The Night Masquerade (Binti #3)

by Nnedi Okorafor

Dedicated to those who aren’t supposed to see the Night Masquerade, but see it anyway. May you have the courage to answer the Call to Adventure.

I awoke to the universe. Out here in the desert, the night sky was so bright with stars. It was almost as clear as the sky when I’d been on the Third Fish traveling to and from Earth. I stared up, hearing, seeing, and balanced equations whispered around me like smoke. I’d been treeing in my sleep. It was that bad. I hadn’t even done this while in the Third Fish after the Meduse killed everyone but me.

Three Augusts in a row, Binti’s story came to me. It happened each time I returned to Buffalo, New York, after spending the summer with my family in the south Chicago suburbs of Illinois. In the August of 2016, I wanted to take a break from writing. I didn’t think I’d have the ending to Binti’s story for a while, years even, and I was fine with that. Then I sat down one evening and the entire story came to me. First the end, then the middle, then the beginning.

I went to South Africa and gazed at the Lion’s Head, went to the Arizona desert and followed a Pepsis wasp, I saw the White House while it was still worth seeing, and I had a conversation about microbes with a Ph.D. student during a lunch with the African Cultural Association at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. When winter break arrived, the moment I took off my professor hat to give the writer’s cap that I always wear some fresh air, whatever it is that takes hold of me to make me write descended on me.

I’d like to thank my Ancestors, who walk in front of, behind, beside, fly above, and swim beneath me.

And finally, thank you to the rest of my immediate family, my mother, sisters Ifeoma and Ngozi, brother Emezie, nephews Dika and Chinedu, and niece Obioma. Without you all energizing my life, the Binti Trilogy would never ever have happened. I love you all.