THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES OF DIRTY COMPUTER
by Janelle Monáe
Harper Voyager, 321 Pages
reviewed by Kristie Gadson
In her latest album Dirty Computer, songstress and visionary Janelle Monáe sings of a future bathed in the blinding light of a new regime. In a world where an individual’s inner circuitry—their deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires—faces judgment from the illuminating eye of New Dawn, freedom is sought out by those who find liberation in the shadows. Monáe’s songs follow the story of Jane 57821, whose queerness made society view her as a deviant with unclean coding—a “dirty computer.” Dreaming of a better future, Jane 57821 broke free of the chains of New Dawn by daring to remember who she really was, sowing the seeds of revolution in her wake. The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a collaborative work with influential writers of the Afrofuturism genre, exploring the expanded mythos Monáe created through her uniquely futuristic yet funky sound. Taking place in the same universe as Dirty Computer, The Memory Librarian is a collection of short stories set after Jane 57821’s daring escape.
In the introduction “Breaking Dawn,” Monáe’s world unfolds like a memory uncurling itself within the corners of your mind. She sets the scene for stories to come, detailing the rise of an all-seeing regime hungry to peer into the clandestine inner networks of its citizens. What Monáe does well is that she immerses you in the story through her evocative writing, utilizing a distinct voice that merges the technological with the thoughtful, the analytical with the sentimental. Through her writing you feel the underlying humanity in an age where living beings are reduced to technical components, regarded coldly as “computers.” But what I found interesting was the last line of “Breaking Dawn,” in which Monáe beautifully introduces the larger themes interwoven throughout her stories: “Beyond time and memory—where the computer cannot reach—is dreaming.” This line calls upon the reader to consider the interconnectivity of time, memory, and dreams, and the cost of a future without them.
The presence of New Dawn serves as a critique of modern society’s intolerance of diversity, sexuality, and gender expression. New Dawn is the amalgamation of all the prejudicial laws and ideologies that persisted unabated in the nation’s past, which the reader comes to understand is our current day. In order to enforce their idea of what is socially acceptable, New Dawn developed technology to harvest, manipulate, and erase the memories of the populace. But as Monáe warns: “Memory of who we’ve been—of who we’ve been punished for being—was always the only map into tomorrow.” It’s this overarching theme that unites the different perspectives across her narratives.
Monáe and Alaya Dawn Johnson challenge our understanding and perception of memory in the titular story “The Memory Librarian,” where we get the perspective from inside the ivory towers of New Dawn. Seshet serves as Director Librarian of a city called Little Delta, and her job is to collect and analyze the memories of its citizens to ensure compliance with the New Dawn ethos. Under her watch, anyone who is revealed to be a dirty computer is sent to a New Dawn facility to have their memories erased, a cruel process called “torching.”Seshet was on her way to rising the ranks, until falling in love with a mysterious woman named Alethia 56934 sets off a series of events that threaten to undermine New Dawn’s influence over Little Delta. Facing an impossible choice between love and duty, Seshet considers doing the unthinkable to maintain control. It’s through Seshet’s inner turmoil that Monáe and Johnson beg the question, who are we without our memories—those encrypted echoes of the past that make us who we are and guide us into who we will become? In a world that violates the sanctity of memory, are we not the owners of our own soul?
Janelle Monáe
“Save Changes” switches perspectives to the other end of the spectrum of New Dawn’s influence, following the life of a family under near-constant surveillance. Amber and her sister Larissa live as outcasts as a consequence of their mother’s past rebellion against New Dawn; their time is monitored throughout the day. To escape their bleak reality the girls attend an illegal party on the outskirts of town, but this adventure turns out to be more than what Amber bargained for. Armed only with a mysterious stone her late father gave her, Amber must decide how to keep her family together with the time she has left before New Dawn takes them away. In this story Monáe and Yohanca Delgado explore an important aspect of time travel: how to make the biggest impact with so little time to make a change. Time is a force we cannot fully control and can barely fathom—so how do we find a way to utilize it to change our lives and the lives of those around us? Yet the beauty of Amber’s story is that she comes to realize that there is never a right time to take action, so long as you have the courage to act in the first place.
The last (and my favorite) story is “Timebox (ALTAR)ed,” where four children discover among the remnants of the past the future they could only dream of. Bug, Olagunde, Trellis, and Artis live in the town of Freewheel, on the outskirts of New Dawn’s “cities of light.” New Dawn took something away from each child—their parents, their homes, their health, their hope. One day they stumble upon the remains of an ancient city in a nearby forest and, with Bug’s lead, they create an altar of found art out of the junk. What I enjoyed about this particular story is that Monáe and Sheree Renée Thomas created a future for the children that reflected their individual talents—Bug the artist, Ola the inventor, Trell the healer, and Artis the lover. Seeing the Freewheel children discover how their gifts can change the future encourages readers to consider how their own talents can shape the future they live in.
What I love about The Memory Librarian is that its stories convey one of the tenets of Afrofuturism: that there is no way to create tomorrow without drawing from the lessons of yesterday. African Americans, as well as other ethnic minority groups, know all too well that those who neglect the past are doomed to repeat it. Remembering our history, both the pain and the triumph, serves as a way to guide our steps into the future we’ve always dreamed—one of diversity, inclusion, and equality. The book centers around another doctrine of Afrofuturism: hope. Despite the current circumstances there always exists the possibility of things changing for the better. And although hope can be a source of motivation to move toward brighter days ahead, it can conversely become a burden that can keep you stuck within the limitations of the present. However, as Monáe writes, to hope means to “work out that invisible balance so you don’t get crushed but also don’t float away.”
As a reader, I enjoy character-driven narratives where the protagonists’ journeys challenge their perspectives and mold them into who they’re destined to become. I also connect with diverse characters who reflect my reality as an African American woman. I love that Monáe’s stories are filled with a unique cast of characters that are unapologetically BIPOC, queer, and feminine. The Memory Librarian spans different experiences and perspectives, from a driven yet fragile Director Librarian whose love is considered “dirty” to a young, black, gender-neutral child whose art is their way of connecting to their long lost mother. I found that I was able to relate to all of the characters, in part, because of the third person personal perspective through which the stories are told. I gained insight into the backgrounds, motivations, and inner workings of the characters from a point of view that explores their individual experiences through an objective lens. However, I also related to the characters because in them I saw pieces of myself: Seshet’s journey reflected my drive to succeed in a white-dominated field, Amber’s life being profiled harkened to my own experiences with racial profiling, and the hope of the Freewheel children ignites my hope for the future as well.
Janelle Monáe’s The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a provocative collection of narratives that urges us to take heed of our past, take hold of the time we have, and take action toward creating a better tomorrow for all. These stories ask us to tap into the inner software of our souls to find the courage to be our most authentic selves, to love freely and openly, and to make a difference in the world around us. It’s with Monáe’s final charge that we are called to action: “You’ve got to dream a future before you can build a future. Together, let us begin this dreaming awake.”
Kristie Gadson is a copywriter by day, a book reviewer by night, and an aspiring comic book artist in-between time. Her passions lie in children’s books, young adult novels, fantasy novels, comics, and animated cartoons because she believes that one is never “too old” to learn the life lessons they teach. Kristie resides in Norristown on the outskirts of Philadelphia PA, which she lovingly calls “her little corner of the universe.”
“Jesus was a carpenter, King Arthur was an orphan, and Laura was a broke, lonely millennial.” This is how Laura, the artificially intelligent protagonist, is summed up in Melanie Moyer’s sophomore novel, The Original Glitch (Lanternfish Press, October 2021). Every generation envisions its savior as one of its most unassuming: so, while the Wachowskis gave us introverted, Gen-X cyberhacker Neo in The Matrix films, Moyer provides Laura, the downtrodden but culturally-aware Millennial. Unlike Neo, however, Laura cannot escape her virtual prison, and her “magical” digital powers are lackluster. It is telling of the Millennial ethos that, even though the novel is about saving the world, the universe of The Original Glitch is familiar, ordinary, prosaic.
An MA candidate in English & Media Studies at Rutgers University, 
There’s no way to talk about Gold without sounding like a flower child spreading the gospel of peace and love, but is that such a bad thing? Love, after all, is the thing that brings us into this world, ties us together, and makes the days pass more pleasantly. Don’t we love to live and live to love? And aren’t all the best songs love songs? Yet, offering up love as a balm to life’s problems feels cheap. We’re often skeptical, understandably so, that love alone can save us from issues like debt, disease, and desolation. In Gold, Rumi speaks to our inner skeptics. Line by line, he tries to show us how love only helps and never hurts. “If you plunge like a fish into Love’s ocean,” he asks, “what will happen?”
I have been reading Jennifer Niesslein’s new collection of essays—Dreadful Sorry: Essays on an American Nostalgia—on a suddenly warm February afternoon. Outside on the deck I sit, the white stones of a fire pit glowing by my feet, the neighborhood kids riding their remarkably loud vehicles up and down and up and down the nearest driveway. Somewhere in Russia, Vladimir Putin is addressing his people with a long list of grievances. He is stamping his figurative foot, wishing for a yester-year, a yester-century, even. And because Putin wants what so long ago was, there are nearly 200,000 troops massed on the Ukrainian border.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, a teacher of memoir at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist, and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at 
Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s novel Frieda’s Song was published in May 2021; her story collection Known By Heart appeared in 2020. Her debut novel The Bowl with Gold Seams received the Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction; her story collection Contents Under Pressure was a National Book Award nominee. Ellen practiced psychotherapy for many years. A graduate of The Bennington Writing Seminars she lives in Washington, DC, and Manns Choice, PA. She is at work on a new novel
THE NICK OF TIME
There’s something refreshingly laid-back about Olivia Tapiero’s take on apocalyptic fiction. Most novels in the genre come off a bit preachy, warning us page after page that X, Y, and Z will be our downfall. Perhaps even more grating, they go through the trouble of explaining exactly how it will end, as if we can be certain of that from our pre-apocalyptic world. Tapiero looks at these conventions and casually walks past them. In Phototaxis, the end of the world makes very little sense. The streets are drowned in rotten meat, suicides spread like they’re contagious, and the only thing that might hold everyone together is a one-man piano performance. She embraces the one idea about the apocalypse we can reasonably be sure of: when it happens, we won’t have any idea how to deal with it.
The traditional identification of poet and prophet is acceptable only in the sense that the poet is about as slow in reflecting his epoch as the prophet. If there are prophets and poets who can be said to have been ‘ahead of their time’, it is because they have expressed certain demands of social evolution not quite as slowly as the rest of their kind.
Johnny Payne is a poet, playwright, director, and novelist. His recent books include his book of essays on French and Latin American poetry, under his alter ego Étienne D’Abattoir; the novel Confessions of a Gentleman Killer; and the plays Death by Zephyr and Cannibals. He directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University.
Six Ways to Look at a Marsh 
Michael McCarthy is an aspiring writer of prose, poetry, and nonfiction from Braintree, Massachusetts who attends Haverford College, where he intends to major in English. His work has been published in Prairie Schooner.
Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos begins with a return. Mira, a Greek-born academic in her late thirties, arrives in Athens after her parents’ funeral. She must sort out the remainder of her parents’ affairs—Mira’s childhood home in Athens and another apartment on an island referred to only as N. While Mira is stranded outside her apartment building without a key, she has a chance encounter with her next-door neighbor, a sea captain. Later, the pair spend night after night on their adjoining balconies. While they are unable to see each other clearly, they share cigarettes, beer, and conversation. Both characters are grappling with grief, of sorts: Mira has lost her parents; the Captain has lost his position as a sea captain and is about to divorce his estranged wife.
The ten stories in Nana Nkweti’s debut short story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells offer tableaus of Blackness that are as varied as they are vivid. From tale to tale, Nkweti’s genres shift as surely as a living body does, limbs never at a single angle for long. The same assortment of stories that renders a realistic portrait of race and romance within New York City’s Black literary scene delves, with the same intrepid narration, into a crime drama’s layered violence and moral contemplation. Though varied, what anchors these stories within one another’s vicinity is a relentless inquisition of human connectivity, a tour that proceeds whether such connection hues grotesque and brutal or beautiful and palliative. Black girls navigate personal and cultural identity as the collection arcs through fandom space in “Rain Check at MomoCon.” Readers alight in a Lagos beleaguered by a zombie apocalypse in “It Just Kills You Inside,” where racial capitalism and white condescension commodify African people unto apparent death. In “The Living Infinite,” our transatlantic vault to Louisiana reveals Nala, a 202-year-old Mami Wata (a female water spirit and seducer of men) mourning her late husband. Nkweti’s commitment to sensory imagery traces trauma as it ricochets between generations, cultures, and families, as it glints in gendered violence, racism (as well as its internalized iterations), and neocolonialism.
Brian Burmeister is a writer, educator, and cat cuddler. He can be followed on Twitter 
Dear Bear begins with the gripping dedication, “For Daniel, to the end,” and from there, takes its readers to the end of the world it introduces. This is author Ae Hee Lee’s world that exists in a collection of letters addressed to the titular Bear—who is both a real and parabolic bear.
Krys Malcolm Belc—nonbinary, transmasculine, and talented—begins his memoir with an Irish dance—“all jumping and pounding, the tight black laces against my calves, the bang of hard shoes on the floor.” He is young and the music permeates, and now, he writes, “I try to remember what it was like then, when I was four and five and six, if I was unhappy. I am supposed to remember being unhappy, but mostly what I remember is what it’s like to stand there knowing the dance is about to start.”
“This is a female text,” Doireann Ní Ghríofa asserts as her story begins. A rouse. A prayer. A persuasion.
Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is a vibrant reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, taking place during the Roaring Twenties in Shanghai of 1926. Gong’s tale of two star-crossed yet ill-fated lovers begins in the middle of a fierce blood feud between two warring gangs: the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Described as “an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time,” their bitter vendetta runs deeper than the Huangpu River that cuts through the city. The weight of each gang’s future rests heavily on the shoulders of both Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlets, and Roma Montagov, heir to the White Flowers. The pain of betrayal burns at each heir’s core, engulfing their previous love in flames. However, when a sinister presence lurking within the depths of the Huangpu threatens all of Shanghai, Juliette and Roma must work together if they ever hope to save everyone, including each other.
At first, it’s a promise. Come on up!
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“Remove toxic people from your life” is one of today’s modern mantras. It’s easy advice to give, but it can be impossible to follow. Author Betsy Bonner can vouch for this. Her personal history is steeped in family toxicity: an environment of abuse, uncertainty, and guilt from which she just can’t shake free. Bonner knows this. She also considers herself the lucky one.
I approached More Miracle than Bird, Alice Miller’s debut novel about W.B. Yeats and his erstwhile muse, Georgie Hyde-White, as a poet interested in learning about Yeats and the woman who influenced his work. Although we get insights about the poet and his work, the novel is more about the journey of his muse, a naïve but determined rebel attempting to thwart the traditional roles that have been carved out for her. We see her youthful struggles and missteps, but by the novel’s close, we see a woman who has learned that holding onto the philandering Yeats means reshaping herself into someone who can contribute to his work.
When I began my part-time job at a botanical garden in the fall of 2017, I had next to zero gardening experience, and I knew little about the different flowers and trees that grow in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. I showed up that first day completely unprepared, without so much as a pair of gloves. But I was lucky enough to be mentored by David, a man in his early thirties from Maine, who’d been gardening for several years. David explained to me the paradoxical nature of caring for gardens: gardens need constant attention, but they bear their beautiful fruits ever so slowly. At the heart of David’s message was that gardeners are transitory, but gardens remain. Our decades are their hours.
I read Little Envelope of Earth Conditions in late June, when COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in the world and the nation—and at home. The May 24th New York Times front page, which listed the names of the 100,000 American coronavirus victims—a very public display of mourning and grief—was at the forefront of my memory, as were the more personal ways that I was mourning the loss of traditions, previous ways of life, time spent with grandparents and my fellow high school students alike.
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Samantha Mabry’s Tigers, Not Daughters is a modern-day ghost story that follows the Torres sisters—Jessica, Iridian, and Rosa—one year after the untimely death of their oldest sister, Ana. Wracked with grief, the Torres sisters ache for Ana; but their profound sadness is met with unexpected events that eventually make their sister’s presence known: raps on doors and windows, writings on the walls, sensory overload, recurring storms, flickering lights, dying animals, and one escaped spotted hyena lurking in the darkness of their neighborhood in Southtown. Ana reappears in a way the girls can’t begin to imagine and returns with a vengeance they don’t understand. Mabry tells a riveting tale of three sisters who discover the power of sisterhood and what it means to stay together despite insurmountable, unnatural odds.
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Brown was already an established name by the time he wrote Clotel. His memoir, the Narrative of William W. Brown, was one of the best selling ex-slave narratives of the 1840s, second only to that of Frederick Douglass. He wrote his debut novel while living in exile in England to escape the grasp of the Fugitive Slave Act. He returned to the United States to lecture on abolition across the country, all while continuing to write plays, memoirs, and other nonfiction. Clotel’s influence can be seen scattered throughout the American canon. Brown’s depictions of passing, “tragic mulatto” characters, and other racial themes would be further developed by contemporaries like Frank J. Webb, later writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, and much later figures of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
From the very first moment of her existence, Muiriel was born alone. Found abandoned at a medical center with no parents to claim her, Muiriel has lived in foster care her entire life. But blessed with a book of survival by naturalist John Muir and her experience in nearly twenty different foster homes, seventeen-year-old Muiriel knows she will not let her past dictate her future:
To The Bone is a book about the particular sort of remembering that accompanies losing a parent to Alzheimer’s. The poet’s mother is brought tenuously, haltingly, on the page. A sense of slippage is accomplished through layering, repetitions, and fluctuating temporality to reveal how a disease of memory appears to the mind struggling to find shore in presence.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. More online at 
Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor 
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