives. Her explanation and application of critical fabulation freed me to reclaim my ancestor’s lost narratives. For that, I am grateful.
