Biomythography Bayou

Biomythography Bayou is a ritual, making available multigenerational blood memory, nonlinear time, and spiritual connection. Eurocentric epistemologies are drowned down deep. Each section of the text opens with an explicatory essay, animating the powers of particular elements in nature and thereby offering context to history, location, community, and cultural specificity. Essays are followed by a collection of thematic narrative portraits that maintain a relationship with the element and with one another; they embody nonlinear generational connection, scene, setting, and theme. Influenced by Audre Lorde's biomythographic form, Alexis DeVeaux's embodiments in queer time, and Octavia Butler's historical harkening and speculative futurist meditations, the author quilts the narrative contours of decolonial Black and Indigenous queerness and kinship across time and place. The text's primary foundations lie in the anthropological narratives and cultural analyses, both fiction and non-fiction, of Zora Neale Hurston and the political poetic portraits of Gwendolyn Brooks.